imaginary landscape

Painting

Here's my favorite piece of the ones I did over the weekend at my kitchen table.  I am working on composition and this is the best one that turned out.  It's got a little negative space going on, on the right hand side where an imaginary little house with a porch sits in the greenery. I did about 15 paintings at once, letting each wash dry while I worked on a different one.  This session was a green study where I worked out my indigo/yellow direction.  There might be some naples yellow in there too, am very happy with that color right now too. 

#Kentucky river plein air #watercolor

I got to go out yesterday and drive around and look for places to paint.  So much fun (and so grateful to my driver and babysitter)!  We took 39 south and ended up at the Kentucky river (I think).  It was raining hard all day yesterday but that was good, it made the greens misty.  I mixed my greens on the way out of town along with a cloudy gray ("antique silver gray" plus white gouache) and a dark brown made of sepia plus burnt sienna; this was in case I did any barns which I did not.

I am really happy with these greens.  They are made with indigo and a medium yellow.  I had to dump a bunch of yellow in as the indigo just devoured it.  But it's a great color and I am finally happy with them, I feel like I've got my foot on the yellow brick road in Munchkinland ready to start my journey.  Now I've got a starting point I can feel solid about.  I just don't like the crayon-colored greens I was getting with ultramarine.  The indigo seems to have a shadowy woodsiness about it that works for me.

The river is made of the dark brown plus the sky color.  The river water here is kind of a yellowish green plus it had been raining so it was all muddy. 

I didn't do as much modelling as I would have liked.  I need to get better at that.  I have been trying to observe a tree's general presentation, with shadowy trunk-adjacent areas and the yellow-green of new growth at the tips of the branches.  My eyes are better than my hands, so I can see but have not yet been able to install this into the painting.  So right now the trees are more just undifferentiated masses than I really want.

I just finished the biography of Edward Hopper that used a lot of material from Jo's diaries, poor Jo.  I was glad she finally got her show at the end and people started to give her work some consideration. Such a shame that her paintings were just discarded.  I am sure that by now they would have been re-evaluated and found to have merit on their own.  I think that every painting has an audience, or will eventually.  I know my pictures get a lot of polite silence in reaction from "real" artists but I think I'm getting better and one day will be able to make something nice. Luckily my husband is nothing like horrible Edward Hopper. 

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across the street

I always sit down and have big plans to make a realistic presentation and it always ends with me focussing on brushstrokes instead.  Here are a couple of pictures of my neighbor's house across the street.  I have done this so many times I just can't do it again realistically. However it is painted from life, I annotated the brown one to demonstrate what those shapes mean. 

I really want to paint representationally, it's just not happening.  I just...this watercolor paper is so absorbent and I hate to go back over a brushstroke...it just ends up looking like this. Oh well all part of the journey I suppose.  Still fun to do.  I think the composition is ok.

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High and Rose #lexky #watercolor #painting

I stole some time on Sunday, 2 hours. I went back to this parking lot at the corner of High and Rose street, behind the auto mechanic that is there. I like drawing the backs of buildings, so much more interesting than the fronts.  I really like this view, with its interlocking planes and different colors of bricks and old stones.  I tried to be really careful with my colors and almost succeeded.  I did not have enough water.  And I am not used to this size of paper which is very narrow and long. In conclusion, I really like these paintings but I also know I can do better. 

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couple of drawings

Yesterday we drove around Georgetown and surrounding areas as my husband was finishing up his Envronmental Science lab and had to identify some trees.  We stopped at a little park and I watched some kids fishing.  The sketch turned out well, I really like it.  Thank you, talent that works through me!  It is always impossible to predict what will come out well.  I am also adding a controversial painting I did last week.  My husband really hates it and my son likes it and I also kind of like it.  I am still working on trees.  You might think it would be easy to catch the color of a leaf in sunlight or shade but it is not. I have not figured out the solution yet. I keep trying though. 

I think painting is like gambling. You get a little dopamine shot every time and there's always that tiny bit of hope like, "Maybe THIS is the big one!"  Good thing I don't lose money every time I paint.

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couple of drawings

I am in training and when I get bored I look out the window and draw trees and geese.  There is a family with five goslings and they take dips on the pond and then the parents splat out again on their big leathery feet and the goslings have to hitch-...hitch-...hitch themselves out of the pond. 

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"Your badge and your weapon" compass construction

Painting1

Another compass construction, this one just for fun.  I was doing some of the "rusty compass" constructions, which is where you keep the compass at a constant opening and create what you can that way.  I think I found an error in my book.  I could not understand why I couldn't get it to work out but I think there is a step omitted. 

I started coloring it in and it started looking like a goofy spaceship badge so I drew a raygun on top and titled it from one of my favorite silly movies, the remake of The Italian Job with Jason Statham.

When I color it in I purposefully don't try to get the lines perfect.  Anyone with OCD viewing this would probably hate it.  But I like the wavering of a hand-drawn line. You could get it perfect by using a Paint program on computer but there is ONE thing we can't get computers to do to emulate humans: make mistakes!  So I am proud of my un-straight lines and little errors. 

#sketch at the playground

Painting

Here's a sketch of my kid going down the slide.  Last year I was afraid to attempt drawing playground stuff as it is so complicated.  This year I decided to give it a try. I added the face after I had already set up the drawing.  I stuck my sketchbook into the scanner at work so the image quality is good and you can see exactly how much I abuse my poor pens.

compass construction: tangents to two equal circles

Painting

When I am stuck at home with nothing to paint sometimes I do some quick compass constructions and then color them in.  Here is one.  Two equal circles on a line, the perpendicular to the line is constructed at the center of each circle and then the tangents are drawn at the intersection of the perpendiculars and the circles. 

After I painted in the yellow and green it started looking like a lake-type landscape and my sci-fi imagination saw what might be giant power generators under the lake so that's the title "The Generators under the Lake."

So yeah this is what I do when I'm bored.

across the street #lexky #watercolor

Painting

This was done during the late afternoon/evening.  My problem with watercolors is I just tend to pile on the paint and lose a value range.  I went back into this with a paper towel and took out some paint in the tree and on the grass and the window.  Tried to lighten it up a bit so I'd have more of a range instead of all dark. I like the mood and atmosphere of this picture. Still need to control my values and edges but it's okay, it's getting there.


I read an artist's statement the other day and they talked about how light was their driving motivation and I got to thinking, it's not really that way for me.  I like to try to get my values right and in that sense I'm interested in light but really what I like are planes and shapes.  and getting the sense of a tilted roof against a vertical wall.  Braque is my favorite cubist.
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