Charcoal Lemons

In my last post, I said:
Charcoal has always baffled me, but I’m going to give it another try using Stacy’s tips in Virtual Sketch Date – July
It seemed like a good idea at the time. Stacy’s beautiful drawing of the VSD sunquats made it look so easy. It’s not.  I’m still baffled by it.
I chose this [...]

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Sunday Study Notes – 7/27/08

Posts I’ve learned from this week:

What comes to mind when you see this colour?    A white peppermint candy? Probably not, but that’s what it’s from.  I took this sample (using GIMP’s eyedropper tool) from the shadow area on the top candy in Peppermint Candies #3 – Daily Painting by Darren Maurer .  A good reminder of the [...]

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Friday Faces

Panic.  That was my main reaction when I was confronted with a face to draw in only 60 seconds. Sheer, utter panic.  Which probably means it’s an excellent exercise that I need to do more often.

As I explained here, I made a javascript slideshow that displays randomly chosen photos for 60 seconds each.  I’ve only used [...]

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A Duck of a Different Colour

 Here are the first few glazes on my composition project painting of ducks.  Warning: it’s difficult to get a good photograph after the first couple of glazes.  Kathy Bailey, the artist who taught me this technique, explained that the eye can see the many different layers & colours and resolve them into a meaningful image [...]

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Fall Classes

The ducks are progressing – they’ve had the first glaze applied, and the second will go on tonight.  But I’m going to wait until the first three layers are finished, then post photos of all the stages so far.
The fall schedule for the local art centre arrived yesterday.  I sometimes think they look at my [...]

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Ugly Ducklings

Every painting has an “ugly stage”, but I think the glazing techique I’m using here has one of the ugliest! This is the first step – an underpainting in burnt umber and white on top of a pinkish ground (which you can see best in the lower left). It’s more or less a value study, [...]

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Sunday Study Notes

I’ve decided that I want to keep a weekly record of blog entries that I find interesting, helpful, or that just catch my attention.  Sort of like Katherine Tyrrell’s “Who’s made a mark this week?” posts every Sunday, but on a much smaller scale.  

James Gurney has a fascinating post about reflected light, with some amazing [...]

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Decisions about Ducks

I spent some time this morning playing with the reference photo for my composition project in GIMP, trying out different crops.  Here’s the original photo:

 
I tried just picking the ducks up and plopping them down on the golden “sweet spot”, but as much as I would enjoy glazing all that water, I felt the ducks [...]

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People Practice

 
Three coats of gesso later (plus one of Indian red + alkyd medium) , my Composition Project canvas is ready to go as soon as the toning dries.
Meanwhile, here are a few of the very out-of-practice gestures I did today from the 30-second drawing feature at PoseManiacs, which is a wonderful tool!  It actually offers timed intervals from 10 to 90 seconds, and I [...]

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Stretching canvas

I’ve decided to use a golden rectangle as my format for my Composition Project.  Standard pre-stretched canvases aren’t available in golden proportions, though, so I need to stretch my own canvas.  This is a new experience for me. One of my instructors briefly demonstrated how to do it last spring, so I hope I was paying attention!  But [...]

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