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.

Hello There

 Hello to my blog. I’ve missed you. 

In my time away, I have kept up with daily project work and I completed Suhita Shirodkar’s class. It covered a lot of ground in 4 sessions. That is not a criticism, although the leap in the 4th class was more than I was willing to do, so I did my own thing and did not turn in homework to be evaluated. 

I still have a long way to go with tackling figure drawing. Here are a couple of attempts from Suhita’s class when we were working from photos. These are all fairly small drawings and the point is to try to capture people in a sketchy type of way, but where there is also aliveness and a sense of movement. I found that I could start to work some things out if I practiced drawing the same person more than once. By the third try, I thought I was getting more believable posture and "movement".

I am starting to develop a dislike of feet, since I just can’t make out their shape. 

The leap in class 4 which I was just not prepared to make was trying to sketch an entire market scene from one of 6 phots that she provided from a trip to Barcelona. It was just too hard to figure out what to include, modify, how to represent everything and so on, so I just didn’t do it. Instead, I did play around with trying to capture and fit in just the people relative to each other in some scenes as a way to push myself a bit. Here’s an example of that. 

While I think all of this has been good, I’ve really been hitting portraits and figure drawing a lot these past few months. It’s been good, but  truthfully it's starting to feel like work. Since I started a new job 4 weeks ago, I don't need more things which feel like work, since I am still in that stage where I am just plain tired a lot of the time, from getting up to speed on things. 

That means I need something that feels more like rainbows, unicorns, and cotton candy, so I’m diverting to something fun and not intense for now. I am trying a new medium for me, gouache.  I saw that Shari Blaukopf had an online class on painting scenes with skies in gouache and it seemed like a good way to learn about this medium. I signed up and bought supplies. 

Here’s the first attempt. I think my clouds and the hills in the background look a little flat, but this is a first attempt. 

I will get back to having more focus with defined projects at some point, but for now I just need some fun. Plus, I have some wonderful sunset pictures from my friend’s cabin and some other good sky pictures that I can explore after I’m done with this class.