Archive for the ‘Painting’ Category

Advanced Painting Atelier Week 10 & 11 Split-Complimentary Color Figure Painting

Sunday, February 23rd, 2020

“Two Weeks.” I have visions of the huge and tall person in the movie Total Recall when the head explodes while going through customs. I decided to do a portrait, of course, I wanted to challenge myself because I thought I needed the practice. Finishing it in two weeks was a joke! For what it is worth, I just finished it. Remember, that always comes with the caveat of “I’m going to futz with it for a while longer until I’m satisfied…”

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Advanced Painting Atelier Weeks 8 & 9 Trompe l’Oeil

Tuesday, February 18th, 2020

This time, we had two weeks to complete a painting. Rose wanted us to do a Trompe l’Oeil, which is a painting that gives the illusion of reality, such as a painting of a window onto a lush tropical landscape that is painted directly on a wall. In this case, I painted a tree frog on a flower coming out of a hole in the wall.

I had an old canvas that I had primed with leftover dark colors, and I decided to use that. The colored tree frog on the blossom I cut out so that I could see how it would look as part of the painting. I probably took the most amount of time deciding how to shape the window, what type of border to use, and finally, how thick to make the border. After I made those decisions, I had to move the whole thing.

Here is the final. Everyone thinks he is incredibly cute!

Advanced Painting Atelier Weeks 5 – 7 Master Copy

Saturday, February 15th, 2020

The next thing we had to do for our Advanced painting class was to do a copy of a Master Painting. I chose Miranda from “The Tempest” painted by John William Waterhouse.

Miranda by John William Waterhouse

I chose this painting because I thought I needed to practice putting my subjects firmly in a background. Most of my paintings are portraits, not complete paintings with a foreground, middle ground, and a background. The first thing I did was to crop the painting because I only had three weeks to complete it.

Here’s a picture of my cropped image and the beginning of my underpainting. The finished size will be 12 x 16.

Here it is much further along.

Here’s my final. It needed a lot more work and this was what I could finish in three weeks. I learned a lot. You can absolutely learn to paint like another artist. I spent a lot of time figuring out how Waterhouse created his brush strokes, how he layered paint to get effects or certain colors. I figured out that he drew/painted the figure without the dress first, I could tell by the shape of the legs under the skirts. A lot of what he paints is very loose, and that is difficult to copy. This needed probably about another 15 hours for me to be happy with it. It turned out to be a great learning experience.

Weeks 10 – 12 Portraits Week 2

Wednesday, January 8th, 2020

July 2019 – (In the interest of transparency, I didn’t want to post this. I wasn’t happy with how my portrait was turning out! Doesn’t matter, it is part of the process and I want you to see the good with the bad!)

Working on portraits was a continuation of us working on our warm and cool lights and darks, building form and structure through the manipulation of color. This is where I am now with both of my paintings. This is a reminder that we are using only the Zorn palette to do these portraits.

First pass with the face

I like how he is turning out so far. I wanted to continue with what I had already done, but I have to finish getting paint on the canvas before I finish off any particular area, just in case I have to make major changes to the structure of the portrait. I stopped here because I had to stop and figure out how I was going to paint the beard.

Working on the above painting made me feel that this was easy! Then I started my self-portrait.

My self-portrait felt like a bit of a disaster. I lost the likeness and turned into a 16-year-old boy somewhere in the middle of this. I’m still finding my way back. Luckily I have a couple of weeks to go on this.

Advanced Painting Atelier Week 3 – 4

Friday, October 25th, 2019

Weeks 3 and 4 were all about Analogous, value-based still-life painting. We also discussed other compositional options such as the Fibonacci sequence and deciding whether the subject requires a low, mid, or high-key composition.

Here was my analogous painting. Almost all of the colors of the garlic fall in the yellow to light grey range. only the shadows on the back of the garlic fall into a different basic hue. There is an unexpected simplicity and neatness to using analogous colors. I found it easier to turn form using fewer colors much as I did using the Zorn Palette for my portraits in the previous class.

Advanced Painting Atelier – Week 1 -2

Tuesday, October 22nd, 2019

I was so excited for this class to begin, in fact, I think I was jumping up and down in my seat. The whole atelier experience has been a huge roller coaster for me by expanding my abilities and making me confront many of my own limitations. This class hasn’t been just about art for any of us. Whenever you push boundaries you’re bound to come face to face with deeply held negative beliefs about yourself and your abilities. This has been no less true for us, and it is a painful journey. As soon as you think you’re past whatever it was, something else looms up to take its place and you begin the process all over again. Painting as a metaphor for life. How interesting. No wonder I’m so passionate about it!

Much of the discussion was about the importance of having a narrative or a story intrinsic to what you’re painting; to think about why and how you are painting what you are. In addition, Rose talked to us about the fact that we will be working on a keystone painting for a series of paintings. We also talked about armatures and did a complementary cast painting.

Someday, I will do a blog post on armatures. Armatures can show you where the most harmonious places are for you to place your focus in a painting that you are constructing. In the painting above, you can see how many of the lines superimposed on the painting correspond with the lines of the painting itself. I love the lines of this painting all on its own in one color. When you look at it in full color, you can see what a masterful artist de Blaas truly was.

Suffice it to say that much of the great art that has ever been created was designed along the lines of an armature, and many books have been written on the subject. Until then, please check out this article: https://www.artistsnetwork.com/art-mediums/oil-painting/pech-harmonic-armature/

Complementary paintings occur when you use two colors across from each other on the color wheel such as red and green or violet and yellow. In this case, I ended up with a yellow-green and a violet. We were using gels in front of our spotlights to create different effects on the statues (or casts) that we were to paint. (Once I varnish the painting it will look much better!)

A Werewolf’s Prophylactic

Sunday, October 20th, 2019

For the technical types, this is called an analogous painting. All the colors used to create the garlic are lumped together in the same part of the color wheel. Because it’s October, and because I like to think I have a sense of humor, I titled this painting A Werewolf’s Prophylactic.

Pieces and parts of this class will be coming out of order, I’m afraid. I spent 2 weeks in France during the class and I’m still trying to catch up. I PROMISE I will post pictures and articles about the workshop and places I visited in Provence. I became ill while I was there and am now just beginning to feel like myself again. Sorry for being such a stranger!

2019 Holiday Painting Finished

Wednesday, October 9th, 2019

October 9, 2019

It’s been a busy week/month/season!  Jan, the maker of our lovely gift baskets that are sold through Hawaii’s Local Buzz, reminded me that she needed this year’s holiday painting prints for her Christmas with Buzz giftbasket event by Friday, September 6, 2019 at our showroom in Honolulu, HI on Mokauea St.  There’s nothing like a deadline to get me moving.

Here are some pictures of the painting in process:

The underpainting is almost complete.

I’m beginning to get a feel for what the final painting will look like.

Here is the final painting.  Quite a few people have commented that they are happy to see something other than the basic red and green for a Holiday-themed painting.  I have to agree.

16″ x 20″ Oil on Canvas

Don’t do It!

Saturday, August 31st, 2019

If you’re an artist, you probably have a large stack of paintings that don’t measure up to your standards.  The longer you paint, the more this becomes a difficult thing to deal with.  I learn something from every painting I do and my skills continue to grow accordingly.  As artists, we are the keepers of our creative destiny and get to decide what to keep and what to toss.

  • I’ve read about painters that save all of their “failed” artwork and use it to create a bonfire every few years because the paintings don’t live up the artist’s own quality guidelines and they feel that this would degrade the scope of their over-all work.
  • I know artists who never sell their work because they feel that a piece of their soul is tied up in the piece.
  • Sometimes I’m just gobsmacked when a piece of art I really didn’t like sells quickly, and the prints from that painting continue to sell, consistently.  Over time, I’ve learned that what I like and what someone else likes won’t necessarily be the same thing.  Over that, I still shake my head sometimes, and that brings me to my next point.
  • Someone somewhere is going to love that painting that I just can’t stand.  Every painting exists as part of my body of work, as part of my artistic journey.  I learn at least one thing from every painting that I create.  I’ve only destroyed one painting, and I regret it.  It wasn’t finished, and at that time, I didn’t think I could do anything with it.  I had fallen in love with a stone wall in Kainaliu and taken a picture to paint just before an earthquake took it down, and here it is.  This photo is the only proof that this painting ever existed.

And, I regret it.  This was very early painting days for me.  I put a lot of time into this painting.  I outlined each individual rock in black.  What did I learn from this painting?  So much.

  1. That I could lose myself in my work
  2. Never lose track of the big picture
  3. Paint things that move you
  4. Rocks are never entirely one color
  5. Get the entire canvas covered with paint before you make any major decisions about a painting.
  6. Don’t outline rocks in black!
  7. Things are never as bad as you think they are

Now, I could have done so much with this painting and turn it into something spectacular.  I may paint it again someday because I still love the wall.

So tell me.  If you’re an artist, what do you do with your “failed” or what you consider sub-par paintings?

Self-Portrait Complete

Saturday, August 24th, 2019

August 24, 2019

As always, the caveat is, it’s done for now.  I’m happy with it, in fact, I’m so happy with it I want it in MY ROOM.  I seem to have this belief that I can’t really paint people well, and then I’m surprised when I do.  Hell, I’m surprised when they are recognizable!  *Shakes my head…*  Sometimes the inside of my head is no place to be.

Have I been comparing my work to other artists’?  Yes.  Sigh.
Does my art continue to improve?  Yes!
Do people enjoy my work?  Yes!
Do I still love what I do?  Yes!
Then I’m on the right track!

One of my goals for this blog is to point out that becoming an artist, frankly becoming anything, isn’t a straight line.  I’ve seen so many blogs where everything is sweetness and light, and everything moves along swimmingly according to the “Master Plan.”  This certainly hasn’t been my experience, and it is how we handle these challenges that make us who we are.

Most of my paintings feel like ongoing problem-solving sessions.  The last thing I do each day is to create a punch list of what I want to accomplish the next time I sit down to work on it.  Creating this list gives me a good starting point.  This continues to happen until I near the end of the process and THAT is when I usually start to feel the energy of what a painting can become.  My teacher, Rose Adare, hits this point before she even puts a mark on the canvas.  (That’s why SHE’s the teacher!)  I’ve only managed that a few times so far, and each time resulted in a spectacular piece.

It is important to become aware of what your process is.  Everyone has rituals that they go through as they work on something.  Become aware of your self-talk and recognize what you are saying to yourself.  Find a way to check criticism, self-doubt, and judgment at the door.  All that negativity does is make the process take longer to accomplish something that was going to happen anyway.  This painting took at least twice as long as it should have because of all the negative self-talk I was dealing with.  In some ways, it is a reverse Dorian Gray.  All the angst, frustration and judgement went into this painting and came out as a sense of peace.  It was worth the journey!