Here’s an update from “Sunrise in Norway” painting, which I’m working on for my “other” class.  Continuing to work from the top down — this week on the rocky slope of the mountainside.  These rocks don’t have to be very detailed.  (When i get to the rocks at the bottom of the painting, in the foreground, those will have much more detail.).  This first layer is just to get the idea down and then I’ll go back over all of it.  

Past couple of days i began working on the boulders and also filled in some of the branches and leaves on the trees.  These rocks are so different from the ones in the painting i just recently finished.  The “old” rocks were pretty easy to paint, as the main challenge was getting the shapes and the values correct.  These rocks – in the current project — are complicated by issues of hue and texture in addition to all the shape and value issues.  So – I’m not even close to having these rocks be as they need to be.  But thought I’d post anyway, and hopefully there will be noticeable progress when i post again.

This is a continuation of post from this evening.  Here I’ll post photo to be reference for my other painting class.  I took this photo while on a hike last fall in Rocky Mountain National Park.  We were hurrying up a mountainside to catch the sunrise-and-moon-set and on the way we passed this lovely little spot.  Teacher said it might be fun to try painting this one on a black canvas, which I’d not only never used before, but had never seen.  He suggested i do a large canvas — maybe 24″ x 32″.  I didn’t want that large as it’s cumbersome to cart around.  As it turned out, i didn’t have much choice re: size, as the only black canvas i could find was around 18″ x 24″.  ‘Drawing had to be with white charcoal instead of the usual black one.  Don’t be shocked — you will probably not recognize my “drawing” as a drawing.  But the idea is just to get placement of major objects and areas.  That’s why i used a grid.

I am beginning two new projects– one each for each of my two painting classes.  Here I’ll post the reference photos for one; another post will have photo for the other.  The first, the mountain scene, is from another wonderful photo Norma took on her trip to Norway last summer.  This one, “Sunrise”, is actually from the very same area as “Sunset” — the one i just finished.  It’s taken an hour (maybe?) later than Sunset and I think she said it’s the same mountain.  Pretty dramatic!  Because teacher for this class likes me to use small canvasses, the canvas for this painting is only 9″ x 12″.  So far I’ve just done the tracing and very small area of sky.

I know there is plenty more i could do with this painting, but really, I’m getting a bit tired of it.  Time to move on.  Learned a lot and ready to apply new insights to new painting.

In the past couple of weeks I’ve worked to put final touches on my pumpkin patch painting.  This included: grating down the windmills and also painting in a blade on the larger windmill. ( i didn’t want to do this because i thought it looked too in-your-face in the photo, but teacher insisted.  Her argument was that the windmill wouldn’t work without the blade.  I said i didn’t care whether it worked or not.  I lost.  And it turned out to be fun to put in the blade just free-hand without worrying too much about whether it matched the photo, which i didn’t want anyway.)  I’m pleased with some things about this painting — like the colors of the pumpkins, figuring out how to make the shadows look shadow-y.  I don’t like the shapes of pumpkins– i wouldn’t buy any of these for Halloween.  I learned a good bit about perspective in trying to get the field in the background and the barn to work.  Definitely worth the effort in terms of stuff to think about..