last day of painting class / term today. it wasn’t my best day painting. when I tried to add shadows and to make the objects more 3D, I wrecked the tone so spent most of the day trying to get this back – lots of squinting and standing back to look at it from across the room. eventually I had to wipe the paint off and start again. I’m not happy with the shapes either (especially the teapot) – I lost them on the first day when painting the flat tones with the large brush, and couldn’t get them back in time. oh well. my teacher said he was happy with the tones. so I need to practice drawing objects (and drawing in general). it’s still drying in the shelves at art school so I need to go collect it this week once it’s dried.
05/12/2015:
today I started my second tonal still life painting — oil painting #4. after working on the contour, my teacher wanted me to just paint flat shapes in the four tones, no details. if you squint it’s easier to see the tones. when I did this, the bottle (which is dark green) looked almost black. I originally painted it with straight raw umber as I thought it would be the darkest tone, but it’s a lighter brown. when I was fixing the tone of the background fabric, a mix of the white + raw umber gave me a really dark brown-black shade which was perfect, so I overpainted it with this. I had the teapot too dark originally also, so had to lighten it a smidge. I lost some of the contour shape when painting the flat colours, so will have to adjust this next week. but my teacher was happy with the tones so that’s the main thing.
next week is the last class for this term so I hope to finish it and have it dry enough to bring home.
some paintings from Carla Sonheim’s flower crazy 5 week class. I’m learning a few new techniques for watercolour, gesso, and mixing colours and textures to create “imaginary flowers”.
layers of watercolour lines and pens/markers with some pencil shading
painted imaginary flowers in watercolour with gesso painted over the top
watercolour blobs in 3 colours, with gesso masking off interesting shapes to create flowers. scratched lines and textures in the gesso before it dried
plus one of the “2014 — year of the fairy tale” exercises — this is my “princess and the pea” mixed media painting. it’s gouche, gesso and pens. the paints are applied using a credit card instead of a brush. it leads to a “free-er” line. I liked the gouche — they dried very quickly
I’ve started the “sketchbook now” class to practice more drawing techniques for my sketchbook, and in lesson one we need to do some tests of our materials. I’ve used some from previous class exercises, which I hadn’t added to the blog, so adding them here as part of this class’ notes. the watercolour washes tests were exercises from Fred Lisaius’ class “Fall Watercolours”. I’ll add more tests here as I work on them
these are the watercolours I’m using most often — a mixture of Schmincke and Winsor & Newton pans:
testing different lines & pen textures:
watercolour bead washes:
watercolour wet in wet wash:
watercolour double wet / flood wash with salt added for texture. I used table salt and since the paper was thick, it didn’t work too well
more watercolour washes, on thicker, handmade paper
watercolour pencils (texta zoom brand) and pens to see what they looked like with added water:
explorations in textiles, mark making, drawing, sketchbooks, art school & uni art work
