A Painting A Day

I have always loved this photo, so I thought it would make a great painting. It was taken our first summer at the lake house.  Daddy had passed away in August of 2005 (I think that's right), and then we bought the lakehouse in December. Daddy had built two little boats like this.  We got one and I think John got the other.  He even made the oars! So we take it out on the water and it floats!  I snapped this picture of Ian from the dock.

A few technical details. I did this in oil on a 14x16 stretched canvas. Also I had primed this with a really warm orange, so the orange shows through in a lot of places. I was very pleased with the effect, and I think I'll prime some more the same color.  I love working with oil. It's just so nice to mix the colors right on the canvas.  I did that with everything. And again, I did not stay true to the actual colors in the picture. I made it a bit more colorful.

I worked with pretty large brushes for most of it... mostly a number 4 filbert and a number 4 round. It was very hard to do the detail in the face. I tried to switch to smaller brushes, but couldn't really control them on the canvas.  I read up on how to do fine control online and it looks like I need to get a mahl stick. It's just a stick with a padded end that you place on the canvas to steady your hand. I'll have to try that!

I'm not really sure if this is finished. I think that's the thing that's the hardest for me... determined when to stop.  I do think I need to fix his shirt (it looks like there's a lump of something in the front), and I need to fix the colors on his left arm, the oar on the right is not even painted,  I need to put more detail in the wood of the boat and I need to work on the shadows under the boat a bit. So maybe I'll work on it a little more tomorrow. If not, maybe it is finished! LOL

Things have been really hectic lately, and I was about to explode from stress yesterday... so I picked up a canvas and just whipped this up. I painted in a frenzy! Not even thinking about what I was doing.  This is the result. I had an old violin in the closet that I pulled out.  I wasn't interested in the details, I was more interested in creating the illusion of woodgrain, and I wanted to make deep haunting shadows.

The funny thing is, I was proud to get something accomplished so I showed it to my husband and he said, "That will be really nice when you finish it." Duh! I thought it WAS finished! LOL

I think this was a little too ambitious of me. Tonight I tried to paint the dog. We have an Irish Setter named Rexx.



I never did get the mouth completely right. The funny thing is, I think the body of the dog is the best part, and I only spent like 5 minutes on that. I agonized over the face and the hand and they still don't look right.

I don't know if other people use as manycolors as I do. The dog was so many colors! It was also my first time to portray denim (in the jeans) and while I think the color is "okay", I have lots of room for improvement!

Well, I keep falling further and further behind. I guess I'm going to have to settle for doing a painting every day I can until I hit 30 paintings. Tonight's subject was an old pickup I saw rotting in a yard.





I am semi happy with it. I used palette knifes for the leaves. The colors in the truck were very hard to match - especially working from a picture and working at night. I did this on a 6x8 canvas board. I ordered a whole bunch of them from dickblick.com for really cheap. They were something like .57 cents a canvas. I also got some more oils from the website and they were really reasonable. I can't wait to try them out. I got cobalt blue, permanent blue and naples yellow!

The green I mixed for the truck tonight was (surprise) viridian. It's more of an emerald green, but by mixing I was able to achieve kind of an army green on the truck and I used the same base color to mix the grass.

Where is the front of the truck you might ask? Well that's a good question! It was gone, so I didn't even try to paint it in. I love the way the truck is kind of being reclaimed by nature.

There are two pictures because I realized after looking at the truck last night that I forgot to paint in the mirror, so I did that this morning and tried to take a better picture of it.

I felt like I was on a roll, so I decided to make up some lost ground. I think I'm three paintings behind at this point. I'm not too worried about it. I'm doing the best I can, and am not going to stop until I get 30 paintings. I am not happy at all with this one:



I don't think I spent enough time on the drawing, so my crab is a funny shape!  The body looks too big and the claws aren't big enough! I also couldn't get the colors right. I think I will have to attempt this again in daylight.

I took this picture on the way to the lake house. The clouds were just beautiful and I thought this would be nice to paint. So tonight I tried to capture it.



This was almost too easy to paint. I used the cerulean blue in my palette on the sky. It was the perfect color for a bright blue sunny sky. I never even used my palette knife to mix colors because I mixed them right on the canvas board. I painted blue straight from the tube on the sides and then gradually added white and a little gray. Then I painted in the clouds on top of the sky. I added just a touch of ultramarine blue in the furthest clouds to give them distance.

The grassy field was super easy. I started with the dark green treeline and then lightly used that same color (a little verdian, ultramarine and lemon yellow) to give the field it's depth. Then I used straight cadmium yellow over the field... and to give it a rich wheat tone, I used a light reddest mixture of alizarin crimson and white with a touch of yellow ochre and brushed that over the tops of the grass. I added a few drops of white for the illusion of flowers... and then to be whimsical I reflected the grass off the clouds! So you see just a touch of the green grass at the base of the clouds closest to you.

I almost felt like signing this one!

I haven't posted for a few days. I am going to try to catch up. I got some miniature boards from the art store and did this painting tonight from a picture we took in Provence on our honeymoon. Our wedding anniversary is today (May 28th) so I thought it would be a fun way to celebrate.



I do really like the way the blue makes the background recede. I improvised the colors, as I tend to always do.  The roofs were not that red, the hills were not that blue. I like bright colors, so I guess I was just trying to get lots of color in.  On the greens, I find myself never using green out of the tube. I have several different colors of green, (like sap green and vermillon) but none of them seem quite right for nature. So most of the time I end up doing a mixture of ultramarine blue and lemon yellow for my trees and grasses. Then I use almost straight blue for the darker greens and straight yellow for the highlights.

To dig a little deeper into color - here's what I use in my palette (in the order of which I use the most) : Titanium White, Lemon Yellow, Cadmium Red, Cadmium Yellow, Ultramarine blue, Crimson Alizarin, Yellow Ochre, and then Lamp Black. I have these other colors in my palette that I rarely use:  Sap Green, Raw Sienna, Cerulean Blue, and Viridian (which is a type of emerald green). Just recently I bought Burnt Umber and I'm anticipating using that a lot.  I find that I use two or three times as much of the lighter colors than I do the darker colors. I use tons of white, and a good bit of the lemon yellow, while only a speck of lamp black and ultramarine blue go a long way.

I have a very good book on color that I refer to a lot. It's called Color Mixing Recipes by William F. Powell. The book is very straightforward. It has a bit of color theory in the beginning, and then it has color recipes. It shows a swatch of the color and then shows you how many parts of each color you need to add to achieve the desired result. I have found it indispensable to my painting.

It's funny that I read these are all the colors you need in your palette:

You need 3 primary colors in two hues, one cool, and one warm.

Reds

Yellows

Blues

Looking at this, and at my colors in my palette, I see I really need cobalt blue. I thought it was close to the cerulean, but I think it's a deeper blue than the cerulean. I'll try to pick some up this week.

On my technique, I was just too impatient throughout the painting. That made my work sloppy and amateurish. Again I am trying to put too much detail. I wanted to do the painting looser, with more impressions than detail. Now that I look at it, I see so much more that needs to be changed.

It was interesting working on such a small board and doing a miniature. The board was 6 x 8 and to me, that's just tiny!

Oh, I got lazy today! This is my pathetic excuse for work today.



The first thing I did wrong was I didn't have a canvas so I had to paint on drawing paper. It didn't work well for paint. I couldn't mix the colors on the paper, it just turned muddy. You can tell the difference between the colors on the first strawberry and the second. Because I couldn't mix on the paper, on the second strawberry I mixed on my palette and then painted it on the paper.

I also have a really hard time getting the colors right at night. I am going to have to find time to paint in the day. The texture of the strawberry is very hard to capture. This is definitely a subject that I need to revisit. I think a little practice will go a long way. I think I am tired today and just not into it.

I am very unhappy with this one, but at least I got a painting in today.

Watermelon! We ate this watermelon this afternoon and I took a picture of it so I could paint it tonight.



The picture is a little blurry, but it's the best I could get. I tried to stay pretty true to the colors on this, but I still think it looks washed out. Maybe it's the subject matter, but yesterdays fish was pastel-e too.

I've noticed that most of the time I use the same brush from start to finish on a painting. On this one, I used two brushes. LOL. At least that's a start. This was my first time trying to paint anything metal, and while I find it very lacking ... at least I can tell it's supposed to be a knife!

Technical Note:  a couple of days ago (when I bought the new canvases) I bought a bottle of fixative. I'm using that instead of hair spray now to lock down my pencil sketch before painting.  But one thing about the fixative - it really smells! So I take the canvas outside to spray it. That helps cut down on the smell in my work area.

It's funny to me how I have to battle my preconceptions in my painting. On this one, I really had to "look" at the painting and resist the urge to paint the flesh "red" and resist the urge to make the melon perfectly shaped. And this was a seedless watermelon... I also had to resist putting "seeds" in it.

I can really see the difference in my work now. There is no telling how long it would take me to get to this confidence level if I weren't painting every day. It's not a chore or a duty, it's a delight to escape from everything else and paint even if it's just an hour a day.

I didn't start tonight until very late, so I tried to keep it simple. This is my interpretation of a smallmouth bass.



There is so much detail in a fish that it was hard for me to figure out where to stop. I did not do the scales, and I tried to loosely interpret the colors. I almost skipped painting today, but I'm glad I didn't. I need to do this every day . It's very good therapy for me I think. I feel GOOD when I paint.

The funny thing is I didn't open a tube of paint. I had paint left over from yesterday, and never threw the disposable palette away, so I just used yesterdays paint. It worked fine, and it cut down on wasted paint!

It was hard to find the time today, so by the time I started painting it was like 9 pm. I am proud that I finished something this complex in just a couple of hours.



Tonight I worked from a photograph, and that seemed to help me a lot.  I don't think the colors are adequately displayed in the photo, but I made it very colorful. Lots of yellow, purple, black and green. Even a few dots of red. I used ultramarine blue in the cow a little bit and that added a great deal. I think the blue in his face drew your focus to it more.

I keep wanting to go back and do more to it. When do you know it's finished?

It was really hard for me to mix the colors at night. There is just something about natural light that helps you "see" color. OMG, I'm just itching to get back to it and do more. I am going to go to bed and stop though because the idea here is not to get a masterpiece in these 30 days, it's just to gain confidence and wake up my creativity.

You know children tell the truth, and my son's friend said it wasn't very good. That's the second one of his friends who has said that. Perhaps I should start listening to them? ... Nahhh... I'm having too much fun.

I wanted to spend less time on my painting today, so I decided to keep it simple.  I painted this apple. (You can actually see the apple to the right of the canvas.)



While the apple turned out "ok," I also wanted to portray the table, but couldn't really get wood grain down. That's a good lesson for tomorrow. Tomorrow I'll just try to paint the table.

I have never realized how important the background really is. I think it was wrong of me yesterday to use that bright green in the background of the Bacardi bottle. It was just too much. All of the artists work that I like has more subtle backgrounds.

I did however paint looser on the background and used a crosshatch type pattern that I liked. I need smaller canvases! I have "paint all your canvas" syndrome, so if I'm going to paint every day, I need less ground to cover!

Also today I gessoed the board before painting. It made a huge difference! Even though the packaging said it was gessoed, the extra coat made it well worthwhile. While I was at it, I painted a background tone (kind of a muted orange) on a couple of canvases. I want to try painting on those and letting the background color add depth.

I see now after looking at the photo above that there is the slightest hint of a reflection of the apple on the table and the table has much more brown in it. Maybe I'll try working from a picture, because I seem to see more looking at it not in "real life."

I don't know if this was too ambitious of me, but I thought I'd try painting glass today.  I grabbed my husband's Bicardi bottle and a glass and set them up outside and started painting.



I don't know quite what to think about this. I really didn't have enough time to finish it.  I think the Bicardi bottle is ok. It was hard for me to judge how much detail to put in. I'm trying to work loosely and I think I put a little too much detail in it.  I was happy with the colors I mixed for the bottle. The shapes are a bit distorted but the idea was to try to paint glass. I think that's why I put it on a white tablecloth. My husband said I shouldn't have used white for that. Speaking of the tablecloth, I didn't have time to put in any detail on it either. I feel like it needs more work to be finished.

Just a couple of notes of things I learned. For one, the mosquitoes were killing me, so I am going to have to start working earlier in the day. The other thing was I got the canvases on sale at Michaels and I don't think they were gessoed. Is that how you spell it? Anyway, the paint just didn't seem to go on the canvas very well, and the cloth showed through too much. I bought a lot of the canvases on sale so tomorrow I'll gesso all of them to get them better prepared.

I almost didn't find time to paint today. I had a lot of things to do, and opted to walk the dog before painting. I was planning on doing a still life in my office/studio.  But I walked the dog in the park and the sky just inspired me.



I know this is really plain, but I am happy with it. Things just started to "click." I started at 7:15 pm or so, so I was quickly running out of daylight. So I blocked in the color first with my knife. That worked really well.  I was happy with the colors I mixed. I had bought myself a color mixing book, but didn't even glance at it. I think I am gaining a bit of confidence. For example, I used blue right from the tube to darken areas in the tree line.

The brushstrokes are so important! I didn't realize until today how important they are! After blocking in the color with the knife, I made big swirls in the paint. I love the thickness on the canvas.  For the trees, I kind of scrunched up the brush. It worked so well!  The technique is so important. I'll try to find some good articles or books on technique so I can find out more.

The other great thing about painting outdoors was that it inspired others. A mom and her two kids came and watched me and both her girls asked tons of questions. Also a couple of fellow painters stopped by to give me an encouraging word.

So, I'm really happy I'm doing this. We'll see what tomorrow brings!

I think I didn't realize how difficult it would be to find the time to do a painting a day. This one took a long time. I think it took 2 1/2 to 3 hours and I'm very, very disappointed with it.



The one good thing I discovered was that hair spray does work. It kept the pencil drawing from smudging, which was a big help!

I really hate painting flowers, so again I was working outside my comfort zone. I also hate pink!

These were some flowers my son and husband gave me for Mother's Day. They were so beautiful. They are starting to fade a little, but I wanted to capture them in the painting before they completely wilt away.  The little glob of color in the lower right is supposed to be roses tinged in pink, but I don't think you can even tell what they are! Surely the painting will start to show some improvement soon!

It's been 31 years since I've put a drop of paint on a paintbrush for anything more demanding than painting a wall.  Now that my midlife crisis is in full swing and it's all "downhill" from here, I thought I'd pick it up again .... painting that is.

I've decided to do a painting a day for 30 days.  Why 30 days?  Well, to me that's long enough to see if I want to stick with it. I tend to have a short attention span so I might not even make that, but I plan to try! I am inspired by all these people who do a painting a day for a year. Now that's a commitment!

I started on Sunday and here's the pitiful result! The only thing I like about this is the highlights on the tomatoes. The rest is crap. The stem colors are all wrong, the background is too yellow without any depth, and my pencil smudged into the oils creating a muddy mess!



I never was much of a "painter" in my youth. I dabbled in it, but could never get the colors and textures to suit me. I always preferred pencil drawings and my favorite subject was portraits.  This is out of my comfort range, and that's good. I'm going to try using lots of color.

The first thing I learned was - pencil smudges can mess up the whole painting! Next time I will try using some hair spray to see if that keeps the pencil from bleeding into the paint.

This one just took an hour to paint, and I guess that shows. It doesn't really look "finished" to me.