Last Class

Even though I didn't get any sleep last night, I decided to go to my art class. It was the last class with the model posing. After ever single class with the model, I was amazed at how different it is painting with her instead of my reference photos. I know that I've been taking poor photographs but you never really realize just how bad they are until you're back in front of the live person.

There are still quite a few subtle problems. There's something wrong with the eye that I can't quite make out. There's also some problems in the mouth area. Unfortunately I don't really know what's wrong all I know is that something is wrong. I'm very happy with the painting from the neck down though. The dress is wonderful. The shadowed flesh of the back is also wonderful. I hadn't put the small shadow that fell between the shoulder blades before and she was starting to look humpbacked. The addition of that small shadow has made her appear slimmer. I'm also very happy with the hair as well. My teacher was pointing out that something was wrong with the ear's tone but, actually, I don't really see anything really wrong with it. I don't want it to really stand out.

My teacher was pointing out my lack of color in my mid-tones and my over usage of brown in the shadows without enriching the flesh tone that was making the painting appear not really dull and lifeless. I spent a lot of time correcting the flesh tones and enriching the shadows. The eye was giving me a great deal of trouble. She almost looks startled now.

I'm not sure whether or not I'll continue with it or not. I guess it depends on how well I can get the reference photos to come up on my laptop. One of the websites I've been reading mentioned that they always paint from a monitor when they use digital reference photos. And the explanation was very valid. Printing it is sort of like making a copy of a copy. You're becoming even one more degree removed from the best subject which is life. So instead of printing my reference photos I'm going to start dragging my laptop into my studio. If the photos work out well, I may continue with the minor corrections.

Tomorrow, I also plan on cleaning and organizing my studio. Again, a website I read said that a cluttered and chaotic space is not conducive to creativity. And of course, it seems very obvious, and it's very correct. I really want to organize it better and get rid of some things that don't belong there. I also have a decent sized collection of bottles and other still life subjects. They need to be put into one spot together. Right now they're all over the place. I also think I need to rearrange the studio so that I can more easily step back from my easel and so that I'm standing far enough away from my subject so that the lighting for my canvas and palette isn't interfering the subject's lighting. It's a very small room though so I'm not sure how much wiggle room I'll have.

Safe and sound

I didn't really sleep Saturday night. The rain and the wind was so loud I have no idea how my husband slept through it. It sound like a herd of elephants were river dancing on our roof. As if that wasn't bad enough there was this pervasive constant roar of the wind. I fell asleep around 5:30 when the rain finally died down enough to make it quieter. In my latest insomnia news, I have a feeling that what doctors have been telling me about caffeine is right. Ever since I stopped working my intake of caffeine has decreased a great deal. And on the weeks when I'm consuming literally zero coffee, I'm actually sleeping better. Well, not really sleeping better. I'm waking up better. I wake up far less groggy. I'm very not happy about that. I do love my coffee in the morning. Actually I just love coffee.

One of our neighbor's trees fell down about 3 houses down the street. That seemed to be the only major damage I could see from the yard. I'm sure other trees came down but Chris and I didn't really drive around looking at the damage. Most of what was littered everywhere was leaves and small branches. All in all, not bad.

The only real inconvenience was the loss of electricity. It went out around 5AM and didn't come back on until 10PM. Again, not really all that bad. There are quite a few people, like Chris's friend Steve, who don't have power and the power company doesn't expect them to have it back on until Friday or later.

I still haven't done any painting. I am in the middle of creating some shadow boxes so I can control the light on my still lives better. Basically I've spray painted the inside of some cardboard boxes black. I'm really trying to minimize the amount of light bouncing around. I need to do more web searching to see if there are some other ideas I can use.

Down with the Oak

In preparation for Hurricane Irene, Chris and I decided to bite the bullet and take down a diseased tree in our yard sooner than we anticipated. We have no idea where we're going to get the money for it but we figured it was better than leaving the tree up and having it come down on our kitchen or our neighbor's house. Although it coming down on our house probably wouldn't be so bad, I'd get a new kitchen :)

They were here at 6AM to take down most of the branches and that's 2 hours earlier than they usually start. They left a good portion of the trunk in place and then they had to go off to do another job. I really do appreciate the fitting this job in the way they are. I feel bad for the noise so early in the morning but, well, it's got to come down now. The left pretty early but they're back now to remove the rest of the trunk and grind down the stump.

I set up a lovely still life today with a red onion and a coffee glass. I don't think I'm going to paint it though because I love the composition and I really wanted it to be on a larger board and right now all I have are 5x5's. I'd really rather it be on a 6x6 at the smallest or even better an 8x8 but I just don't have those on hand right now. I have cheap crappy canvas boards but I want this one to go onto something better.

After many mistakes...

PRO
1) The color of the mug is spot on. I'd like to say it took a deep understanding of color to nail it just right but it's just caput mortem straight out of the tube. I experimented with some different color mixtures but nothing was coming close and when I mixed the caput mortem with some quinacridone red mixed in.
2) I love the way the rim came out.
3) The background color was a good choice. I like taking colors straight out of the tube and using them in the background because it isn't often that you get to use a color straight out of the tube and I do love naples yellow.

CON
1) It's crooked. I'm not sure how it's crooked or what's making it seem crooked but it is.
2) The highlights on the handle were very difficult and they still don't seem right to me but I'm not sure why.

LESSON
Changing the value of a color doesn't always mean adding white. I started painting the mug's mid-tones with the caput mortem mixed in with white and it looked so wrong. I mean like really wrong. That was when I discovered that mixing the quinacridone red made the value of the caput mortem lighter. The color of this mug was extremely difficult. The darkness of the color just made it very difficult to see the values in the mug. I also had a lot of difficulty reproducing the lighter mid-tones. I've also realized that I need to control the light in my studio better. I'm not sure how I'm going to be able to do that but I have to do it. It's making things way harder for me than they need to be. All of the bouncing light is really making some things way more confusing than they need to be.

Mug #2

Technically this is mug painting #3. But I have fallen in love with the gessoboards to the point that I am going to redo the first mug in the series on a board; hence the renumbering.

I'm not going to go through my normal pro/con/lesson process right now as this is still a work in progress and may have to span a few days. I'm not going for super realistic here. I do want to keep it very very loose but the emblem in the middle is causing me serious headaches. My initial rough draw in was very very wrong. Even though I went over that initial sketch, it seems to still be in my head. And despite the fact that it's NOT on the board, I'm still painting like it is. So I think I may need to step away from this for a few minutes and clear my mind... after I go back into my studio and wipe off the emblem which is so crooked it's hurting my brain.

EDIT: Well after wiping out and redoing the emblem four times, I finally gave up. I am going to include the emblem but I'm going to wait for the painting to dry and redo it again. The emblem doesn't have a lot of contrast with the board so I'm having to paint in the mug color to really check to see if it's right which is a lot of work to keep removing and redoing. Plus I'm fighting against the wet edges as well. Letting it dry will remove some of the other challenges and will let me focus on getting the damned thing drawn in properly. I managed to get in the darks, the midtones and the lights painted onto the mug. There is a lot of reflective light and other reflections going on.

EDIT 2: Fiddled with the painting again. Ended up wiping out the handle... twice.

Next to last class

I knew the great night of sleep I got on Sunday night would come back to haunt me. I didn't fall asleep last night until around 6:30 in the morning. I did manage to drag myself out of bed around 9 and get to my art class. I thought it was going to be the last class and since I missed last week's class, I was worried about time constraints. Turns out that the model was out also and they had someone else so I actually didn't miss anything. And it turns out we're going to get one more week to make up for it which works out even better.

I tried to work on the painting from a picture I had taken with my phone but the camera on my phone isn't all that great so the picture was useless for any fine detail. It was good enough to block in some of the values, get a decent approximation of the skin tone and correct some drawing errors. I should have taken a picture of that stage but I completely forgot.

It all worked out so much better when I got back in front of the live model. The studio had the air turned up a little too high and she was cold so this time she put her sweater around her arms and it looked really nice so I decided to include it. I'm also happy that this painting is starting to move away from looking like a police sketch drawing and beginning to look like an actual individual. In the past my portraits tend to get stuck in that generic sort of stage. Yes they look like a human. Yes you can tell if it's male or female. But it looks like a person you saw out of the corner of your eye. It has no characteristics of the individual. I really need to get my teacher's advice on how to get farther away from that police sketch stage.

There is still a lot of fine tuning to do. I hope the pictures I got come out okay because this is not something that I'll be satisfied with after only one more session with the model. There are just too many little things all over the place that need to be adjusted.

Mug Series #2

Despite the leg pain, I decided to go ahead with my painting today. I didn't really know how standing would work but, surprisingly, I was able to handle it. I don't even really seem to be experiencing any fallout from it either. I think it may have helped my back pain a little.

Chris bought me this mug a few years ago. Back when we lived in Ithaca, there was this amazing shop downtown that sold all sorts of handmade unique items. Some of it was created by local artisans and craftspeople but some of it was imported from all across the country. These mugs with little animals on the bottom were some of my favorite items. I've only drank out of this thing once. And I cannot tell you how much it made me smile when I got 3/4 of the way down and I had frog eyes staring back up at me. I'd use it more often but the figure on the bottom means you can't stir anything in the mug.

PRO
1) I love the way the little frog in the middle came out. I obviously wanted it to be the focal point and I managed to paint it as the focal point.
2) This is the best drawn painting I've done so far.
3) I was able to stop and not overwork it. I really want to loosen up my painting style and I think I managed to do that here.

CON
1) The dots are on the mug and I was hesitant to include them in the painting. Without them, the mug looked very stark to me and uninteresting. But I'm not sure I like the mug with them either.
2) No matter how much I seemed to fiddle with it, the shadow under the mug's handle never really looked right. And it still looks a little off to me and I'm not really sure why.
3) The last mug painting was a white mug also and it came out more looking like a cream colored mug. And while I think you can definitely tell that this is a white mug, I still found the white challenging. Creating the proper value in the lighter areas was difficult. I was always thinking they were too light but when I darkened them, the mug started to look like it was grey. But when I left the values light, highlights didn't contrast well.

LESSON
I'm going to be standing up from now on. It doesn't seem to hurt my legs and I actually stepped back from this painting a good half a dozen times. I will probably have to get something taller to put my palette on though. The snack tray I have it on now is too low.
This was my first time using an Ampersand Gessoboard. I had read about other people using them on various blogs and I really wanted to give them a try. I love the smooth surface. I feel like the brush strokes are really standing out rather than being obscured by the weave of the canvas, though that could be the produce of my using really cheap canvas boards. The smooth surface does have its drawbacks. I am one of those painters who will brush over an area again and again. I know you're not supposed to because you'll end up removing paint. This surface is not forgiving of that. It is extremely easy to remove paint from the surface with too much brushwork especially if you are stingy with paint. Both of those are things I need to work on and since this surface doesn't give me a way around it, I think I'll continue to use them.