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 […]
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 […]
Flabby Brain 