Trip to Nashville

I went to Nashville, TN to paint for six days and had a lot of fun. I came home with 5 paintings all of which I will post. I went to paint with the group of painter (teachers) that Johnnie Lilliedahl gets together for an annual national atelier. We work in the old masters method of limited palette, transparent underpainting and an opaque overpainting at the end.

I loved doing the landscapes the best they were a lot of fun and easier for me to do. They were taught by Bill Bayer from St. Louis, MI. Bill is quite funny and hauntingly honest about his life. If you have a chance to lookI am including his link http://www.billbayerart.com/

We worked with John Constables images and did studies of his techniques. Here is my painting.

Lisa Gloria Workshop Day 2

I finished my painting but since taking the photo, discovered an error in painting the spoon which I will fix. Sometimes you are concentrating so hard on painting, you literally cannot see the forest for the trees! But, I am gonna post the finished painting after correcting the spoon. I will probably have some corrections to make when Lisa gives me feedback as well.

She gave me feedback on the first day which told me to soften my edges and darken the apple flesh. I am not sure I accomplished these items. She did say that I did a good job with the color underpainting and keeping the layers thin enough. The size is a 6x8 in canvas on a panel. I love painting on panels. You have that board that is stiff behind your canvan and for me it is easier to control the paint.

Lisa Gloria Workshop Online

Today from 11-2pm I took an online workshop with Lisa Gloria. She used USTREAM with some sort of camera setup to do live streaming video...fabulous idea! She sent a color high resolution photo of the still life we would paint and a transparency of the contour drawing to check your own drawing, but alas, I drew mine on by tracing the transparency instead of using a good lesson in drawing...but, I can paint this again on my own. We also get a dvd of the painting sessions...I have been following her blog for a while and found her Art Studio Secrets to be very interesting as well as informative. http://artstudiosecrets.com/

Those of you interested in art will find many useful tips in her blog and she is an interesting source of art news, esoterica, facts, fiction, etc.

Today we did the underpainting with raw umber to pick out our darkest darks and lightest lights and those in between. We did the color underpainting and hopefully if things dry enough, we can do the color overpainting tomorrow. Here is what I did today.

Red Plums

The red plums are my first subject of painting a still life, and can I see my drawing errors, yes, pics posted side by side, so I will refine and do a set up of the fruit and paint them on a 4x6 cotton panel. I will post my progress as I go along. My goodness, I thought I was seeing them better than that...

One problem I keep encountering with my drawings is that the tooth of the paper keeps filling up with graphite and clumping. It is hard to get my darks in without resorting to embossing and I am unsure if I should do that.

I have painting with Cheeko tomorrow and will take one plum to her to see if my idea of using Diox. purple, alizarin crimson and indian yellow for the fruit is on the right track...cannot wait to get started...

Those light lines you will see in most of my drawings are sight lines that I use on a viewfinder to help me get the drawing on the paper better...did it work?

Snowy day March 1

We woke up to snow this morning and it is coming down heavily. Fortunately the snow does not stick to the streets as we have been warming up down in the south. I could not resist taking a picture.

Posting 2 drawings I did yesterday. One is a ceramic figure of a chihuahua. I hope to paint this one with watercolor. The other is a colored pencil drawing of a Hyacinth. It smells so good, I have been watching it grow. Thought it would be a good subject to draw but was overwhelmed with the flowering part, so I did the best I could to suggest the flower.

My photos of my drawings have to be the worst! I have to take them to the photoshop editing area and change the contrast because I have trouble with the lighting, the flash goes off and bleaches out the colors and contrasts or it has a fuzzy out of focus image. I need to work on this aspect, so any suggestions are welcome.

Drawing

I have been taking drawing classes in the hope to improve my painting. My teacher is Cynthia Mask. She has been doing a great job with the class and has inspired me to do more drawing, so I have been practicing much more. I am finding inspiration in just about everything, learning to "see" as an artist is fun because once you start seeing differently, everything before you becomes a challenge.

My friends Millie Greene and Judith Gibson went drawing at the Auburn Cemetary yesterday. It was a quiet day and we sat for a couple of hrs drawing the monuments. I loved it, it was such fun to see how to make those lines behave. Of course, more practice is needed but I am off to a start.

My graffite jar is a new purchase, I found and it is the color of graffite, so I bought it so I could draw it. Hopefully I can paint it in the near future.

Gloria Perkins Workshop

This was a fast paced workshop. Gloria is famous for her exquisite florals. I saw her work in Nashville and wanted to learn more, so I signed up for her class at her studio in Sharpsburg, Ga. I learned so much while there, mostly that I have a long way to go on technique. It was hard, she was working fast and the reason for it was to keep us from dabbling in the paint too much. The photos do not do these paintings justice. I do not know why my photos of my work turn out so fuzzy. Anyway, here they are. I will go to her workshop in Nashville in March, 2009. She is doing some more florals... oh me, what am I getting myself into?