Fiddling

Normally I like to be thought of as perfect. For that reason, I like to save the mistakes and not show you... but this is a rather large landscape and it was GOING to give me fits.

First. I wanted to have a sense of the clouds in front of the thunderhead. I also liked the definate dominance of that shape. The hills in my reference actually dropped off to the right and the bushes sort of merged into a mass down in the corner. So I redrew my horizon and cut a bit off that last ranged.

And that left me with a very tricky color thing on that butte in the middle range. I am really off with it... tomorrows brain power.

Second, that landscapey part at the bottom. Don't enjoy it, not too fond of it, so I have it in my head to eliminate.... but as I did that ONE good thing happened. I widened the path of earth making the reason for all that salmon color more functional.

The bushes are still to spotty, the sense of land is there, and a bit too polka dotty. I LIKE my cactus in the middle. Problem is making it part of a sequence that makes it work. I am still working on it to see if I can keep it....
So here we are today.


As a portrait painter, I always tell people how I am trying to portray a scene with the intensity I do a face. The details kill me! I see a zillion leaves, not a tree.

I think this may be called successful enough but from a portrait painter, not really a landscape painter. I have a few more ideas, but I am learning (perhaps ONLY by the mistakes) a few thing I want to try again in the next picture...

Oh, by the way... it would be a really good time to enroll in my workshop in Prescott. After Monday there are no refunds, so risk it! Call them.

See you there!
dj*

When you have an underpainting and are too anxious.

Having had to leave for an appointment I came in and was having so much fun with my cloud, I really felt the need to make that sky very flat. The nupastels I use were not hacking it. Because I used the Medium, I decided to try another experiment and took some sanitizing alcohol (the hotshots use denatured stuff, but I am not a hotshot and it makes it look all watercolory, which is EXACTLY what I want it to look like!



These are a real pain to photograph because the early light on the sketch was perfect. As the afternoon wore on, the skylight got darker so I turned on a lamp. LOTS of color wackiness. I will try to balance the pictures, even if they are not really true representations of the painting....

After tackling the sky, I decided the foreground plants were not right either. My limited palette was discouraging, so I just added some pure viridian watercolor to juice up the bushes.


Remember I am not a landscape painter, so this is going to go on instinct for a while and when I have what I call "covered" which is something I do in oil as well (I give myself permission to live with it a while and the rest will be tweaking. Sometimes it turns out to be done, but I reserve the signing for a while.)I will hit it with some workable fixative and let it darken a bit. I am having most fun playing with the multiple colors and their value properties. The simplest combinations can make radical changes... and the photography is really going to be hard to show it... ah well, back into the dust!
dj*

Fingers crossed.

It is not that my technique is better suited to figurative, in fact, most people would think the opposite, but I have challenged myself to do the impossible: A landscape.

I have some pretty nifty reference that I have been mulling over in my mind quite a while. This is a nearby view that I think will suit my needs as far as shapes and values. And one big cloud.

For this I did something new. I used an underpaint of a pastel medium by golden.... WHY WOULD I SPLURGE? I had some sample jars and a friend gave me three more. Time to play on someone else's penny.

It has ONE good quality. The paper did most of the buckling when it was applied, but because it is a little dryer, when I made my underpaint, it shrinked down a little and stayed relatively flat. No photos, as I was sort of stuck in my brain, but here is the first stop this morning in daylight.


We will keep in touch with this one.

The Progress Shot

I wanted not to scare off the participants, so I did a couple more hours work on the demo. It is being refined for color and relationships. The photo may be updated when I re-photograph it in daylight, but for now, one can see it does actually not end up being abstract expressionistic, and can be refined quite nicely into recognizable realism:

dj*

My Class in Mesa

Because I am starting to promote my class this summer in Prescott, I figured I would post a little of some of my work in a class I teach every week in Mesa Arizona. This is a great group of exceptionally talented Seniors (and just under) who have figured out how to keep their homes tidy and come out every Wednesday for a casual paint-together. I pick up after lunch with a group I call Art Coach. My only goal is to HELP IMPROVE THEIR WORK. I try hard not to teach, per se, but to understand what they want to accomplish in their own work and demonstrate for an hour some technique of mine that they can use or ignore.

This month I started with a very brief version of the Pastel Over Watermedia. Much like my demonstration will be at the Mountain Art Center at the end of May.

I used a cold pressed watercolor taped to a chunk of foam core. It was a revelation! I was taught to put a pat of newspapers under the paper for than nice bounce that makes pastels push much better than on a hard surface. Fit my easel and was nice and soft.

After sketching from my photo, I make sure the resulting drawing DEFINES THE EDGES that I need to keep track of as the painting progresses.

The less lines the better. It is going to get lost anyway! Because I am going to saturate and scrub the under-painting, I did use some workable fixative but this was in graphite. Graphite has a lot of durability that charcoal does not. It is a bane in oils and slippery but when you see what we do with it, you understand.

Next I scrub... and I LIKE to scrub... my under-painting of inexpensive acrylics. I use up the old and nasty stuff for this. I also like it, because I keep throwing out the hard and dead tubes as I prep for the demonstration. One can acquire a few too many paints.

In the class I explain the under-painting does three things: Individually or all at once, the colors you put on can support the values, by darkening areas that you want to go dark, complement colors for extra vibrancy or intensify a color using analogous hues. I have done a little of everything in this:

I ran into the ladies room (because I forgot my hair dryer) and using the hand dryer in there, made sure all the water was out of the paper. This works best when SCRUBBED into the surface. This demonstration came out much lighter than I had intended so I will have a darker general appearance, as I have to build up darks to give the appearance of lighter. (I use inexpensive NuPastels for about 85% of the piece before the light bright soft pastels, and the contrast is what makes us see light and dark.) THEN I reinforced the drawing with compressed charcoal or pastel.

Even light edges that touch other light edges but have major color changes are good to map out. My other trick is a transparent tracing paper sketch that can flip back and forth to correct from. As a solo painter, it keeps me from walking over to visit the neighbors in the middle of the night for a fresh eye!!!

Class began progressing and I talked a bit and forgot to shoot much, but the first thing I did above was limit my value range by finding the lightest part of the painting - in this case her eyes - and the darkest part near by. I make a note with a stick and DON'T ever use white or black. In this case it was a yellow butter color and green.... yes I used great for her blue eyes, because it was dark.... then I started trying to lay in my shadows and general tones.

I endeared myself to the class by admitting I goofed! The sticks I had on hand were ALL very middle values. Few strong darks and almost no light flesh tones. I got to show how to improvise.

If you don't have the right stick, you can literally mix colors. In the light areas of the skin, I used a lot of that buttery yellow OVER the darker pinks to actually make lighter colors. When the colors are too strong but you don't have the proper gray tones, or too light or even too dark, a good five or six simple gray sticks will work to lower intensity and control values. Using colored lights AND a light gray I was able to start blending up in the skin while beginning to darken the shadows with browns.

At the end of the demo, I was able to sit IN FRONT of my piece and start rethinking some of the drawing issues I had lost with the initial chalking in.

The gang went wild. I must say I was over at the sink encouraging splashing and slopping of the under-painting and that fear of losing the image was very intimidating, but it was quite well received.

Next week, I will try to finish up and show how to use fixative as a tool and when to hit the big guns (and money) with the buttery soft pastels. I could see their brains start to wrap around the idea in the students that attempted it

Back next week or next pastel!