This post is about my field of pumpkin painting from my Monday class.  Although i remain less enthusiastic about the methods applied here (especially the tracing business), i am certainly having good experience with fine brush work on smaller canvases. 

As you can tell from the title of this entry, I’ve been working on rocks. Also water. The week before this one i also tried to get a better start on the sky, but haven’t done anything with that this week.  So with rocks i painted in a few along the water’s edge and also worked on the large ones in the fields and hills.  My teacher suggested last week (or maybe the week before) that i adjust the lines of the mountains and hillsides to reflect their downward pitch.

Today i spent a couple of hours working on the rocks on my Sunset/Sunrise painting.  I wanted to get some of this part started before i go to class.  Class is tomorrow morning, and I’m wanting to get some feedback from my teacher, who hasn’t yet seen this painting.Also worked a little on darkening some of the mountains. (Because of glare, you can’t really see the effect on the left side of the painting.). Worked also a little on the water, though i need to think about that a good bit more.  It’s way too saturated an orange.  Will have to experiment some more.

As i noted in the post i just published, there were no classes for a month.  And the rules for the Monday class are that students are told NOT to work at home on paintings that are being studied in class.  So the only update i have on the “pumpkin” painting is from class, which resumed yesterday.  The canvas is small and there is a lot of detail in this one, so I’m getting quite a bit of practice with small brushes and working in small areas.  Most of my time yesterday was spent trying to paint the grass in areas around the pumpkins.  This was pretty tedious and i soon tired of it; so switched back to working on the pumpkins and the wagon.  all still very preliminary, but should pick up in the next couple of weeks.

Through December i didn’t have either class this year, so i was on my own with painting practice.  I decided to do something i hadn’t previously done — which was to start from scratch a new painting, without any teacher input, at least for the beginning stages.  I chose to work on another stunning photo that Norma took in Norway.  I tried to be careful with measuring and drawing, and color mixing, and then began laying on some paint. I’m attaching here both the reference photo and my very preliminary efforts to date.  You can’t tell from painting at this time how the colors will end up, but you can see the general layout of the composition.