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.  

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.

The Calm Before the Storm

In spite of this winter dragging on and on and on with things like record setting snow or yesterday’s morning temperature of 9 degrees (windchill of minus 7), I am not talking about that type of storm.  Later this afternoon, the house will be full with 9 people to play cards and have dinner.  While I am looking forward to this and it should be a blast, I feel rusty with hosting social gatherings.  My spouse has a healthy accumulation of vacation at work, so he took some time off this week and really shouldered the burden of getting ready with doing a ton of errands and cleaning.  

There’s still a list of things to get done today, but it feels manageable.  

When I got up this morning, the house was quiet.  I brewed some tea, sat in a chair with two house cats close by, and looked at pictures on the IPad.  For painting, I want to work on landscapes or outdoor scenes and I want to work on 5” by 7” pieces, so I can give them to Art 4 Shelter if they turn out.  

What I’m finding is that when I am looking in my pictures, I am drawn to scenes that have too much detail.  I like detail.  I like complexity.  I like lots of fussy little bits. That leads to poor choices for what I want to currently explore, especially when working small. 

As a result, I spent time this morning slowing down to look at some of my photos in a new way to find both interest and less details. This meant cropping like crazy. 

I am not sure I was completely successful, but I have several pictures that I want to explore.  It was a good exercise and it was a good way to start out on a busy day.  It also has me thinking about being more aware of those simple scenes and settings around me at any time, so I can generate some new photos to explore. 

Also, here is a painting from earlier this week. I think this was a reasonable photo choice, but I don’t want to go with anything more complicated than this and less complex would probably be better.  

Finding Time Here And There

Doing short spurts of drawing, while I am feeding the cats, means that I have been drawing a little every day. I am still exploring faces using pictures from Sktchy. The goal is to stay away from detail and just explore the shape of faces trying to use simple lines. I’m still using the back of fairly thin paper that I’ve already used on the other side. One morning this week, I set a timer for 15 minutes and had a lovely time just experimenting.

I’ve been trying to think about the different planes in a face, how necks attach to the head and things like that. Lips are a complete mystery to me and they are hard to suggest with the thick lead I am using. Still, I would rather proceed in this manner for awhile and see what I can learn.

One thought that shows up in my mind from time to time is to think about the 2-D images I am using as if they were 3-D. That was something that Suzann Beck mentioned in her class at Wet Paint. She also said to think about 3-D shapes you are using as if they were 2-D. It does cause me to look at things and consider them in a different way.

Here are a few of my drawings. They are quick and simple. I am not going for accuracy.

On the painting front, I’ve been finding bits of time here and there to paint. Here is a revisit of a landscape. It’s still not there. While values need to be more distinct, the shape of the land turned out better.

#319 - Landscape - 6" x 6" - paper

Getting Back To Normal

I seem to be bouncing between two states - hyper-busy (i.e. feeling more like a human doing rather than a human being) or completely lazy and/or unmotivated. It's a bit disorienting. Although, I think it's part of getting back to things being more normal. My honey is recovering quite well and I have the first draft of our taxes done, so I guess it's time for some additional normalcy.

From an art perspective, I am painting on more days than not. I've been working from this picture I took in Connecticut last summer. The tree is magnificent. I cropped it down for a 5" x 7" and an 8" x 10". 

I got lost in the 5" x 7" and abandon it. I tried again with an 8" x 10". While I went further, I didn't finish this one either. I started on the tree with the trunk and the darkest values in the leaves. I got overwhelmed, since I don't know how to represent what I am seeing, plus I also had trouble mixing my greens. It was worth it to try and I'll loop back to this picture when my skills are stronger. The person turned out okay. There are actually two people in the picture, but I edited out the second person who was mostly hidden.  

#318 - Comforting Tree - 8" x 10" - paper - unfinished

On the drawing front, I've been procrastinating for a long time. I will start in a direction and abandon it, until I start in another direction. Today, I did something that I've been meaning to do and which I really should do. I want to work on capturing the big pieces or chunks in a drawing, as part of training my eye better and learning to address the big picture before straying into the details. It's territory which actually scares me a bit, but in a good way.

Today, each time I fed the cats, I went onto Sktchy and tried to draw a rough outline and big shapes of some of the faces I've bookmarked. You can see lines showing through from drawings on the other side of the paper, but you get the idea. I'm using a lead holder which holds a soft 5.6mm piece of soft graphite, so I can't get into the details. Here are two of today's drawings.

 It was fun and gave me a different way to think about faces.  The cats get fed 4 times per day, so this gave me several small chunks of time to draw. Each time, my brain was tired by the time the cats were done eating. All and all this worked out well. 

Paint Strokes

While I made a promise to myself that I would not go crazy with either critiquing or culling my monthly Art 4 Shelter submissions, the memory of the paint strokes in this one kept bugging me. I decided to revisit it before painting my September submission. I painted it without looking at the first version until I was done.

#259 - Cabin Dock at Sunset - 5" x 7" - paper

I like this version much better and will submit this one.

The lesson in this is that the direction of paint strokes matters. While values and the value shapes are important, so is how you "build' the value shapes through paint strokes. This is a hard lesson for me, since I don't have an intuitive sense of this and need to learn from trial and error. That's why I wanted to redo this one. 

Two Quick Paintings

I dashed this one off quickly, yesterday. This tomato weighed in at 1 1/4 pounds. I haven't painted from life with a viewfinder recently, which made the viewfinder awkward to use.

#255 - Kellogg's Breakfast - 8" x 8" - paper

Originally, I took this morning off work, since I was going to go to the fair to sketch. Instead, I decided to stay at home for the entire day and catch up on a few things. That may sound like a crazy trade off, but I've been suffering from overdoing-it-itus and need to slow down. 

Since I haven't had much time to paint, I did another quick painting this morning. This was painted from a picture I took on my first outing to try plein air painting with Michele and Kat. I feel like I'm seeing more in the source picture, but can't capture what I want to capture, yet. 

I think my recent cat painting turned out better, since I feel like I have a better "understanding" of cats as a subject matter (especially my cats), since I've painted so many of them.  

#256 Minnehaha Creek Scene - 8" x 10" 0 paper 

Since it's tomato season and the rest of the week is going to be busy, my plan for the week is to do some 10-minute tomato paintings. 

Interesting

Where did the week go? For me, it flew by in a whirlwind of being busy - - a little too busy without enough downtime or restful sleep. I fought with feeling tired and a little overwhelmed all week and did not find the time or energy to draw or paint at all yesterday. While I might only spend 10 minutes total on these activities on a busy day, I always feel like I've missed an opportunity when I skip a day.

I slept in this morning. With that and the weekend, I feel much more refreshed.

Earlier in the week, I did several more value sketches. Three were of people from Skchy. The unfinished one was the start of one from a photograph of black raspberries and foliage in my yard. What was interesting was that I partially shifted over to "drawing a person" rather than drawing the value shapes and values. I didn't realize it until I was done. It takes a lot of mental discipline, at least for me, to stay in the world of shapes and value, which is why I think it's a good skill to hone.

The other thing I noticed is that it's easier to approach an activity with a "fresh mind" the first time I do it. When I try to do the same thing the next time, it's like my brain goes into a "been there and done that" state and it's hard to stay true to my self-imposed assignment.

In other art-related news, I finished my August Art 4 Shelter painting.

#252 - Sunset at the Cabin - 5" x 7" paper 

The things I like about this one are the paint colors, the sunset, and the implied boat. I didn't go "overboard" on putting in too many details of the boat. Once I was done with the painting, I could see that the direction of the paint strokes of the water would have worked better if they were more horizontal.

Woodpecker In Winter

When I needed something to paint, I looked at pictures and decided to paint the first one which appealed to me. This winter, I took some pictures (thanks 60x zoom on the camera) of a little woodpecker tapping holes into my neighbor's tree and one of these pictures caught my attention. It might have been the fact that it was over 90 degrees outside at the time with a miserable level of  humidity in the air.

I drew this one and started the trees last night and finished it this morning. When I stopped last night, I was not pleased at all. In fact, I would have given it a negative 12 on a scale of 1 to 10.  I'm not sure why the negativity dial in my mind was on maximum last night. This morning when I looked at where I had left off, it didn't seem so bad.  Now that I'm done, I can say that it's not going to go down in the record books as one of my favorites, but it was a reasonable attempt.

My takeaway is that I need to work on my self-talk. When I'm in the middle of working on something, I need to change the commentary in my head to something along the lines of "I'm working on this piece. I'm not done. The time to evaluate it is after I'm done and have taken a break".

#243 - Woodpecker In Winter - 8" x 8" - paper

Bridge In Minnehaha Park Revisit

It's July, so it's time for this month's Art 4 Shelter painting. I decided to revisit the Minnehaha park bridge with a different cropping.

With limited time, it took 3 days to finish. Here it is after two.

I finished it last night.  In hindsight, this composition draws my attention under the bridge. Sigh.

#242 - Minnehaha Park Bridge - 5" x 7" - paper

I'm still not sure about using the small brush to show the bricks in the bridge (at least I didn't paint each individual brick), but I don't know how to approach it otherwise. I like the trees and water. This is the first time I've painted water where I think it looks like water and implies movement. For some reason, the patterns in both the water and trees "made sense" this time, so it was easier to be truer to the values, especially with making the light parts light enough (relearning this crucial point for about the 199th's time at this point in my learning process).

I painted both the trees and water fairly quickly without multiple layers of paint or getting too fussy, so I think they look more "alive". Once I go down the rabbit hole of overworking an area, I can never get a sense of  "freshness" back.

The Last June Landscape Painting

On Saturday, I got together with friends to paint outside. I can't wait to do this in the fall. We went to Minnehaha Park. While it was a very warm weekend, it wasn't too bad in the park. It helps not having any buildings around, plus there was a breeze. In typical fashion, my brain went into overdrive and anything I know about painting flew away. One suggestion was to focus on a very small composition. That is good advice and I will it a try next time. I hope to go out to paint plein air a few times by myself before I get together with friends in August to paint outside. We will see how that goes!

Instead of showing Saturday's paintings, here's what I finished today. It was painted from a picture. I drew it out on Friday, so it counts as a June landscape painting.

#239 - Bridge In Minnehaha Park - 8" x 8" - paper

I decided to show the stones of the bridge using a number 4 brush. I think it looks a  bit cheesy, but you don't know unless you try these things! I like the person and umbrella on the right (the red and white one).

My commitment to work on landscapes for the rest of June is done, so I need to figure out what to focus on next. Since I feel like I'm tightening up, I probably will do several rounds of 10 minute paintings.

Egret In Marsh

My last post was so long, I'm making this one short.

#238 - Egret In Swamp - 8" x 8" - paper

It was tough trying to address the water and the shadows in the water, given that there were bits of brush / reeds in the water. I don't think I was successful, but it was fun to try.

Barn And Other Structures

In 2012, I went to a hoe down organized by friends who have an organic farm in Hutchinson MN.  This literally was a party to celebrate the end of the growing season (i.e. put the hoe down).  It was a potluck and included a barn dance. Most of the participants were from CSA-type farms in the area. I took several pictures of the farm buildings and now I wish I would have taken many, many more!

#237 - Barn & Other Structures

I started this one yesterday and completed it today. When I was working on the buildings, I kept thinking that this was going to be a terrible, terrible painting. After a short break and looking at it from a few steps back, I surprised myself that the buildings read pretty well. Certainly not perfect, but not terrible!  Things look vastly different over the end of a paint brush versus a few steps back.

How is life otherwise? Pretty good. Today is my anniversary and it started out with the arrival of a new flamingo. That's the good part of pretty good.

We still have no idea which friend(s) started the tradition or who is keeping up the annual tradition. All I know is that a new flamingo shows up every year on our anniversary. This year, the new one showed up some time between 10 pm and 7 am.

The not-as-good part is that I managed to cut my left thumb while making lunch this morning. It's not bad enough for stitches, but it was more than a surface cut. It still hurts. Later in the morning, I took a  break from working from home to go water the garden plot. While I was there I harvested some lettuce and managed to cut my right thumb. I'm really not sure how I managed to do in both thumbs on the same day, all I know is that having both of them bandaged is is annoying! I'm not superstitious so I don't think this has anything to do with it being my 13th wedding anniversary. However I've decided no more knives for me today.

Third Try Of A Simple Landscape

Here is take 3.

#236 - Simple Landscape Take 3 - 8" x 8" - paper

While I'm not sure my execution of this scene is improving, I am noticing more each time I look at my source photo. There is a large section of dark in the bottom part of all of the trees and greenery.  This time, I saw more than I did the last two times.

I Don't Care What Color The Water Actually Is

When I started this one I said to myself "I don't care what color the water actually is", so I just tried to stay true to the values. I had to repaint the grassy area, since it was too dark originally. Now that I'm  done and looking at the picture, the sky turned out too dark. Darn! While I was painting I noticed how light the sky was and thought I had my paint light enough.

#235 - Bridge In Minnehaha Park - 8" x 8" - paper

Overall, I am feeling less intimated about approaching a landscape painting (a/k/a - those things in life with many, many elements to figure out), at least in the comfort of my home. It's easier to say to myself, I think I'm going to try this part in this way and see what happens and that is a good place to be.

Lately, I've also been thinking about super vivid mode. My camera has a setting called super vivid and it helps create beautiful pictures. Sometimes, it feels to me like it's cheating a bit, by enhancing reality. This slightly puritanical outlook carries over into my painting. If the colors are on the muddy side in my source material, I tend to stay too faithful to that and that doesn't make a very interesting painting. It's also a weird quirk, since I love saturated colors. With this one, I turned up the super vivid setting in my head, although I went more muddy with the bridge and the upper trees and sky since they were very muted in my picture.

Take Two

Take one occurred during painting class and I never posted a picture of it. I also never finished it. Take one was the pinnacle of frustration when I had no basis and no understanding of how to break landscapes up into cohesive pieces or shapes. The first step has been learning how to see differently. Slowly, I am learning this or at least experimenting with it. It's an interesting process going from not being able to see or process something at all to taking baby steps towards taking in visual information differently.

I am so glad that I took another session of painting classes with Kat. I learned so much. As a result, take 2 went better. Plus, I enjoyed painting this scene this time.

#234 - Scene From A Car Window In Quebec - 8" x 8"- paper

TGIF!!

Until I opened the paper this morning, I forgot that "The Incredibles 2" opens today. The first one is probably my partner's favorite movie or has to be close to his favorite. Since I am working from home today and he can ditch work a little early, we bought tickets to a 6:00 pm showing. We never seem to go to as many movies as we plan and we mostly go to them when they hit the second-run theaters. I can't wait until it's time to go to tonight's movie!!!

I started this landscape yesterday and finished it today.

#233 - Dirt Road Near The Cabin - 8" x 8" - paper

Painting landscape after landscape is helping. While I can't say that I like any of my landscape paintings, I am enjoying the thought process and trying to improve. There are several things I feel good about with this one. There is more of a distinction between the foreground, middle ground, and background than usual. The trees in the background recede to me. These trees really were an extremely dark green and I decided to use a blob of pthalo blue red shade in my green mix. I like what it did. While I don't care so much for the foreground trees, I do think the different parts of the painting read as being distinct. It was fun playing with different types of paint strokes to try and do this.

My plan is to keep working on landscapes, although I will take a break at some point during the month. One of things I learned from the recent session of painting class is that I need to occasionally re calibrate by doing some 10 minute paintings or one stroke paintings. Plus, it's good to mix up painting from pictures and painting still life.

Two Tries Of A Simple Landscape

I took a break from water. These two paintings are from a picture I took at the MN Landscape Arboretum. The picture was taken mid-day with the sun overhead. Much of the picture was dark and I'm not great at adjusting for that. Still I really enjoyed painting the sky with this first attempt. The trees ended up being overworked with layers and layers of paint.

#231 - Simple Landscape Take 1 - 8" x 8" - paper

In the second one, I tried to not overwork the trees.

#233 - Simple Landscape Take 2 - 8" x 8" - paper

At first, I painted the dark shrub in the middle and left the shadow black. I didn't like how it looked, so I gessoed it out. I still don't like how it looks, but I'm ready to let go and move on.

Back To Landscapes

I continue to encounter all types of different issues when I try to paint a landscape. Rather than shying away, I'm feeling stubborn. My goal is to focus on landscapes for the rest of June from which I hope to gain some additional skills or ways to think about or approach a landscape painting.

This seems like a reasonable response given painting #228. I got lost while trying to do this painting. In spite of adding a 4 x 4 grid to the picture and to the painting surface, I managed to goof up the depth of things, so I decided not to finish it. This feels like a different chapter in the same book. When things like this happen, it's frustrating, but at least I can work to improve on things I'm aware of. There are many other problems with this, but messing up the depth of things was the biggest. I also think this was an issue when I went out painting plein air over Memorial Day weekend.

#229 - Minnehaha Creek - 8" x 10" - paper - not completed

In that vein, here is a painting from a smaller cropping of the same picture of Minnehaha Creek.

#230 - Minnehaha Creek - 8" x 8" - paper

I didn't sweat getting the color of the water accurate, but I did struggle with trying to figure out where the water was cooler in tone and warmer in tone. It seemed to be cooler in the light and warmer in the shadowed areas, which does not make sense to me. Given that and that I don't trust my eyes in making these distinctions, I want to keep thinking about the cool or warmth in the things I see.

I See

Yesterday morning, I started with painting the person looking out into the woods. After that, I bounced around. While I liked the person, I didn't like what I added after that.

I gessoed over the area of the path and walked away.

Last night, I went down to finish. Something clicked. I kept looking at the person thinking that he turned out and all I had to do was imply the shapes, values, and colors of the different parts of the person. I thought “why can’t I do that with the rest of the scene”. Why does my brain go into this whirling vortex of overdrive when faced with a whole rather than focused on one small part? After that, it felt like I got out of my own way and I could finally see things like how the path curved in the photo. The different parts and pattern were visible to me. While they were always there, I could finally start to see them. Even better when my hubby got home and I showed him the painting, he could identify the person I painted!

#226 - Looking Into The Woods - 6" x 6" - hardboard

Sometimes I feel like a need a better or an updated manual on how my brain and eyes work.