My Barn Burned Down

Archive for September, 2009

lost puppy samantha

I cannot believe how fast the week has gone. Three paintings I thought were near completion and I think I’m overworking them. Keep messing them up. So I thought I’d take a break and get out my sketching tools as I keep reading on the blogs etc. how the foundations of drawing are so crucial. I also see that I need more experience in seeing how the value changes turn the form; they are so subtle it really takes focus and concentration. I remember when I took Drawing I and II at Montgomery  College in my thirties how surprising it was to learn that I had to learn to see. So – serendipity again – I was standing at the bus stop after work and a torn photocopy of a lost puppy flier was hanging on by a fiber to the pole. It’s movement in the wind made me take notice and I thought, how adorable. That would be fun to draw. I hope they found her. Her name is Samantha, like my own dog who died this year. It was interesting returning to pencils and how challenging to get the gradual changes in value. It’s a very rough drawing, but showed me I need to do more to get my chops up. She’s cute though.

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Just a brief post to give you a few minutes of beauty today: go to this website and listen and look and feel refreshed.

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Last night I was browsing various artists websites and found Jeanne Lafferty (The Laughingstock of Lourdes). She has great fun making art and had me laughing out loud. One of her blogposts said “I’m afraid of the grapes…” and I realized that I had set aside a project because I was afraid of the grapes…and the bird..and the whole thing. I signed up for an interactive class with Mary Kingslan working with Genesis Heat Set Oils and did step one then have ignored it for six weeks. The interactive class ended, and fortunately they allow the participants to get a DVD of the classes missed. I watched them last night and got remotivated, due to the fact that Mary’s teaching style is very clear and very ‘no big deal’: “If your strawberry faces the other direction, that’s fine, it’s your painting”. In Jeanne’s blog she states that she set up her blog to keep her working and that’s how I’m going to use this blog, too. So here is step one that I have done, followed by the goal of the finished painting I’m learning to paint:

Project: step one background and table

Project Goal: to look like this

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A Katrina Rescue

Today is a milestone … well, maybe a quarter milestone since the amount is small…but I set out to begin painting in order to help raise money to help save dogs lives and give abused parrots lifelong sanctuary. My first painting has sold and this morning I sent the funds straight to Tara’s Babies. What a happy day. It wasn’t much, but it’s a start and I know how much they are struggling to give these dogs a second chance. And that with more funds, more dogs could be saved. So quickly, back to the easel. I’ve got three paintings almost finished and they will go up on my eBay shop this weekend. And soon I’ll add a page here to take commissions for pet portraits you can commission.

Even if you don’t want to buy a painting, go to Tara’s Babies, and look at these faces and I dare you to try not to donate to help them.

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Walney Pond, Chantilly, VA

Yesterday I went on my first plein air painting trip! I am always impressed with seeing artists out with their easels set up and seeing them complete a full painting in one session. Usually the style is impressionistic/expressionistic,  so I thought, well, that shouldn’t be too hard. oy vay. My first mistake was deciding to try plein air combined with just learning oils. (I am used to acrylics). Wet into wet painting is a whole new ball game and everything kept getting overmixed and turning the same color.  The next mistake I discovered was not blocking in the main areas of the scene onto my canvas. I ran out of room for the pond reflections-plus inverse sky.  Pfew. A lotta learning the hard way. After three hours I decided I had to let the thing dry and finish it later from photos.

My first attempt at plein air painting. (No LOL zone)

What I had not experienced before was how challenging it is to even see the colors of nature when you are looking right at it! I actually felt my brain struggling with “water is not blue” because clearly, on a totally overcast day, the water was mostly tree reflections and dark green, brown, gray….not blue. And the bank of trees were obviously made up of individual trees with many different colors….of GREEN. Okay, that tree is green but I can see it next to the next tree which is green, but really red green, next to bluegray green….oy vay again.

But it was great fun, as it was part of a Meetup.com group and hanging out with other aspiring artists was invigorating. The location was gorgeous and I decided that plein air painting and painting from life in the studio are my goals. I definitely recommend you try it!

Here’s one plein air painter’s blog I follow for inspiration: Tom Brown.

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