just some scribbles

i took a lot of time off this year to focus on self care and figure out what i wanted to do about work. i currently work in a hospital and it is amazingly stressful these days. in September, i scribbled these in the "notes" section of my organizer/planner.  

college painting assignment

College painting has assignments that we do.  At first, I was concerned about what seemed to be a lack of objective. But then I finally figured out, maybe I don't need to know what the objective is.

just paint.

I've learned how to build canvas stretcher bars and stretch my own canvas, which my first assignment is being painted on.

The second assignment is to mix 100 colors on paper that I gessoed.  I didn't know you could gesso paper and paint on it, so--cool!  I couldn't be less interested in this assignment, but I have learned a lot about certain pigments, namely how freaking strong they are, like viridian, and some of the reds.

The 3rd assignment involves building a cradled board and either copying a famous painting, or copying a famous painter's style.  I chose Monet.  Because I thought it would be "easy".  :-(

To explain my subject I would need to tell you that my husband is a gardener. He loves it.  He loves color, and layers and this is his art.  He's been working on our back yard really hard this spring, and he's created a masterpiece.





Here's just a couple of pictures of the same view, which is my inspiration:

  

So this is what I decided was going to be my subject.  

Monet used the following colors, as I've been able to find out on the internet: lead white, which is apparently ILLEGAL WORLDWIDE, vermillion, deep madder, emerald green, chrome yellow, cadmium yellow, cobalt.

After the 2nd day, here I am.   

I think I want to kink the end of that arching coral bell yucca flower. It's too neat.  And I may draw the other one up past it, I think those trees need to be darker. Time for drying for now.

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The next day, I started muting the green of the grass.  I cheated a little and added some lemon yellow, which is much colder than the Chrome yellow used in Monet's palette.  The greens in the desert southwest are much warmer and muted than they are in Normandy.  I needed to add some sky holes to the cottonwood (middle tree) to better define it.  

I also did some more work on the shadows. - since it's first thing in the morning, there's going to be a lot of shadow, as the sun is very low in the sky.  I decided to bring some morning color to the sky.  

I also want to add some background "sky holes" in the yarrows to to separate the heads a bit.  I may add some more red to the shadows, and warm up some of the highlights.  Last but not least, I'll work on bringing out the purple salvia, which I"m going to make more like Russian Sage.  

I don't know what's going on with that shiny stuff.  That might be from a medium I was experimenting with.  

Day 4: I toned the sky back to blue, with gradiation from top to bottom.  I also I decided to use some pale rose to add some highlights to the sky and to add an inner glow to some of the plants and hills and path.  I also added to blue/violent for some of the shaddows.  

Tomorrow: I may bring back the tree shadow on the grass, highlight some of the path in the back, and see if I can fix the orange yarrow on the lower right, and get rid of that line underneath the hills in the background.  I should be able to finish this.    

I'm thinking of a title. Monet had a habit of painting the same scene at various times of the day and throughout the seasons.  

Maybe: "Impression, Sunrise over Brian's Garden, in Summer" 

I don't think I"ll put this one up for sale.  I think we'll keep it so that we have something to look at in the winter.  

Surprisingly, I discovered a that money did a series on the French Mediterranean that included a yucca:

Villas at Bordighera, 1884.

Which this as my guide, I can now make some more decisions.  I plan to make the mountains a little more indistinct but for the most part, I'm done.  

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random still life assignment

The final painting

So, I started College Painting I.  It is a requirement in nearly every drawing or painting class that at some point you create a composition out of an assemblage of random art objects and render it.  So here we are.

Assignment 1: Paint a still life from a set up in the room, in black and white and shades of grey.  Using Titanium White and Ivory Black.  I cheated a little - I'm sure earlier art students had to figure out the values in gray by eye-balling the set up, but not me.  I have an iPhone.  So, I angled the set up that I wanted, and took a picture, using the phone to change it to b&w.

It turns out that there is another good reason to take a picture, that being that people are just RUDE.  Within an hour of sketching out my picture, people had started coming up and moving things, adding things, taking other things away.  Before the end of class, it looked like this.  

And an hour later, the ice bucket on the far right was gone.  So yeah.  Picture. 

My first pass through was kind of rough, and a little scary.  

But eventually, I cleaned it up, and added in the flowers. At first I struggled with the roses.  Quite often my roses end up looking like female anatomy.  Perhaps I could become famous making statement pieces, but I'm just not feeling the need to paint clitori.

 I made the rabbit look more rabbit-like and less pig-like.  

I think my cherubs are too fat.  But that's too bad, I guess.  Next, I worked on the wrinkles.  I think I fixed the wrinkles pretty well.   But I've screwed up the torso on the cherub:

I'll have to work on fixing that next.  

taboret

I took private lessons this past spring from a local artist, Tom Blazier.  I envied so the taboret that he had in his studio, and so I set about getting one for myself.  After looking at some of the fancy ones online ($$$) I started googling "cabinets with drawers" and the like.

Finally, I found this on Amazon and I couldn't be more pleased.  You have to assemble itself but it's totally worth it, and not difficult at all.  Solid wood.

These are nice flat drawers that have paints in some, brushes in others, and a spare palette.


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landscape lessons.

Almost done.

As a wanna-be oil landscape artist, I imagine I'll have all number of pretty landscape pictures.  Some I may even do more than once.  I tend to like single-word names because I like to challenge myself.  But ultimately, I may just name my paintings by numbers.

Anyway.  I take lots of pictures of pretty views.  Seeing pretty views is one thing.  Seeing one that's worthy of a composition and some paint is a whole other thing.

My first finished painting will be from a photograph I took from near the northern end of the Black Canyon trail in Arizona.  I was attempting a 60K for the third time on this trail, and for the 2nd time I was coming off an illness.  I did not finish.  Once I realized I wasn't going to finish, I simply relaxed and took some pictures.  This is one of them.  

I started out by toning my canvas, and I think this may be the secret for me.   I love the way the color peeks through, here and there.

 My first pass was colors that seem GREEN.  like, jarringly green.  I puzzled over this, and the fact that sky seems weirdly blue.  This is because they are next to the toned canvas color.  

But I like the toned canvas because there are tiny hints and teeny bursts of color.   In the desert it's hard to show that without making it look like Andy Warhol does Landscapes.  

My next pass over is to tone down the greens a bit.  

 

 Now now after adding some darks, it seems a bit dark.  The the sparse nature of the high desert is lost in all of the sage that I painted in.  And, I've lost the perspective of the foreground, which doesn't show any transition heading down the trail.

My mentor made some suggestions, and demonstrated how I could put in some highlights, showing the sun peeking through the clouds, and here's where it is now, after I added some highlights earlier today.

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artsy journaly stuff

I had decided to take a year off art school because I'd been under so much stress, and had so many health issues.  However, I'm feeling GREAT these days--I've had some changes occur in my life that have simultaneously relieved my stress and energized me.  But how to get my mojo back?

First, I looked online for some sources, searching under "art and drawing prompts" to get me back into the flow of creating, and I found this:

I'm pretty excited, in particular, with this course for beginning.  I put together my beginning kit:


 In case you're wondering what's in there other than the immediately visible, it contains the usual drawing supplies (conte pencils, art gum, prismacolor ebony drawing pencils, sharpener, chamois, micro pens) along with:
Derwent watercolor pencils
Couple tubes of Liquitex heavy body
spray bottle
glue stick
W&N water colour markers
scissors, xacto knife, razor
several water brush pens
metal French curve, eraser shield, flexible ruler (from my math teaching days)
prismacolor colored pencils
yes - that is a W&N cotman mini kit.








My journal is a hard-backed watercolor journal, 400 series by Strathmore.  

#1 is a doodle on a napkin.  I doodled a self-portrait.

#2 is self explanatory. I used a combination of Derwent wc pencils, W&N wc markers, and a brush pen.  After it dried, I used colors from my Cotman field box and a toothbrush.














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#3 was perhaps the one I most looked forward to doing.  In this exercise involved "SECRET".  I chose to take pictures of my secret, cut them up, make a collage, and paint over them with some Liquitex heavy body paint.  I used titanium white, mixing white, umber, and hunter's green.  

I'm looking forward to exploring this site and all it has to offer.  I've never been a mixed-media person and have always envied people who were.  As time goes buy I hope to become more comfortable in creating this type of art.

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first lessons

I have to say it's exciting learning that you're wrong, especially when 'wrong' refers to completely skipping over something because you might not enjoy it.  For me, that's like oil painting. 

After listening to me kvetch about how I never have time to attend classes, and knowing that I want to be a landscape artist, husband found one to mentor me.  Technically speaking, he's actually teaching me since I've never had a class in beginning painting.  And. he's an oil painter.

I had, early on, discounted the idea of oil painting, assuming that it was 1) messy, 2) would trigger huge asthma attacks, 3) was messy, and 4) I can't paint wet-on-wet.  

I'm amazed to find that it's not smelly, especially since there's something called "odorless paint thinner," and since I wear gloves and a smock, it's not messy at all.  In face, it's easier to clean up because it doesn't dry in 30 seconds, like acrylics, ruining whatever it touches.  Including, for instance, brushes.  

Required reading is John Carlson and Kevin McPherson.  My teacher, Tom Blazier, has so much knowledge to teach me that it makes my brain hurt.  But so it is, that at some point, I had to actually put paintbrush to canvas.  

the first lesson was all about planning a painting, and laying in the big shapes. 

This is the photo.  

This was taken during the 20-miler at Old Cascadia Trail Run, at approximately the third hump in this elevation profile.

Step 1: Shapes and values.  Here's my sketch.

I took the liberty of changing up this picture, making clumps of pine trees rather than a single wall; there will be something done in the foreground to create a path for the eye to move through towards the opening in the trees.

Next step was to mix some values and hues.  Now, this is an iphone picture, so the color isn't exactly on point...as well, I had already gone in and put in some relief in the distant mountains.

Now what is that weird wall between the first two mountains?  Oh, that has to go.  

This one is still in progress.

So while working on another painting, I also had another "a-ha" moment, at least for me: things are not just the color they are.  They are the color they are relative to the color next to them.  

My oil painting mentor has been trying to teach this to me but I just haven't been getting it, until I started on my next painting. 

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