A Painting A Day

I have taken quite the hiatus from painting. But I guess if you love something you will always come back to it.
I started easing back into it by starting an online course with Dennis Perrin on painting the flower portrait. The past couple of days I've painted some rather past their prime pink roses in a blue mason jar.
This is day one - "Having a Ball" will post day two next.

 I spent most of today reading Brian Keeler's book, "Dramatic Color in the Landscape." I'm so glad I did. He's a fantastic artist, and because I am on a mission to improve my landscapes, I thought some instruction was in order. I was planning on painting in the late afternoon, but I went out and took reference photos instead.

So around 10:30 at night, I started this. Not sure what size the painting is, I think a 20x20, but it's definitely larger than what I usually do. This is the result - Keeler style!

 Today I ran out late in the day for an hour or two to paint. I looked online and found a nice park nearby. It had an amazing fountain, but it was the light of the green grass in the distance and the interesting colors in the water that drew me to this spot. My technique was very messy and I had to leave very fast when a sudden thunderstorm sprung up but overall I was happy with this effort.

 I felt very in tune with my painting. My palette was so simple. I used alizarin red, cad yellow, ultramarine blue, white, permanent green light and burnt umber. I had also bought myself a round brush and experimented with the thin lines of the tree branches.

Spent the morning out at Shelby Farms in the good company of Denise Rose for the March Plein Air Memphis outing.  Wonderful location! I was pretty happy with my colors today especially the reflection of the trees in the water but not so happy with the trees. I imagine it's just going to take a while and perhaps the right kind of brushes to get the trees right, especially the big thicket of trees in the foreground. I didn't have any brushes for thin lines - must work on that! I do think I got closer to a focal point. My eyes are drawn to the trees beyond the lake, but my intention was for the thicket of trees to be the focal point - so I accidentally succeeded! Haha

We had a break in the rain for a short period today... and I took the opportunity to get out of the house, go to Shelby Farms, and paint! I have a long way to go on my plein air work. I don't know why my landscapes are so blurry. I guess I get impatient and don't focus enough on details. A painting needs a focal point, and I must find a way to put one into my plein air paintings!

 Happy to get back in the studio tonight. Painted this at Anne's tonight and am planning on painting again on Friday. It's been too long!

 


So I'm excited to now be at Market Central, and will devote some time to putting together more art for this wall!!!

I I'm having a bit of a painting problem lately where I can't seem to find a subject that holds my interest. So I started looking on you tube and found a ton of interesting faces. This one in particular stood out to me. Love her full purple lips!

It's been so long since I posted! Crazy busy lately! I have been productive and have been painting, just not posting... haha!

 I put a few hanging systems around the house. One in my office so I could get my paintings off the ground, and another in the kitchen. We have a very modern kitchen and so I painted a couple of abstracts that seemed to suit the room. ;)

This one was my fav of the two. Here's the other:
 

I plan to put a clear coat of epoxy resin on them. It will be an experiment since I've never done it before. I've ordered the stuff but it won't be here until the 18th so will have to wait a while.

Happy painting!

It's extremely liberating to just paint what I want to paint! I was out of town for three weeks, and now I need to get some things painted for The Fountain Gallery.

I've had this picture saved for a while now - and painted it today. I have a terrible summer cold and so didn't feel like doing much - so painting was relaxing.

My son didn't know who this was! I must have done a terrible job getting his likeness! In case you also don't know, it's supposed to be Jack White. I went a little crazy with his hair - the colors were just talking to me. Maybe I inhaled a bit too much paint thinner but I am really loving his hair! Haha

I have been traveling a great deal this month, and so I miss painting! Tonight I had to paint something - anything! So I found a picture online of Amy Winehouse. I can tell I'm rusty. There are a few things that may be wrong here:

1. I used bright colors
2. She looks too much like Elvira
3. I made her prettier (subconsciously I think)

I'm not saying I don't like it - I like the way she looks right through you. I also think it's good to change things up a bit and experiment, so I will look at it a few days and then decide if I really like it or not. I will also cut myself a little slack because I haven't been able to paint for about 2 1/2 weeks! ;)

One of the hardest things for me (besides choosing a subject to paint) is to know when it's finished. I started to correct my mistakes - but after a few little brushstrokes decided that I like it just the way it is.

If I were to do more I feel like I would overwork it - and perhaps ruin it. So here's my final portrait of Mark Landis.

By the way, they posted the portrait on the Art & Craft Facebook page. You can see it here:
https://www.facebook.com/artandcraftfilm?fref=nf

I watched the best documentary I've seen in a while the other night.

It's called "Art & Craft" and it explores the forgeries of Laurel, Mississippi native Mark Landis.

Landis' crime was (in my opinion) fairly harmless because he didn't profit from any of his forgeries - he was being a philanthropist.

The thing is... the guy is really a great artist.

Anyway, I did this really - really quickly tonight. Just basically throwing the paint on the canvas. I plan to refine it more - I see about a hundred things I need to change. But I wanted to post a before, so I can gauge the "after"!

By the way, I'm planning to send this to him.

 Always love painting from life group on Wednesday nights! This was our model. She is getting married in two weeks so I don't know how she fit this in!

 I had a difficult time painting her but I was really proud of the pillow! Haha!

We had another drop dead gorgeous model in painting from life group tonight. Anne is on a roll! She had beautiful features - full lips, long neck, bright blue eyes.

I think I am bringing too large of a canvas to the group because I tend to paint a little larger than life, which I really don't like.

All in all, I was semi-happy with this one. Half way through I messed up all the edges like I've seen Sue Foell do so often. It seemed to help because my painting was too controlled up until then.

There just isn’t enough time to do everything I would like in 2 and a half hours!

I don't do enough pencil sketches these days. I usually just jump right into painting without doing any drawing. I did this quickly today, and enjoyed working with a different medium so much! It's a study for a larger painting I plan to do.

I'm not sure if you can tell but I did a little more on my Carnival of Venice piece. My husband said it looked like a Geisha girl in Venice - my son said the mask was not evident. Everyone's an art critic around here!

So I worked on it a little more. I'm not sure that it's any better and I may work on it more.

Last night went to live painting group but I was really not having a good night and that was a real shame because we had a beautiful model. I had been up since 5:30 and I think I was just tired.

Here's my unfinished piece that I am very unhappy with!
I'm breaking a new rule here. I was listening to a podcast on savvypainter.com with Carole Marine and she talked about how important it is not to post your bad paintings. I'm not sure if that really applies to me yet because I'm not selling my work - still very much in the learning stages, but it sure sounded like a good idea.

I am such a weirdo! Haha! I wanted to do a quick painting tonight and was just so fascinated with the Carnival of Venice pictures I found online that I did this.

 It's surprisingly hard to do a blue sky, and blue water, and blue boats. They were all different shades of blue. The sky graduated from an ultramarine to a cerulean to an almost yellowish light blue. As you can see ,I didn't spend a lot of time on them.

 But the thing that just absolutely fascinated me was the figure in that mask! I don't know if you can actually tell it's supposed to be a mask.... but that was what I was shooting for!

I'm almost ashamed to post this picture - it's so messy! Yesterday to prevent my hand from cramping, I approached my color chart slowly - only doing a couple of rows at a time and then taking a break. That helped and my hand and wrist survive!

My goal was to find the right flesh tones for an African American girl that I plan to paint. So the color I started with was Burnt Umber.

Here's what I learned:

First I didn't mention in the last post that doing these exercises uses up a LOT of white! I'm using Titanium White.
Another thing I didn't mention is that I'm using the paints I use all the time - in my case they are Rembrandt brand, and it's important to use them because other brands have different tinting strengths and so my charts wouldn't be accurate if I used a different brand of paint on them.

The colors I used on this chart were: Naples Yellow, Cad Yellow Light, Yellow Ochre, Cad Red Light, Alizarin, Terra Rosa, Burnt Sienna, Raw Sienna, Viridian, and Cobalt.

While I was looking for really dark flesh tones, surprisingly I found that Burnt Umber can make some fantastic caucasian skin tones too. Especially the lighter ranges of Burnt Umber mixed with Naples, mixed with Yellow Ochre, and mixed with Burnt Sienna. Even just plain ole burnt umber mixed with white makes a nice neutral caucasian skin tone.

I found that Viridian must have more tinting strength than Burnt Umber because it overpowers it and the mixture turns out green. On the other hand Burnt Sienna seemingly has weak tinting strength.

Burnt Umber mixed with Cobalt gives you a fantastic very slightly greenish gray. I don't know about you, but for me it's very hard to find an easy way to mix a lively gray, so that's very useful to me.

 Here's a picture of the girl I'm planning to paint.



From my exercise, I think the color that most closely represents her mid range skin tone is the two darkest versions of burnt umber mixed with raw sienna. The highlights seem to almost go a warm yellowish orange, and so for the highlights I will try the third color down of burnt umber mixed with orange. Then for the darkest dark on the right side of her face, it looks almost dark purple to me ... so there I will use the darkest value of burnt umber mixed with alizarin.

It will be exciting to see how the painting turns out. I've never done a color study "before" painting a portrait, so wish me luck.

I was needing some serious redemption after my latest "attempts" at painting, so tonight I thought I would try to paint something nice at our life painting group. My friend's daughter was the model, so I guess I just stacked up too much pressure to perform on myself!

 The group was packed so I ended up in the corner, so didn't have a good angle. I think I captured her likeness somewhat, but I also think I was a bit tired of painting after painting the two roses earlier. So I'm hoping she will model for the group again, because I would like another shot at painting that beautiful red hair!