Quick Thoughts As "Do It Anyway December" Comes To An End

I followed Roz's guidance for doing a project in December and found it to be useful and productive.  The actual project was an exploration of color by painting apples in acrylic.  This branched into exploring and learning more about value.  Along the way, I also started to do thumbnails and try a bunch of new things such as:

• Painting objects in unrealistic colors.  I was surprised how hard this was to do at first.  I haven't some pretty strong rules in my head about how things should be and I want to bust through them.  
• Using a different colored ground. 
• Copying other people's apple paintings to get some ideas about how to do different brushwork, and 
• a lot more. 

As part of focusing more on values, I pulled together some additional tools and used some new things.  Most of these, I already had, although I did buy the gray and black paint.   

I'm not good at making up backgrounds in my head, so awhile ago I had painted some folders in different colors to use when I set up a still life.  Once I started focusing more on value, I found it extremely useful to painting the folders into neutral or gray scale tones. 

Another thing I discovered (or rediscovered) is that I was never making my lights light enough and I used to shy away from using light backgrounds.   All of this meant that my consumption of titanium white paint has gone way up. 

On December 1, I started out essentially have to start all over again, since I had not been painting.  That was painful. 

Day 2 went a lot better than day 1.

Along the way, I discovered that I'm more interested in learning, so I experimented a lot, rather than getting as caught up in the results or the output. 

The month ended well.  I wasn't trying for that.  It just sort of happened.  I especially like the shape of the green apple.