This is a small painting of a farm in Corinth, Maine. It is set way back from the road and has all its pasture up front. I like to see who is in the fields when I go by. Often there are horses and colts out there. I think this car has been there as long as I can remember. This was my first successful attempt at painting a car. I was pretty happy with it. Usually they do not look at all like a car.
This is a collection of 4×4 paintings that I did this week. They are copies of larger paintings by a friend who’s work I particularly like. His brush strokes are quick and sketchy and his paint is quite thick and textural. Another thing I like about it is his color choices. He uses a few different colors than I was using and I enjoyed adding these to my pallet. (the new ones were sap green, cad orange light, and yellow ochre)
I really enjoyed these little studies. I got a feel for the look and light, as well as a bit more texture. I think this was very helpful.
So these are 2 of the paintings I did as I struggled this week. When I edited the colored one and looked at it in black and white it was not too far off from this one on the left that I painted in one color. I have yet to be successfull with this painting, but I thought I would show you where I am coming from. I will continue to try capturing this to my satisfaction, but probably not today ( =
This week has been one big struggle when it comes to my painting! I took a photo of a beautiful spot last fall. The setting is of a waterfront area early in the morning. There was bright, warm, low sun shining on the shoreline making the dried grasses glow in the warmth. In contrast, the shadows were a beautiful cool blue.
I have been eager to put this into a painting and be able to capture that wonderful contrast. So this week I have painted that one scene no less than 10 times, perhaps more. Each one has been dreadfully unsuccessful! I tried everything, from quick little sketchy paintings, to full blown effort, all with no success. Finally I decided to take a step back and do a value study using a single color. (Almost like a black and white). This proved to be helpful in showing how close the colors were in value, but it did not help me to get the colors correct. I guess I will just have to go back to it another day and try again.
Well this painting was a good application of all those grays that I practiced the other day. I really like paintings with lots of light/dark contrast like this. It is always a challenge to get the values right. There are only a couple small spots of colors without any gray in them here. It is quite something to start graying down, say a green for instance. As you put red into it to gray it on your pallet, your eye may tell you that it is no longer green. But when you put it onto your canvas your eye tells you that it is a green. Remember that this is only going to be true if you get the tone and value correct. Otherwise it will look like dreaded mud!
(These are those little lanterns that miners used to wear on their heads. They are pretty cool and practical. My husband has a nice collection of them)
Today I felt like I needed to put down on canvas all the variations of gray I can mix. In actuality, this isn’t even a fraction, but I wanted an assortment of grays leaning towards another color, like a gray purple, or gray green. Gray is really just any color that has some amount of all 3 primaries. This is a valuable lesson to grasp! I think it is one of the things I have found most helpful in my progress. I still need work here.
Can you guess which of these took 15-20 minutes, and which one took almost a full day? Well, I wanted to do this to prove that a painting can be done quickly and effectively. In this I wanted to capture the essence of the scene; like the light vs. darks and the general layout, and perhaps notes of color. The larger one took most of a day. It really is not that much more detailed than the other. They both capture the scene. I could work on the smaller one more, but this is all I needed it to tell me right now. I think this is a very valuable skill to learn well. I will be doing much more of this quickk study to see what I can do with it. I would not consider the larger one a complete painting, but I was at a point of overworking it and decided I had messed with it enough. I will try it again another day.
Well after scraping off several attempts at painting pears with fewer and more deliberate brush strokes, I think I finally had some progress and success. In this group I decided to begin with a black and white to help me determine the values that I was struggling with. This seemed to help out quite a bit in the long run. The first 4 of these only took me about 10-15 minutes each. That is my goal with these quick studies. The last one I played with a bit longer. I want to do this same sort of study with another subject. It has been very helpful.
My objective in t
his study, was to get to the point where I could put down brush strokes with confidence. I did not want to overwork these things. My first 4 were horrible. They took me about 1 hour each and I’m not even sure that at that point they looked enough like pears to suit me. I actually scraped off the next several attempts. Ugh!
These are my first attempts at painting a white coffee cup. One of the exercises in The Daily Painting book, suggested doing 4 paintings that consisted of a cup and a couple different pieces of colored papers. These each took about an hour a piece and I tried not to be too fussy or to go back over them after my time was up. Overall I think there is progress. So I’m going to call it good!
Art with my Coffee 