Try Harder Things

That is the theme of the next two paintings to share - - try harder things.  I remember the first time I tried to paint a cat.  I was slightly terrified.  The painting represented the best I could do at the time and I have always felt a tiny bit of pride when I look at that painting on this blog.  No one would say it was a good painting, but I faced my fear and did it anyway and that was the start of working to learn how to paint a better cat portrait.

I like buildings and structures and Brendon Farley’s paintings of scene of the streets and alley’s of South Minneapolis and I have been afraid to try doing that. 

One of the homework assignments for today’s class was to painting something from outside your window.  While I miss the tree that used to be in the alley next to my garage (and I wonder if it will impact my hummingbird sightings this year since that was the best place for a hummingbird to perch to guard two of my feeders), I do like looking out the kitchen window at my purple garage and across the alley to the neighbor’s house and garage.  I love color and the pop of the orange-red of the flat part of the neighbor’s garage is always fun to see.  

I took a picture of that, cropped it, and painted it and I felt a bit of that same rush from trying something that I am afraid to try and I think I found a little more freedom to keep trying paintings like this, so I can get better at them. 

One of the many challenges was how to make paint strokes interesting when you are painting a flat surface with straight edges like a garage door or all that sky, since I edited out some trees  I plan to ask Kat about that in class.  Also, how can I imply the boards of wood on my garage, instead of making them so obvious.  That’s just a few of the things!

Last week, I tried to paint the tiny glass bottle and an orange in Kat’s class and it was hard. She let me borrow it and I gave it a second try, which I think shows improvement from the first try.  I also had fun with the pepper. 

I have been painting most days, not every day, and I am so thrilled to be back at it.  It was a long and frustrating drought. 

Paint Something In Your Bathroom

One of the assignments for class yesterday was to paint something in your bathroom.  I was planning to do that on Friday, but did not factor in my morning eye appointment.  When I came home, my eyes were dilated and I figured I would not be able to do this.  By the afternoon with my eyes back to normal and carving out an hour to paint, I did this.

This one is for Art 4 Shelter.  

I had so much fun giving this a try and I am pleased with how it turned out.

Between this painting and yesterday’s class, it feels like I have my groove back. I am inspired.  I have a mental list (that I really should write down) of things I want to try.  I want to push myself.  

There is so much to learn and try.  I would like to improve my compositions.  Here are several attempts.  I am not thrilled with the results, but it felt really good to give both of these a try.  Although I got frustrated with the spoon and just stopped working on it. 

 

10 Minutes For A Painting

I have been painting more and blogging less.

Last Saturday in class, it was the 10-minute painting exercise and I felt really good in class.  All the sludge going on in the world receded and I felt very present and open.  

It’s a nice group of women and a big part of what I enjoy is seeing what other people are doing.  We are using the same materials and working on the same assignments for the most part.  The biggest variation between people seems to be paint brushes.  

It’s fascinating what people do.  One person uses a tiny brush and just sets things up and goes to work.  One person for last week’s homework took a deep dive into shiny things and the colors she found in the shine was amazing.  

I always feel so inspired.  

It can be hard to put your own work up for others to see.  After that initial reluctance, it’s okay.  Enough time has passed that everything looks a little better for a fresh eye than I might have recalled.  

In class last week, we did the 10 minute painting exercise.  In one of my spiral notebooks, I already had an 8” x 8” ready to go where the ground was pink and I had brought a green apple. 

While I can’t quite replicate this exercise as well at home, the forced pressure and limitation of doing a 10 minute 2” x 2” painting 4 different times is actually freeing.  There is no “do not”.   There is only do and even if the piece ends up with significant issues, there is something magical about the process and result as well.  You are in the moment.  Some decisions work out.  Some don’t.  While there is pressure, the stakes are very low and it’s a good way to get into “the zone”. 

I like painting on black, but, occasionally, it’s also fun to try a different ground.  When I do this and my first stroke goes down, my visceral reaction is slight panic.  OMG.  What have I done?  This color is not behaving the way it should.  The passes quickly and it’s time to get to work.

Here’s what I did in class.  

Since class last Saturday, I have done 2 more sets of 10 minute paintings, although I did cheat and go longer on several ones.  Also, time constraints meant that I would do 2 of them and go back and do the other two later.  You lose a bit by not doing 4 of them. 

Pears could become my favorite fruit to paint.  

Someone in class last week had some lovely deep red apple paintings.  I find it difficult to paint deep red apples and decided to give it a go.  I think I still need to add some more white and have been practicing this in some other paintings.  

For the rest of these, I’ve been trying to do 37 paint strokes or less, although I always seem to lose count, or trying to limit the time spent painting. 

This one was painted on a green background. I’ve been playing around with using a flat brush rather than a bright.  I can get juicier paint strokes with the flat, but my edges get sloppy and I’ve been losing the outer shape of what I’ve been painting quite a bit.  That happened with this one.  I also find that I tend to lose shape more often or worse on the left side of things and I have no idea why. 

For some reason, this one really annoyed me until I noticed the top.  Here’s a crop of just that. 

This pear seems boring to me.  

I took an in-process photo of this pear painting.  

This was a 15 minute painting and I got too fussy and lost my original paint strokes.  

There is so much to learn and so many experiments to try and I am really thrilled to be back and painting more regularly.  

Missed Class. Been Sick.

 The second painting class was last Saturday and I woke up with a 101 degree fever, so no painting class for me!  When Kat sent out the class recap, it sounds like they did the one stroke per color, but in addition in her recap email she mentioned 37 brush strokes method.  On a whim, I did a google search and the best thing I found was this from the Painters Keys.  I also saved this with a bookmark.  When class is done, I am going to do this for 1 month and I am going to reread this letter.  It really spoke to me and it got me started.  The first few strokes were much more dynamic.  The finish was not, but I caught a glimpse and have something to strive for. That was the mug in the group below.

Here are some of things I’ve been painting.  I’ve been trying to paint every day, even if it’s only for a few minutes. 

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. 

 

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. 

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.  

Some Second Layers

 I haven't been writing. I've been off experimenting.

I've been job hunting.

I've also been painting the stairwell and stairwell ceiling (with white on the ceiling and only one color on the walls, in case you are wondering).

I've still never met a bright color that I don't like The following one is actually brighter in person.  The other interesting thing is that the above one is hansa yellow opaque as the first layer with quin magenta on top, while this one reversed the order of the colors. You can also see that I used different techniques, but even so the difference is interesting.

I am toning some of the colors down or at least adding some areas which are more neutralized. This one is actually a first layer.

I am loving the excuse to play with color.  I have made a pledge to myself that these are not precious. They are to be used. I can always make more.

Still On Layer 1

Tomorrow, the first set of videos for working on a second layer drop. That means that I have been doing a lot of first layers. I could seriously post a lot of pictures. It’s been a joy to just play and to play with color. As I start to work on 2nd layers, I will just post my favorite experiment, since the last time I posted.

This one got made when I pressed a clean, dry piece of paper on top of another piece of paper which was dry in some parts, mostly dry in others, and really, really wet elsewhere.

This turned out pretty cool. I may or may not add more to it. 

So the other cool thing to share is a picture from today. 

A Little More Joy

 Given the news of the death of RBG, I am extra glad to have Roz's class. I need color and I need an excuse to play. 

Here are some new experiments with a toothbrush and a spray bottle. I have a tendency to use too much water. At the same time that I was coming to this realization, Roz had a post on her blog about this very subject. 

The first 3 times I played with the toothbrush and spray bottle, I used way too much water. The 4 time worked better. All of these were on 5" x 7" pieces of paper.

The 5th time was even better. I still think I could have waited for the initial marks had dried a bit more and could have used a bit less water from the spray bottle, but that is something to revisit later since tomorrow the videos drop for the 2nd week of class.

Here's one other 1st layer from earlier in the week. When I can be patient and wait for things to dry, sometimes too much water is a good thing. It doesn't show up as well in the photo, but this one has a really cool frosted effect. 

A Little Joy

 I am so glad that I signed up for the last round of Roz Stendahl’s online class called “Textures: Backgrounds for Visual Journaling and Mixed Media”. The class started on Saturday. 

My reaction to the pandemic and the aftermath of the civil unrest stole some part of my creativity. It was coming back slowly and never completely went away thanks to my knitting, but a big part of it has been missing.

In the last several days, I’ve caught myself thinking on more than one occasion, “I wonder what would happen if” in response to thinking about creating a new first layer as part of this week’s homework. It's a good place to be and it makes me feel like that part of me which has been missing is starting to return. 

So far doing a few new first layers each day makes me feel like I am a little kid playing with finger paint.

This is my favorite one so far.  After brushing some paint on damp paper, I used the rare, but very effective art tool, know as a scrap piece of plastic shelf liner from IKEA.

As class continues, my guess is that we will be adding onto our first layers and covering parts of them up. For this one, I will probably keep it "as is". 

Since I liked this one so much, I did a follow up with a rubber stamp I carved several years ago.

One thing I like about this is when I open my sketchbook, I want have this big, white empty piece of paper staring back at me. It got me thinking about my relationship to color, but that is a post for another day!

Beginners Mind

Yesterday, I spent the day in class at Wet Paint. The class was Gestural Watercolor with Monica Fogg. She was an affirming, generous instructor and has a background in teaching art. It was a lovely day.

I lucked out getting into the class. It had filled and I was put on the wait list. On Thursday, I found out I was in. That may have contributed to how I approached class. There wasn’t time to overthink things. So on Saturday morning, I decided to leave the internal critic at home, along with any anxiety or insecurities. This has been a year with a lot of change and growth and I decided this class was a gift for myself and I was going to have fun, learn what I could, and embrace whatever happened. All of this led to the perfect combination of approaching this class with beginners mind.

While there weren’t any extreme cases in the other participants, it made me a little sad to hear other people’s comments which made it clear that their internal critic, anxieties, or insecurities had accompanied them to class. Been there. Done that. Know what this can look like and sound like. I wish I could push flip a switch for myself and for other people just make this go away forever.What a gift that would be to myself and to others.

Anyway..........I had a lovely day. We did some different exercises, which included mixing up colors  you might find in a green pear or a red pear. I went a little crazy and filled about 1/3 of the sheet initially. At lunch, I filled the rest of the page. My color mixing was intuitive. When I had a splash of color, I’d mix some other color into it, just to see what would happen.

We did some other exercises and, after that, it was time to spend some quality time with pears. One great thing I learned is that you can play around with watercolor on less than great paper. My 3 stroke pears and the ones below were done on a crappy 85 gsm paper, which I have, but don't enjoy drawing on. I’m thrilled that I can use it up as warm up paper for playing with watercolor. For the 3 stroke pears, I was being very literal. Monica noticed that when she was checking in on participants and suggested using a brush with water to move the paint around. That didn't count as an additional stroke. In the 3 stroke pears, no one thought about or represented the negative space. When we were given up to 10 stroke pears, Monica mentioned negative space and people started to consider it.

At first, I was unhappy when the end of the stem bloomed into the top of the pear, when I let two wet parts touch. Later, I decided I liked it. Overall, this class and approach is a fun way to explore watercolor. Since you are more exploring the idea of something rather than a true representation, it's easier to let go and let the medium do a little (or a lot) of what it wants.

For one assignment, we practiced some simple thumbnails. If you were happy with one of the scenes you set up, the next assignment was to paint it or you could set up something different. There were apples, squash, gourds, or pears to choose from. For my thumbnails, I had a larger scene, but when I went to paint I focused on two pears which seemed to have a lovely relationship. They weren’t holding each other up, but they seemed to be there for each other.

I lost any gestural aspect and overworked it, which also meant that there’s not much value range. This may sound like the internal critic speaking, but it’s not. When I was working on this, I was in the moment, in the zone, and in a place of enjoyment and learning.

I tried a second set up, but didn’t get very far with it. The group was circling up for another round of comments and feedback. For the last assignment, we could do whatever we wanted to. I decided to try and be more gestural with a pear and to be clearer about light, medium, and dark values.

It was a really, really great day and I think this class got me out of my art-making-avoidance funk. Slowly, it’s been lifting, but as of yesterday it’s dissipated and is gone. Hurrah!

When I Am 62

Daniel’s surgery was 7 days ago. While there is still a lot of recovery needed, I think we both turned a good corner today. One of the ways I can tell that I am starting to work down a sleep deficit rather than building it up. Another is that there is the tiniest bit of room for ideas and thoughts which have nothing to do with hip replacement surgery.

We still get a newspaper delivered to our home and I like to read each day’s newspaper. If I get behind, I don’t read it as thoroughly, but I still look at it. Today, I started looking at Sunday’s paper. In either Friday’s or Saturday’s paper, there was a sidebar which mentioned this program. Apparently in Minnesota, you can take college courses for $10 per credit at state-supported institutions of higher education starting when you are 62. I have a ways to go, but it’s pretty cool to think that I can take some art classes at a junior college or a university in my future!

I am getting behind in Kat’s online class, but that is not a problem since it’s online and work at your own pace. I wanted to try and keep painting, but knew that I wouldn’t be able to every day and wouldn’t much time on the days I did paint. Is that an understatement. On my most exhausted days, I haven’t painted at all. On the other days, I have done one 10-minute lime painting. For this set, I did the first one (upper left) on 3/11 and the last one on 3/18. For the two bottom ones, I was just plain stubborn and painted, even though I was pretty beat. I skipped yesterday and probably will today. Tomorrow, I hope to be in a place where I can do at least one 10-minute painting per day or most days.

#313 - Limes - 8" x 8" - paper

The first one was painted with my old lighting scheme. I really like the bounced, lower light and feel like it’s helping me not mute my paint colors so much for the other 3 paintings.

One other thing I should mention about all of this surgery recovery stuff is that it really helps to have good family and friends. Both Daniel and I are really blessed. 

More Homework

I had been getting along great with my sumo mandarin. On Wednesday, I started a painting using it as my model and it was a clunker. I didn't finish it. Yesterday with limited time, I switched to something I could start yesterday and finish today.

#310 - My Current Favorite Mug - 6" x 6" - paper

This is a mug I purchased from a friend, who is a potter, when I was back in the Quad Cities this summer. The color is mostly orange/brown with overtones of green, which makes it hard to decide what color you are dealing with. This is mostly one-color per stroke. I did cheat a little bit.

I like the handle of the mug.

The mug looks more like it's kissing the edge of the painting. I should have set this up better and clearly cut off the top part. 

Spherical Objects

Alphonso Dunn does beautiful pen and ink drawings. I've checked out his book from the library and really should pick up a copy. Yesterday on Facebook, a post popped up from him about a new video on YouTube. It was very topical, since it was about drawing a sphere in pen and ink.  It got me thinking about how to translate this to paint strokes.

Yesterday, I went to the grocery store and found a strange looking citrus, called a sumo mandarin. I bought one to paint. Given Alphonso's video, I thought about it's shape and started a quick drawing in my kitchen, which I didn't finish.

After that I went downstairs to paint.

The top part which sticks up didn't turn out the way I wanted. It was coming along at the mid-point of the painting. I thought about why and will give it another go. It's almost like this was my warm up to better understand the shape of this thing.

#309 - Almost One Stroke Sumo Mandarin - 6" x 6" - paper

This morning, I had a little extra time in the morning and I was thinking about my friend, the sumo mandarin. I started another quick drawing. When I got to the right side, I tried to turn off my thinking brain and just go with the flowy part, trying to capture the shape directions with mostly straight hatch marks. By the say, I do realize that I make up my own form of English and word usage when I write about this stuff, so don't ask me to define what "shape directions" really means, but it's the description that popped into my head. When I stopped, the idea of a vanishing point seemed to apply. To "build" a round shape, it seems like you need to angle the hatch marks towards an axis (like Alphonso mentioned). At the outer edges, the angle is more extreme and at the inner part, it's less extreme. It seems like this could also apply to the angle of paint strokes.  None of this is absolute, since if all hatch marks or paint strokes were mostly up and down (or side to side), the result would look pretty boring. Still, it's something to contemplate. 

Does any of this make any sense at all? At least I can say, that I am getting a lot of value from the $2.39 piece of fruit I purchased yesterday.

One Is a Lovely Number

In Kat’s online class, it’s one stroke per color week. This is a good way to slow down and think. The goal is to paint a simple object by mixing a color and painting one stroke with that color. You finish the entire painting in this manner, or you try to! It can be easy to forget that and use a color that works well more than once before you realize it. I like to mix colors, so I enjoy this. Plus, it’s good practice mixing colors so that more of the paint is on the brush, rather on the palette. I am still marveling at how much better it goes when I don't have a goopy paint brush. In the past when I've tried to not have goopy paint, my brush would be too dry. Scratchy, dry paint strokes feel awful to paint. It's like the visual equivalent of fingernails on a chalkboard.

When I took Carl’s class at Wet Paint, he would mix premix puddles of color with a palette knife before he started a painting. He also used the matte medium, which thinned the paint color. You can build layers this way and/or you can smooth value transitions. I found it hard to control my paint. Now that I understanding grabbing the paint in the brush better, this might go better.

While it’s a bit frustrating that this one, seemingly small, thing has taken 3 1/4 years to fix, I am also reminded hearing about someone taking mandolin lessons from Peter Ostroushko years ago. Apparently, Peter began both his beginner classes and his master classes with how to strum the strings. I like the idea that no matter the level of competence an artist has achieved, there is always the opportunity to go deeper and learn more about each component or skill involved with the thing you do.

To a certain extent, I do that in my work, accounting. I am a process person. Once I have set up a system for a client, over time, I will continue to refine and optimize it until I don’t see any way to improve it further. This is the fun part of my work and it’s a balancing act of implementing change, getting benefits from the changes, and making refinements at some time in the future. This is what I enjoy about my work versus the auto-pilot parts of my work, which aren’t that fun. Most people think accounting is all the auto-pilot part, but it's not or it doesn't have to be!

Back to painting.........

I overworked this, because I enjoyed mixing colors. With my paint strokes, there are too many which are similar, i.e. same angle, direction, length, and so on. I am liking the oranges I mixed!  This was a blood orange, so there were some parts along the edges where were a really dark orange.

#308 - One Stroke Per Color Orange - 6" x 6" - paper

By the way, this really is my experience almost every time I take a picture to post on this blog. My picture-taking process is move the step stool in front of the windows, place the painting on top of the bench, move the cat one or more times, and take the picture.

One last thing, I subscribe to The Painter's Key's, thanks to Kat's recommendation. A letter / blog post comes out 2 times per week. Many of them are gems. I really like the one for today.

Bad Apples

Bad apples. Bad, bad, apples. I painted two very, very, bad apples. Those aren't being posted. 
These are the alternates. I don't think I have much ego about my painting. Still, it's humbling to be struggling with capture the shape of an apple. I feel like I've painted a lot of apples in the past 3 1/4 years. It's also part of adjusting back to painting from life. 

#306 - Apple - 6" x 6" - paper

#307 - Another Apple - 6" x 6" - paper

I just need to keep at it. On the plus side, I am getting away from my old, goopy, paintbrush habit.