Garden Flower

I am slowly working my way through the first painting in Jim Musil’s online class.  The class seems well organized and thought out and he is teaching his process.  My progress on the one painting that he covered in month of May has been slow for many reasons.  I hope to finish this week.  

On a different note, the irises in my gardens have been spectacular this year.  I kept wanting to do something with the purple ones by the alley, but they have come and gone.  The same is true with the Siberian irises. They are getting close to being done.

When it was lightly raining this morning, I went out and cut one that still looks pretty good.  I brought it in and went down and tried some rough sketches of the shapes. 

Nothing fancy and no goal to capture an actual likeness.   It felt good to have a pencil in my hand and explore.

Off On Another Tangent

I have gone off on another tangent. I think it will be a good one and lead me back to having a regular art practice again. I started following an artist, Jim Musil on Instagram and he started to offer an on-line subscription to learn his process.  At first, I signed up for 1 month, but when I saw the quality of what he was offering, I changed that to a full year subscription.  

His process is very different. One thing he does is create his images from a combo of drawings, photos, and artificial intelligence, so it is heavily composed.  The first month was focused on his painting process, so this will be shared later.  Another big difference is that we also are using fluid acrylics. 

I think it's going to be a good contrast to what I've learned and how I've worked up until now.

There also is a very active Facebook group and it seems like a good group of people.  People are both kind and constructive in their comments.  

We are all working on off of the same image.  Here are the process photos so far the very beginning with creating a drawing using graphite tracing paper through painting the light clouds.  

These clouds may not be 100% finished, but they are far enough along that I don't want to do anything else with them until I'm farther along with the rest of the painting. They turned out okay.  Actually, I feel pretty good about them given that it's the first time trying this, along with everything else that is new.

That's all for now about this. 

I'm not being chronological with this post.  Here is the last piece I did for Art 4 Shelter.  This was with Neocolor IIs.

Several to Share

I have been working slowly and with what seems like a lot of layers.  There are several pieces that I am not sharing, but here are two I will share.  I would like to get better at showing brushstrokes with the Neocolor IIs.

This week I also went to an informative and interesting talk about paper-making at Wet Paint.  Since I don’t work with watercolor, it was not as applicable to what I do, but it was fascinating.

Cake, Take 2

It was really fun to revisit this piece. I like more things about this version than the first version.  

I plan to revisit the other two pieces of artwork we copied as part of the Neocolor class that I took at Wet Paint. 

Mind Blown

Recently, I finished reading Get The Picture by Bianca Bosker and several pages towards the end  completely blew my mind in the best way possible.  Big picture, all of it relates to the idea of color constancy.  It's easier for me to just share a clip from Wikipedia to explain it.

"Color constancy is an example of subjective constancy and a feature of the human color perception system which ensures that the perceived color of objects remains relatively constant under varying illumination conditions. A green apple for instance looks green to us at midday, when the main illumination is white sunlight, and also at sunset, when the main illumination is red. This helps us identify objects."

In the book, an example is given related to Claude Monet and his paintings of Rouen Cathedral at different times of day.  In one of his renditions, it's a painting from the morning and the stone masonry is painted dark blue.  The book explains this was not artistic license, but probably came from Monet's ability to be able to override his brain's color constancy mechanisms and that there are people who can do this.  Mostly artists.  The scientist that the author was talking to thought that artists have the capability to switch this ability on when they want.  

This was at the end of several pages where it talked both about how miraculous our vision is in how it can make sense of things, but then it went into how our vision gets filtered and constrained by expectations.  

It also made me immediately thing of an early painting of Hammett.  I am sure that I posted about this one, but I can't find it in my blog and I didn't put the date of the painting on the back.  Darn.  Anyway, here is the finished piece from long, long ago.

My guess is that this was from the 2nd set of painting classes that I took from Kat.  One week, we used tracing paper for the image and this was the painting that I did.  While working on it in class, I got stumped on the colors and I remember Kat coming over and asking me what colors did I see in the shadowed areas of his face.  She was very patient, because I had to look for quite some time because I just couldn't see what color it was.  At some point, it's like a veil lifted and I could see a color, but I didn't believe it.  Finally, I muttered in a questioning tone "purple"?  

Even when I said it I still didn't quite believe it.  While the inside of his ears frequently are a light pink or purple, I've looked at this cat a lot in real life and I've never seen purple.  If there was such a thing as a cat with purple fur (naturally not dyed), I am quite certain that I would want one.

I wasn't blogging much when I took the most recent set of painting classes with Kat at the beginning of last year, but another interesting thing happened with seeing color.  When we were painting oranges, I suddenly became aware of or could finally see the color of the shadow that bounced back up on the orange.  If I put the orange on a blue piece of paper I could see the blue that bounced back up on the orange on the dark side of the orange.  I remember feeling slightly bit giddy about this, plus it was so much fun to paint these crazy color shadows.  I really do wish I was actively blogging when it happened, but I still remember the feeling.   

Both of these are strong memories and it's interesting to have a little better idea of what happened and why it's been so hard in the first place. 

I know artists can just geek around color and it works if you get the values right, but I also think a lot of the time they are just seeing more than the average person.  

All of this is fascinating.  

Third Sitting

I'm done.  I added a background and fussed with a few details.  Backgrounds challenge me and after I was done I had a different idea about what I could have done, but overall I had a really good experience with this one.

A few of the others that I've finished recently (not the copies from class) will probably go to Art 4 Shelter.  This one will for sure. 

Also, I wanted to post the last copied piece of artwork from the Neocolor II class at Wet Paint Art.  The original piece was Andre Derain's portrait of Matisse.  I really need to do a better job of lightening my pencil lines before I get started.  I do not like them peaking through.  As much as I love color, it actually made me nervous, especially in the background and in the jacket, to have such differents in color and shapes just next to each other without understanding why.  That means it was a good thing to do, since bumping up against those self imposed constrictions in my brain is part of what all of this is about for me. 

One last thing.....I found a new app that I like.  It's called DrawingGrid.  There is an Apple version and an Android version.  It is very easy to use and it has a diagonal feature that I like.  It really helps my drawing.  I have finally made peace with the fact that while I want to continue to learn how to draw it works 1,000 times better for me to use a grid when I am drawing something to paint. I just don't see well enough.  The grid and diagonal lines both are a useful tool and they help me see things and relationships better and I am finally okay with that.  

Occasionally if I am planning to paint from something relatively simple in nature like this one I might free-hand draw it, but otherwise it's the DrawingGrid for me. 

 

After Two Sittings

I hope to finish this one tomorrow.  Here's where I ended up after my first sitting last night.

Here's where I ended up tonight. 

Water based media is very, very different, but I am having fun exploring.  I like the Stonehenge paper in the craft color. 

How To Bee Better?

I am still working with Neocolor IIs.  Here are 3 pieces using pictures in my yard.  The most recent one is on the top.  It is on black paper.  It’s hard to get coverage, but I also like how the colors behave. I also like the top of the flower and the bee the in this one.

The other two don’t do much for me, but working on the same subject matter multiple times was useful.

I am interested in figuring out how to blend better when I am using these more like watercolor.

Copied Artwork #2

For the second week of class, we treated the Neocolor IIs like watercolor.  Since I have not played much with water based media, I found the blending to be challenging.  This took me about 4 sittings to complete.  Class finished up this past Thursday, so I am a bit behind.  When I am done, I am thinking about doing a second version of each piece.

Here is an in process shot.

After spending so much time on this one, I’m looking forward to seeing a Georgia O’Keefe in person.  I think I will appreciate it more. 

Hodge Podge

Before I started the class at Wet Paint, I pulled out the Neocolor IIs and started a piece the way I used to use them (small piece on its side and layering up color).  It didn’t get finished before class started.  When I  pulled it out to work on, I tried doing what we did in class last week on top (filling in color and activating it with water).  Last night, I decided to finish it and I scribbled, painted, or whatever.

One of the many things I love about the Neocolor IIs is their opacity, making it possible to try and fix things.  A lot of the time I find that my lights need to be lighter. For this one, I used the side of a white piece, plus some scribbles to make that happen.

The photo I used was from a trip I took in the fall. I didn’t know what flower was, but I liked the crazy center part.  Using Google Lens, I believe this is a Japanese anemone.

Back To It

Other than knitting, I have not felt the siren call to create.  Sure, it would whisper ever so slightly from time to time, but it's been easy to hurry past that.  Recently, it got louder and, at the same time, I found several classes that I wanted to take.  

The first class was a Valentine Card Workshop with Jane Davies.  I become aware of her through a friend I met at one of Kat Corrigan's classes.

Valentines and/or the well-known heart-shaped symbol was used as a way to explore collage, shapes, colors, patterns, and other parts of what Jane referred to as visual language.  The class was online.  While it was only 2 hours, she covered a lot.  Even better, it was fun!

For the next couple of days, I played around with making some different hearts, but didn't complete them.  When Valentines Day rolled around, I had only glued down and finished two of them.  That morning, I decided that I wanted to make more so I could hide them around the house for my partner to find.  I gave myself a set and short amount of time and buzzed through a bunch more.  They didn't have to be perfect.  They just needed to read as a heart and be vaguely interesting.  

It was a blast and I think my partner had fun stumbling across them throughout the day. 

I don't have a stack of "collage" paper, so I mostly used things cut out from magazines.  The polka dots came from a thank you card from a friend.  

Here's one I made for me to hang up in my drab cubicle.  While I don't spend much time there, I've slowly been adding things, even though it is a shared cubicle. 

The week after the Valentine workshop, I started a 3-week class at Wet Paint where each week we are copying one painting using Neocolor II crayons from Carn D'Ache.  I was interested in exploring different ways to use these and this class looked like a great way to do that.  It is also a remote class.  

Week 1 was copying from a Wayne Thiebaud painting using the Neocolor IIs and we were mostly coloring in / filling in areas of color and later activating them with water.  It was a fun way to play and practice.  One area where I would like to be more careful is when you put down the small bits of contrast or outline colors in this piece.  You really don't need much and I was a little heavy handed.  It also helps to be careful with your brush and amount of water and it would be good to work on that.  Even so, I can't help but smile when I look at this one.  

I learned a lot and will probably do a second version.