30/30 Challenge - Angel - Day 29

During this 30/30 Challenge my own subject matter has been all over the place from indoor studio still life, portrait from life, and landscape. Included rendering same subject matter from photos to reinforce how differently the colors are represented. Certainly not a body of work for gallery representation, but what a pleasure to just play and experiment. I've learned that I love to paint anything and everything.

After the end of the challenge, I'll narrow it down and select a few things to concentrate on for awhile. Since so many questions have come up while working on certain subjects, I'll be quite busy with my journal too.

Questions that you might also be asking are:
Why do I paint? Why this subject?
Is it a big idea or just something to practice craft?
What's my real motive - self fulfillment, therapy, money, etc.?
Is the idea related to art concepts or just a copy of something sitting on a shelf?
Does each start have an intention? What is a successful painting?
Is this one better or worse than the last one? Am I making any progress at all????
Many more...

Day 29

My daughter's kitty, named Angel, went to kitty heaven recently, and I thought I'd do a little study for her. Finding a good photo wasn't easy, but notice the double heart shape on her chest fur-so cute!?

One of my personal goals was to start something new everyday, have to say, I came close. Only a couple were longer projects, but there was a reason behind the shift in the plan - mostly because I was trying slightly different things in one painting each day.

Since I'll be headed to a meeting, this will be one of several starts to be finish after the challenge this month.

30/30 Challenge - Ballerina - Day 28

My favorite models are dancers. They have a sense of movement and body control that most other folks are missing. There is such a beautiful sensibility that is so expressive. Whether they are sitting down, or expressing in dance.

If you love to draw and paint the figure, I hope you have the opportunity to study from life. It is the absolute best way to learn how, and you can see and learn how others approach the subject.

Day 28

This little study was from a photo lying around my studio and thought it might be worth doing a loose value study using the color of linen as the mid tone and adding the highlights and dark tones to describe the dancer.

Time to begin Days 29 and 30.

30/30 Challenge - PK Landscape -Day 27

I wanted to get back to working with the palette knife again on a landscape. It produces a sculptural quality that seems to fit with landscape images. It's messy and textural, and if you love oil paint, it just satisfies the senses and my right brain loves it.

In addition to knowing it would take a lot of good practice to get this technique working successfully, just going for it gets rid of the tendencies of being too fussy. The expectation is different.

Day 27

30/30 Challenge - Roses - Day 25-26

I've had these silk variegated roses sitting in a pale for at least 3 years, and everytime I think about painting them I resist. It looked like an overwhelming task and I'd tell myself to wait until my skills were better. Well I don't know that my skills are better, but I decided to take them on.

I think I got some courage from something I read about how to approach mixing a desired color. I was taught to 'paint what I see', but I always saw what I couldn't paint because of the limits of paint. Nothing as bright as the sun, and nothing as dark and a black hole...
I never really learned how to actually mix a desired color and wasted lots of paint and failed continuously trying to achieve what I was looking for...

Well recently I read that when looking at a setup, identify the color (keep it simple), red, blue, yellow, etc. Don't try to say orangey grayish purple or some other impossible hue that's clearly not on your palette! So after identifying the hue, then mix for the value of that simple color, and also adjust for temperature... and finally adjust for chroma.

Day 25

I wanted to take time to give this new approach some time since I'm usually just guessing what to do with the mixes. I laid in transparent color to start and identified the light and dark areas of the roses.

This took a bit of time, but I let it sit overnight before making more difficult decisions about color. I did some practice on my palette to be sure I could remember the sequence of mixing.

I was putting in a warm background for contrast to the cooler color in the setup. It's all relative... right?


Day 26

The exercise was not as difficult as I imagined. Could maybe adjust a few more things, but my goal was to try the mixing approach.

I have some practice to do, but this effort using the above approach resulted in colors that I was fairly happy with... after all these are variegated silk roses unlikely to ever be seen in nature!

I will attempt again soon and give a little more attention to the composition and light source for stronger shadow pattern.

Thanks for visiting...

30/30 Challenge - Madalyn Start - Day 24

I've been wanting to paint a photo of my granddaughter for literally years! I misplaced it about 5 years ago, and searched for it countless times with no success... 'sigh'

Finally, while just goofing around in a stack of colored paper, and 'what not', it popped up! I was so pleased - in fact, thrilled that it hadn't been destroyed?

Now it's duplicated and stored in a safe place... and I can start the painting process. She's older now, but I just love this pose of her and can hardly wait to finish it to hang on the wall.

Day 24 

Worked out a few sketches for value patterns, and just had to lay down a oil sketch before doing anything else. I will do a few more studies, but wanted to share this with you now.

Doesn't she look like an 'adorable baby doll'?

Thanks for visiting...

30/30 Challenge - Value Study - Day 23

I believe a big part of learning to paint is also doing activities that help solve potential problems that we encounter when a master/mentor isn't available to give us feedback. It's what we call 'study', but we of course we must be able to recognize what we need to improve without just being critical of our work. Since I know I still have the challenge of nailing values in color when doing a mix, I chose to work on that today...

Day 23

This setup is pretty quirky, not meant to be beautiful in any way, and I almost never select items with hard edges because I don't have a real steady hand or good tool for defining them except for a palette knife. However, since I have these blocks left over from my granddaughter's stash, I just set them up and lit them from the side. The little squash is almost ready for the trash, and thought it would put strong contrast into the painting.

I chose a setup with five distinct colors of different values. Didn't use black and white for the paint, rather UMB and TOR and white to change values. This way I still have some sense of color as I mix a value range. Then for your convenience, I painted swatches of the local color/shadow color of each item in the setup.

This is the result... can you tell what color is what value?

30/30 Challenge - Huge Solitary Lemon - Day 21-22

Well, it's now day 21 and I'm still on track. Have to say that I've been feeling a little bit of resistance mostly because I want to put more time planning before starting a painting, but if I've established a new habit of painting everyday, then I won't feel defeated no matter what the outcome. The daily posting to the hosting blog is probably the most challenging to accomplish in this exercise because of the time limit on when posting is closed for any given day.

Day 21

Why this lemon?? Well, I've seen a lot of lemons, but none the size of a large orange!! This has to be the largest lemon ever - it's skin wasn't smooth and yet it wasn't very thick either. Just seems so unusual, but then I don't get to see them growing in their natural environment. Never the less, it wanted to be painted, right?

Once again with reflected light. The light source is again at the top, like high noon. I'm trying to keep most things consistent to see if I notice the color nuances more easily with fewer variables except for the main object.


Day 22

Decided to paint this record breaking lemon again with another light angle so I didn't get the halo effect on the table top-and a few minor changes in the setup. Lemon turned, changed the color of the table top, and added some greenery.

Still working on reflected lighting which is a huge challenge for me, but lots of fun trying. Also limited the time to complete so I don't think so much about the decisions.

Tip: This may seem obvious to you, but it wasn't readily apparent to me. The metaphor that comes to mind here is I 'couldn't see the forest for the trees.' Even when I squint, I've found that I'm noticing too much information when I begin a painting so I've decided to work with a setup from a greater distance so I don't see so much detail. If I need to see some more specific detail, I'll just walk up closer to see it. I think this will certainly help me see larger shapes first...