The most recent session of classes with Kat Corrigan finished up on Saturday, so I am in the beginning stages of making my own structure, so that I can better keep a creative habit going.
Specific goals for the coming week are:
- To finish two pieces started in class, and
- To copy several apple paintings done by other painters.
The overarching goal is to support a daily creative habit.
There were a lot of takeaways from class. In no particular order, here are some of the things bubbling up. I don’t want to lose these. I also want to go through my notes from the session and prior sessions and capture more of this and try to put it into practice.
- Slow down to really see.
- Practice with thumbnail sketches.
- Squint.
- Talk out loud about what you see to try and override your brain.
- Keep experimenting with paint layers, but go back to stroke per color, timed paintings, or set number of paint strokes painting from time to time to recalibrate from getting too fussy.
- Remember swirly paint strokes (think about Bev).
- Practice / focus on letting the black gesso show through in different ways (think about Kat, Joe, Bobby, and others).
- Background examples (think about Bobby and Joe)
- Look at pictures from class for composition ideas or ways other people seemed to approach this.
- Value, value, value, including darker values of light colors.
Going back to the last art class, this is the other piece that I finished. This one was done much more quickly than the cat painting in my last post, even though this one has so much more going on. I tend to shy away from more complicated scenes. There are so many decisions to make, but I want to try and start tackling harder and more complicated subject matter.
I feel good about this one. I think I did a better job of making decisions as I worked through it. It looks a bit cartoonish to me, but it was a better job of tackling a scene than I have done in past.
