See you in Portland this weekend!

I will be at the
Da Vinci Art Fair
with cards, prints and painted terra cotta cups. Great Gifts!

Sales support local artists
and the arts programs at da Vinci Arts Middle School.

December 4th & 5th
Saturday 10-6 pm & Sunday 10-4 pm

2508 NE Everett Street, Portland Oregon map

Brothers 3

My wonderous nine month old grandson arrived here on the 26th to stay while his parents are in Japan. Skype is a wonderous thing even when the connection falters. We will return him to Portland on the 3rd, have a nice reunion and come home on the sixth.  THEN I will paint again.

Until then here's what happened on the painting of the brothers.

I started defining the background with some tree branches and leaves, lightening the area behind the taller boy's head and breaking up the big dark space on the left. I also lightened the tops of the rocks to keep that lighter diagonal moving.

Here's the squinty eye take on how the values are working out according to my plan which is still visisble in the background.

Had to spend some time on these beautiful faces before I ended this session. I think I've caught the younger- now if I can just keep my brushes OFF, except for his hair which needs work.

At the end of this session I realize than in my desire for a light diagonal I have made the water look like milk.  Ah, three steps foward, two steps back.  And so it goes.

The next day I take the dog and return to Beaver Creek, where this idylic scene began. The water does not look like milk; it is a mirror.

With my new reference photos I rework the water. It's better and I look forward to retrning to this painting.

Happy Halloween!I'll be back in November.

Brothers 2

One of the things that happens when I take photos of a painting's progress is that I don't always have the  camera on the same setting. If I use the auto I get much cooler colors than if I shoot with manual settings. So don't think the color is swinging wildy, it's probably just the camera. 
Here's where we left off:

Wow! There's the color shift I was talking about!  Here I'm thinking about the size and angle of the bow and arrow and not liking that they are parallel to each other.

Let's indulge in slightly smaller brushes ,change the angle of the arrow and work on the boys...

The skin tones are a challange. I have a tendancy to add too much white and I'm thinking at the end I will probably add an orche glaze to warm things up a bit.  It IS summer, after all.  the faces are starting resemble

their owners.

 A little more definition in the rocks. I've put in about 4hrs...we'll call it good for the day.

Brothers

The Roses were a good warm-up; this week I'm on to the painting for my niece. I'm doing this from a photo which I will not post in it's original form because it was taken about 8 yrs ago and one of my grand-nephews is not so happy about anyone seeing this image of him naked!!! ( He's threatened to sue if I do the painting, but I'll take my chances.)
 The first thing was to change the color photo to a high contrast black and white to get better see the big shapes.

Next I added on to the left side to make a better composition. A general guide is to have the center of interest be at the junction of the painting's thirds. I've drawn lines here so you can see that the lines cross near the boy's faces. In the original shot their faces were close to center. The re-do has more drama, don't you think?  The red spots were an idea about having them gathering fruit or something, but I abandoned that idea for metaphor about brothers which came a little later.

This brought me to the point of a rough in on the 24" x 24" canvas. I projected the image and made a quick charcoal sketch of the main elements.  (There is lots of controversy about weather it is "OK" to do this, which I don't care much about. I think the main issue is that people use images that are taken by others, project them as is and then put paint on it. The composition, color and subject were all done by someone else so the result is hardly "original". Not the case here so I am guilt-free.)
I sprayed the sketch with fixative and let it dry overnight, then I did a quick color wash with ochre acrylic.

Then...I chickened out and painted the October Roses.

A few days later I came back to the Brothers and did another color blocking with acrylic. I chose the violets and blues because I thought they would give and interesting under tone to the greens, and yellows and pinks I planned to use. By this time I was hot to get going and the thin acrylic allowed me to do that because it dries so fast. If I'd used oils, even thinned with turp, I would have had to wait a day rather than an hour. Oils can go over thin acrylic, but acrylic over oils will peel off.

Here's how it went:

I'm including my reference photos in these shots so you can see if I'm sticking to the plan as I go along. Having them on the wall behind the easel helped me just look at the the shapes and values, not any detail.



These are the brushes I'm using. No need for any details at this stage! The sketchy marks are the bow the smaller boy will carry and the arrow his brother is holding. The angle of the arrow should stop the eye from following the arm right our of the picture.
Do you get the metaphor?

A check with this black and white at the end of the day shows me I'm losing the strong light diagonal, from bottom left to upper right. I'll have to keep an eye on that as I proceed.

October Roses

Look who is back in her studio! It was a short summer and a long fall, but enough is enough. It's time to start painting again! 

I did the rough-out of a painting I've been promising my niece for about a decade but felt I needed a warm up before I could dive into it.  A couple of days ago Dennis shooed one of our resident triplet fawns away from my favorite rose bush so I decided to cut some for us to enjoy before they disappeared. They were on our breakfast nook table in a blue glass vase and since all I wanted to do was stare at them and breathe their sweetness I decided to paint them. This was bold decision. Flowers, especially roses, are hard to paint (for me anyway) and they only behave for a day at most before they droop and fade and you can't figure out why that shape you thought you'd nailed doesn't seem to be there anymore. BUT they were SO pretty...and so I began. Here's how it went:

Keep it loose...find the big shapes...define the color scheme ( complimentary: yellow-violet). Was SO happy to be painting again! Lunch, siesta, and back again...

 The black and white photos help me monitor the values.

starting to get droopy!

Got to stop. I'm SO tired. I can see that the flowers don't have enough change in value to give them any volume but I have no more energy and the light is totally different. I set the vase outside hoping at least the bud, which is my focal point, will still be recognizable in the morning.

Next day. I painted for a while before I remembered to take any photos. Got some darker tones into the blossoms and juiced up the background, defined some of the leaf structures.

 

I feel pretty good about this knowing that in a couple of weeks, when it is dry, I'll take another look and probably do some glazing and brighten some highlights.  I'll post again when it's finished. In the meantime there's that other one I started... and I feel braver now.

Our Home and Studio- what's not working here?

This is the point in almost every painting where I could just turn it to the wall and walk away. The initial buzz is over and I start to struggle. Something is not right with the buildings in this one but I can't figure out what. Terry Miura, who taught a painting workshop here a couple of years ago said, in effect, " Figure out what's wrong and then fix it, don't just muck around hoping it will get better." So I work on the  hills and sky a bit more and leave the buildings until the answer comes.

Every time I stop painting I scape up all the mixed colors and keep the blend in a pile on the pallet. It's a mix of all the colors I am using and so makes a great neutral that will naturally harmonize with the current color scheme.

I do like this glass pallet! It actually makes me want to clean up at the end of each session.

The next day I avoid the buildings further by starting to do something with the trees. I put in the white birches and suddenly see that the house porch looks like it is floating above the studio building and the ground where the trees grow. What the ????  It was tempting to think the problem would just get covered up by the trees, but with bare branches I couldn't count on that. Nor would I have heeded Terry's advice!

It took Dennis' fresh look to see the problem is simple perspective: See how C and D would converge if extended to the left before E or A met them? and how line A is straight across and above the roof line of the building on the left?

 With proper perspective all the lines would meet at a "vanishing point" on the horizon, and you can see below how I corrected the roof lines so they work. The roof of the house porch now meets the roof line of the studio so it no longer "floats". If I had paid better attention to the grid I made when I started, I would not have had this problem. Once again, good planning always pays off.

With this issue resolved I could go ahead with the painting:

...and at this point I will leave this painting for now (after I put a sold sign on it) and return to it with a fresh eye after I attend to some other projects. I'll let you know when it's "finished".

Hope my learning process aids your understanding!  Thanks for your comments and suggestions.

Our Home and Studio- the color

The next day I was excited to get some color on this canvas, but before we get started I want to show you my new glass pallet and color layout.

 

The glass is an old bathroom shelf which is nice because it's sturdy and has rounded edges. I backed it with kraft paper which is a good neutral background that allows me to see the colors I'm mixing without the distraction of old paint stains on the pallet. Because this is a new arrangement for me I wrote the color positions and made a spot of each color on the paper, then I just taped the paper to the glass around the edges. This limited  color set up was suggested in a painting video and I thought I would try it. Clock-wise: Aliz Crimson, Cad Red Light, Cad Red Deep, Cad Orange, Cad Yellow Deep, Cad Yellow Light,(Rembrandt brand recommended for all the Cads. Do you agree?) Titanium White, Veridian, Cer. Blue, Ultramarine,  Brnt Umber, Ivory Black at the bottom. The blob in the middle is Gamblin Gel Medium with some Gamblin Liquid Alkyd mixed in to help things dry a little faster.

Another good tip from the video: keep an old phone book handy to wipe off you palette knife. VERY efficient and saves on rags.

 

I liked the mood of the afternoon winter light...

 

...used a big brush and tried to keep the strokes loose and varied, moving from the shoulder instead of the wrist.

 

I did not like the hills in the backgound. Too green? Too dark?

I 
 

Squinting at it upside down let me see the hard line between the sky and the hills...

 

...so I softened it and bingo! the buildings popped into focus. More tomorrow.

Our Home and Studio- the set up

As you know, we are selling our place and making that happen is taking up a lot of my time and energy. Draining might be the word. I was starting to feel like I work in an office, on a computer all day. The remedy was obvious: get back in the studio! If I'm hung up on our property then paint it. Last year I painted a watercolor of my daughter's house, with a SOLD sign outside, when she had to sell it .

I figured the Universe could use a clearer picture of what needed to happen and she got offers within a week!  Maybe I'll put a SOLD sign in this new painting of our place as well. With oils I can always paint it out later if I want to.

Several days have past and I am glad to report that I feel much better, and since you all seem to really like seeing how I muck my way through a painting step by step I'll take you through this one as well. It's not finished but if I end up chucking it at the end, you'll be right there to see it happen.

I thought about doing this plein air, but it's too cold. I took two reference photos and taped them together to get the whole scene. Then I did a grid on the photos and the canvas to layout my sketch. I numbered the grid lines to make it less confusing.

 

Since I was really itching to dive into the color and enjoy getting something started it took some discipline to do a small value study first.

 

I should have done this first but in this case I don't think it would have mattered much.

Next I played around with some color options. I really wanted to do something bold to play up the light on the buildings and not stick to the "real" colors of the scene.

 

I used some pan watercolors and tried this scheme. I didn't really think about it too much but it turned out to be a split complimentary.

 

How about a split complimentary with purple? 

I have to admit I was looking for something a bit more natural (there's that conservative part of me-again), but our buildings are NOT yellow and orange- they are earthen plaster brown.  My color scheme in the corner is a triadic but the study has bright yellow in it... so much for color theory, eh?

 

A black and white of that color study reveals it to be pretty blah in value range so when I do the painting I better get that worked out first.

 

OK, I had my value and color studies and started on the canvas by blocking out the values making the lights lighter and darks darker than the study.

Let's check out the composition by turning it upside down. I fuzzed it a bit, but squinting will reduce it further to just lights and darks.  The sky becomes a lake with trees reflected in it, the driveway a blustery sky, but the important thing is the lights and darks are not equal which keeps it pretty interesting. It's good enough for my purpose right now, which is to make a painting so I'll want to make another better one.

 

We'll see how the color work progressed in the next post.