As I drove up to my art teacher’s studio this morning, I noticed a young black border collie trotting up the driveway. She looked friendly enough, so I wasn’t overly concerned about getting attacked — more like getting licked to death. I parked my car, and she came over to my door as I opened it. “Eh!” I yelled at her, making what Diana Gabaldon would undoubtedly refer to as […]
Today in art class I worked more on tone. I’ll show you the progression of a drawing in charcoal on rag paper. The first step is to determine the average tone of the setup, which in this case was a middle tone, about a 4 on a 1-to-10 scale, where 10 is the darkest. The setup was a dark wine bottle, a green pear, and a white onion set on […]
I’ve been learning to think about tone in a painterly way. Tone is the structure of a painting and is what makes objects appear to be three-dimensional. If you think in terms of movies, you’ll notice that a black-and-white movie tells you most of the information you need to know about the environment. You can tell what is grass and what is water and what is skin, and so forth. […]
I haven’t fallen off of a cliff. Just FYI. Lately I’ve made a change from the art of writing to the art of painting. I’m learning to paint from a classically trained artist in a small, self-paced class. It is absorbing a lot of my mental time even though I’m physically drawing only about six hours a week. I’d like to post bits and pieces of things I’m learning as […]
Flabby Brain 