Not One Stroke Per Color

One stroke per color went out the door with this one. I painted this on Saturday.  When I need to focus more on building the shape, I abandon doing one stroke per color. This turned out more muted than I planned, but I got closer to the shape, including the top than I had.

#311 - Sumo Mandarin - 6" x 6" - paper

Tomorrow, I am taking a several hour drawing class during the day at Wet Paint. It's called "The Science of Seeing and Its Impact on Portraiture".  Part of the class description said "This class teaches the science and psychology of how our eyes and brain see and interpret visual information. It will also teach you why drawing errors occur and how we can use our bodies and time-tested techniques to draw more accurately", which is why I wanted to sign up for it.  For me, it's also a chance to rest and focus before his surgery on Thursday morning.  

I've been thinking about and trying to notice what and how I see. I copied the following from today's posting of a blog I follow.  The overall post is a big long and rambling, but it contained a lot of good stuff.  It was from an interview from On Being that Krista Tippett (not my favorite person in the world, but someone who does interesting interviews with people) did with Maira Kalman.   

"I absolutely think that a museum is one of the deepest places of meditation that there could be, maybe even more than a library, because you’re looking. In a museum, you’re not reading — I mean, you’re reading a little bit, but you’re basically just wandering and looking. And once again, the function of the brain, what happens to the brain is very different than, I don’t know, than being in a supermarket — even though I love being in a supermarket. So wait a minute. I love supermarkets. I love to look at all the packaging. To me, that’s a little bit like a museum. But that’s a digression. I think that we have the opportunity to understand silence around us, and really looking, all the time. There’s always the opportunity. And there’s never a lack of things to look at, and there’s never a lack of time not to talk."

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.

A Very Long Post

I am getting ready to mail off a package to Art 4 Shelter for their event on May 15th. It’s hard to believe that I’ve submitted items for 4 years! This year, the plan was to submit 12 items with one being painted each month. That didn’t happen. The current count is 6 paintings. While they are still accepting artwork through the end of April, I want to get my items in early. In two weeks, one of the members of my household is getting a hip replaced. With that and Kat's online class, I don't see myself getting more of these done and mailed. 

Here are the pieces I am going to mail. 

Whenever I paint something on a 5” x 7” piece of paper, the intention is that it's for Art 4 Shelter. As always, there are items which get rejected. For those, I’ve gotten better about tossing them in the garbage, since I don’t need them around. It’s a balance between being honest, but also not being too picky.

The biggest motivation I get from drawing and painting is not the end product, but instead how it changes how I interact and process the world. I notice more and, when that happens, I try to slow down (at least sometimes I do) to really process and enjoy what I notice.

This morning, Hammett, one of the orange cats, was sitting in my lap. He was looking up to watch the birds and squirrels through a very high window in our kitchen. I found myself looking at and really seeing his eyes. The edges of his eyelids were a delicate light shade of lavender, except in the lower corner where it transitioned to a slightly-darker-in-value, soft, rosey pink color. The color of his eyes closest to his pupils was the same color as some of the lighter color of his fur, which is an orangey-yellow, more towards orange. While the rest of his eye color is more yellowy-orange, more towards yellow. I also could see two different highlights in his eyes. The reflections back from the windows created  highlights in his eyes which were horizontal, but slightly curved, in the color of  light gray with overtones of blue. He also had the smaller, bright highlights which are a color closer to white. When you paint these in they make the eyes in a painting come to life.  Until I started painting, I never noticed these highlights.

Hammett has been my cat for years. I've looked at him many times. I've studied pictures of him in order to paint him. He has very light color fur around the outside of his eyes which frame and highlight his eyes so beautifully, I've never gone deeper to really see his eyes. It was shocking and wonderful to see the orange in his eyes, the lavender eyelids, and all the rest.

Not long after the experience with Hammett, I opened up my refrigerator. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed the green apple with a sticker/label on the apple. Instantly, the thought flashed in my mind, how would I show the label in a painting? The label has a curve to it, one side is slightly larger, and so on. 

It was that kind of a morning.

I am sure there are many people out there that don't think any of this matters. I'm not sure how to express this, but I think it matters greatly. For now, I'll just say that it's adding a richness to my life. 

Changing subjects, I've been taking Kat's online painting class. Maybe, I'm not changing subjects as much as I thought, since I find myself noticing things watching the videos that I either missed or couldn't "see" in her live classes. Since she has a camera pointing down, the vantage point is different. As a result, I am picking up things about how she grabs paint to mix colors and get paint in her brush in a way I wasn't getting in live class. I've never understood how she can get the "right" amount of paint on her brush, so that the brush isn't either too dry or too globby with paint. I have a bad habit of loading up with too much paint, making it hard to get a variety of paint strokes and I haven't been able to figure out how to get the "right" amount. Something clicked when I watched the videos. Currently, I am bouncing between trying to break my old habit of a globby paint brush and picking up paint more effectively.

For class, I am planning on posting what I paint here and only send her the stuff I want to be evaluated.

We started with a color wheel and mixing gray and brown.

Mixing a good brown is still a mystery to me. However, this color wheel made me happy. I can't explain why, but I smile whenever I look at it. Because of that, it's hanging in my office where I can see it. 

We needed to do a value study of a simple object and paint it. This is a clementine. The top is flat, not that you can tell from my drawing.

Here's clementine 1. Blah. That's all I have to say. Blah. Okay, I'll also say that the top does not look flat. What's really interesting about working on simple shapes is that there is not a place to distract or hide.

#303 - Blah Clementine - 6" x 6" - paper

Here is take 2 when managing the amount of paint on the brush started to click. I took this photo part way through and I am glad that I did, since I should have stopped. Instead, I continued. At this point, this one looks like it has a flat top at the very top. Hurrah!  I do confess that it looks like a complete copy of Kat's style.  It's not my goal to copy her style.  It's been helpful to read some of Roz Stendahl's comments where she thinks beginners get too hung up on developing a style too early when what they should be doing is focusing on learning and developing skills. 

#304 - Flat Top Clementine - 6" x 6" - paper

Yesterday, I painted a lime. There are things which don't work and there's something which bugs me about it. I like the greens which I mixed and there is a shape to it. I do find it interesting that the clementine above has a lot more energy to it than this one.  The energy just seems to drain out of paintings which are overworked. Some people can layer paint and still keep the energy, but that's another thing I need to work on figuring out.

#305 - Lime - 6" x 6" - paper

This is a very long post, so I am going to wrap it up with one final thought. The challenge of switching back to painting from real objects rather than pictures always surprises me.

Art Critic or Photography Assistant?

This is literally where and how I usually take pictures of my paintings.  The back of the kitchen has big windows, so the natural light is good.  I put the picture on top of a footstool we keep in the kitchen and this happens.

Usually, I move the cat before I take a picture.  It's always this particular cat.

I don't paint flowers very often.  When I do, especially a close up, it's easier to paint the values and value shapes without painting a flower.  Maybe it's because a close up flower reads as a more of an abstraction to me.  I'm not sure how to carry this over to my other paintings. For this one, it felt like my thinking brain took a break and my processing or visual brain took the lead.  I wish this happened more.  It can't be forced, but I can create the right conditions, hope it happens, and enjoy it when it does. 

#300 - Como Conservatory Orchid - 5" x 7" - paper

I still like painting things which have big areas of white in them, which is hysterically funny to me since in most aspects of my life I've never met a loud bright color that I didn't like.  It's weird, but for some reason I tend to dull down my colors in my paintings.  Too much, I think.  Often when I'm done, I will look at something and think I should have let the colors pop a bit more.

White is fun to paint, because it isn't white.  While it's not visible from the picture, one thing I noticed in my picture was that the white on the left side of the flower was warmer than the white in the more shaded part on the right.  I tried to capture that.

This one and some of my other 5" x 7" paintings are for Art 4 Shelter.  This year the event is on May 15th and it's in a new location.  It's a great event!  Mark your calendars.  Plus, it's never too early to send them submissions.  Here are the guidelines.