So The Big M and I went to SXSW. I am 22 months shy of my 40th birthday and I still have all of my teeth, so while I’m not *empirically* an old person, I’m old for hanging out outside of Antone’s on a Tuesday night during the biggest music festival probably anywhere. I had a few contemporaries around me, but still. A little incongruous with my stray gray hairs […]
Today I started working on recreating the lemon painting (see post below) with a real still-life. I bought and cut up some lemons, then went about the tricky task of setting them up with the lighting and viewing angle and background done as closely to the original painting as possible. I had some help, fortunately. Here’s my first painting copied from an original by Helen van Wyk: Here’s what the […]
When I last posted about the lemon painting, I wasn’t very far into it. It’s now finished, and I’ll try to explain the steps I took to get there. It took longer than I thought it would. I’m learning that painting is a lot like writing. It doesn’t make sense to write in every single detail of a scene — what every single thing looks like, sounds like, smells like, […]
I decided to leave the pear as-is and pursue my next art project. My teacher suggested that I pick a painting of a still-life to copy. Later I can reproduce the still-life in reality and paint it again. Copying paintings as a way of learning technique dates back to the beginning of painting. It’s like doing an internship in art. The student doesn’t have to make any choices about color, […]
Close to our vineyard there was a pear tree laden with fruit. This fruit was not enticing, either in appearance or in flavor. We nasty lads went there to shake down the fruit and carry it off at dead of night… We took enormous quantities, not to feast on ourselves but perhaps to throw to the pigs; we did eat a few, but that was not our motive: we derived […]
Now that I’m working in color, my first project is to paint an apple. This is harder than it sounds. My setup is below. You can see the color wheel I made on the left. The apple is more or less blocked in with three tonal ranges in the red. This is where I started today. What you see above represents the previous lesson’s work. Since I was starting from […]
I’ve reached stage four of my beginning oil painting class: the color course. The following pictures were taken over two successive three-hour classes. I’ve had to slow down as we move into the world of color. The first step was to take a look at the primary colors I had in my tubes of paint, and then to mix their secondary colors. This isn’t a completely faithful image of the […]
While I have some free time today, I’ll post the progression of my latest oil painting. I did this one over the course of two 3-hour classes. A fresh canvas. The charcoal under-drawing. First part of tone painting. Close-up of same. Refining… Refining it with opaque paint. More refinement. And … I’m calling it done. I can see where further refinement would help, but I feel like I’m getting the […]
There have been a couple of things I’ve wanted to write about, but until I have time and energy to do so, here’s how my finished oil painting turned out: I started with it dry… Then started working on it… And finished with this: One down and three to go before I get to try color.
Back in college I took art history, in which I learned the astonishing (to me) fact that the old masters had as many as 99 layers to their oil paintings. I always thought that meant they had 99 layers of, say, blue on Mary’s veil, something that would give the color “depth.” Not so. As it turns out, the layers have different functions. First comes the primer to keep the […]
Flabby Brain 