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?

First Oil Painting

I decided today to clean up my studio/office because my mother is coming in a couple of weeks and I don't want her to see the mess. I ran across some old paintings of mine and thought I might start photographing them to try to get them in some kind of chronological order. I made a slide show of my watercolors in Adobe and it was a fun look, so I am going to try to do it with all the stuff I have done and see what happens.

No painting today, but this is the first one I did with Cheeko Douglas. She is such an inspiration. I don't believe anything could rival her passion for painting. She told me she paints 24 hrs a day, "I paint all day long and when I sleep, I dream of painting." I wish you could have seen the way her face lit up when she told me that. Anyway, she helps us a lot when we paint. She shows us how, then steps back and sets us free! Here is my effort.

Happiness on a Table

I have I think, finished. I redrew the picture with the help of the photograph. That helped me see what I wanted and narrowed my focus and eliminate the entire world, which is what I tend to do. This satisfies me more than the first one, but; I wish I had done as good a job painting the agave. Something wrong happened with the paint mixes. Oh well, it is just paper.

Trip to Nashville

My trip to Nashville in March was fun and a challenge. I worked in oils, watercolor and acrylics (I am now more intrigued). I worked in color theory in the oils and am facinated with the huge assignment of painting all the color combinations in a full spectrum pallette. I have been working on them for about 2 months now and am getting them completed. Will show some of them later.

In watercolor, I painted with Kathie George, a long time favorite teacher of mine with whom I have been taking yearly workshops with for about 9 years (we think). I am submitting my finished Koi, her design, on Ginwashi rice paper. We did a batik on that. I finished it off with a rubbing of a TJAP stamp (pronounced chop) that is used in Bali to stamp batiks using an irridescent gold oil pastel crayon. I brought the finished piece home and brightened the colors some.

To go back to the project of painting reflections on the table, I am going to redraw and repaint. I thought that what I was looking at was so different from what I was actually looking at, so I will do a redrawing and repainting. I am going to use the picture to help get a better contour drawing to get started with on paper, then trace my drawing onto watercolor paper. That should help with all the erasures. Meanwhile here is the image of what I saw (I added a few things to the setup).