Transition

The last two weeks of art class involved landscapes and pets.  Working on a landscape that I started, but did not finish, and one that I did finish brought back all my insecurities in a surprising way.  Given that and the end of class, I stumbled a bit, but pushed through to not lose the painting habit.  

Here is the landscape that I brought to class.  

The week had some unexpected demands on my time, so I only painted on Sunday and Friday and I rushed the ending to just get it done.  At the same time, one of the lessons from Kat really sunk in about squinting and look for big shapes.  When I was mostly done, I caught a glimpse of my photo across the room, squinted and saw that my reference photo was mostly made up of 3 sets of shapes from the greenery along the edge, the bowl of the falls and the falls.  I don’t think I tend to notice things with this type of cohesion and I think this will help as I continue to practice.  

Here are a couple of cat paintings. 

One thing I want to focus on is paint strokes!  When I’m doing simple objects like fruit, I like the blockiness I get a lot of the time.  With a complicated structure, I don’t know what to do.  So much to learn!  

One of the people in class mentioned copying paintings off of Pinterest and she had an owl painting.  I went out and pinned some cat and owl paintings and.want to work off of some of these to see what I can bring back to my paintings.  I’m not sure it’s appropriate to post a picture of the entire copy, so here’s a partial.  

It was a good learning experience.  I’ve never done this and think I could learn a lot.  

Best of all, I am still painting and will continue to post, but probably not as much as I did the first few years after I started.