Wingnut - The Beginning

I decided to do "dotty" again.  Here is the start of this painting.

Idea

When I was posting about Sadie's painting, yesterday, I was struck by the things I saw in her picture from looking at it on the computer.  There is a fairly obvious triangle formed above her nose, down the sides of her muzzle and up to the place between her eyes.  There is another triangle that is upside down and above the first one that is from the top of her head down to between her eyes.

Funny, I did not see these before.

For a couple of paintings, I might try to do a drawing before painting where I:

• Draw the outline.
• Look for a mark key shapes. 
• Do some shading to reflect the values (lights, mediums, and darks).

Sadie - Take 3

I'm stuck in my brain about how to mix Wingnut's lighter colors, so I diverted to painting Sadie for the third time today.  In many cases, three is the magic number.  For this one, my guess is that four might be the magic number.  Still, I feel good about the improvement each time.

I did the sketch at work at lunch today.  It was on a 5 inch square surface.  It made the drawing harder, since I'm using a version of the above picture that is 8 inches square.

Here is the finished painting (a/k/a my third attempt).  The nose is getting better!  I'm also pleased with the lighter background.  I don't know why, but for a long time it was really, really hard to paint lighter backgrounds. Sadie is still a little too dark. Also, her eye color is hard. They should stand out more. There are so many orange and brown colors, I'm not sure how to do it.

This was my second attempt, painted in mid-August:

This was my first attempt, painted in mid-June:

Long Weekend, But Less Time For Art

This was a 3-day weekend, but somehow I drew and painted less than usual.  What is up with that?

Here is my latest victim, Wingnut. He is one of those cats that photographs, beautifully.  It's almost hard to take a bad picture of him.  One of my orange guys is like that.

I'm also going to try painting both his body and face. I am taking creative liberties and will show him as though he is on a rug, rather than on a folding chair.

The other thing that I did this morning is plan a little for the week.  I pulled out some pictures and my notebooks, where I've already gessoed some pages and made grid lines.  It's going to be a busy week, If I can draw during lunchtime, I'll be ready to paint when/if I can make time!

Flower

This is my first try at an iris.  I painted it from a picture taken in my yard.

I also am happy that my paintings haven't been as dark.  I used to have a shop light directly over my painting spot in the basement.  This was too much light directly overhead and was part of the reason that I was painting so dark. I moved the shop light behind and fiddled with a temporary light, so that I wouldn't have shadows. It is working much better!

Landscape With Sunset

This is the second time that I've painted this scene.  I like this one better than the first attempt.  Plus, it just felt great to have some time to paint.

Landscapes are hard.  There are a lot of decisions to make and sometimes it's hard to see if you made good ones until way later.  The biggest thing that I could do to improve this is to figure out a better color scheme for the water and sky.  The picture is dark and I think I'm trying to be a little too literal with the actual colors.

Busy, Busy, Busy, Busy

Life, in general, and work, in particular, got very busy this week!  I am looking forward to a long weekend and getting back to my painting and drawing,  It's become a habit, a good one, and I truly miss it when I can't make time for it.

Last week, I took a quick buzz through this blog.  It has more than 100 posts. I made a list of things I've learned or observations that I want to revisit in the next several weeks.

Drawing is an integral part of painting.  At first, I resented the time that it took to make a drawing. Picking up the paint brushes and putting paint on them was painting, not the work that comes before that!!  Eventually, I made peace with the fact that drawing is an integral part of the process. Now, I enjoy it. Many times, but not always, a good drawing leads to a good painting.  Over time, I'm figuring out what lines and "reminders" that I need in the drawing, so that I don't get lost. One of the things that I recently started doing was marking the edges of things before I start to draw.  That helps, immensely!

I also like drawing in a sketch book, especially contour drawing. Very, very slowing, I'm working through the exercises in several drawing books.  If I ever have a luxurious surplus of time (meaning that I've already had time to draw and paint something), I like to pick up a pencil and try to do a quick sketch of something.  My hope is to have more time this fall and winter to do this.