A couple of weeks ago i began a new painting.  Since we haven’t had class time to work on our paintings i’ve Gone ahead at home.  This teacher wants us to begin by using a grid, which i’ve Not done before, but i can see the value.  You can probably make out grid lines, as mostly all i’ve Done so far is block in shapes, so paint layers are pretty thin. The reference photo is from a photo workshop Norma did last year (the horseback one) in the Wind River Range in Wyoming.  What you can see in my beginnings is an effort to get some of the hues blocked in.  Ignore the lower right half of the painting: an experiment gone awry.  I wanted to paint a dark substrate and then paint all the flowers and plants on top of that. Still plan to do that, but so far have three layers of that to-be-background, and it’s not yet right.

Last week in class we were each assigned a “live” pear to paint.  The lesson was on figuring out light and shadow, (along with color, of course).  We had about an hour for this little project.  I will play around with the result, but here is the original. (Note that the background is pretty flat — that is because we didn’t have table edges; i might paint those in later.)

 

i spent a bit of time on the last class assignment — the one where we were learning about using a palette knife. I scraped off some of the “corn” and tried to replace it with a bit more background. Then, days later, (after it had dried, sort of) i added more “stalks”.  I am probably better off thinking of them as kind of a hybrid corn, at least for now.  Also added a layer to the grass at the bottom of the painting; tried a mid-blue glaze on the gray barn roof (but it didn’t “take” too well — will have to repeat: this is common – glazes almost always multi-layered.  ) The thing about the roof being blue, however, is that i want to be careful that it’s not close to sky colors.

I haven’t posted for a while because the teacher we have currently does quite a bit of didactic work in class.  We actually work on projects designed to teach specific things.  A couple of weeks ago we had a lesson on light and shadow.  Last week we all tried to copy a barn and field of corn from a photo teacher took in Iowa some time ago. The challenge was that we were not allowed to use a brush — we were to practice learning how to paint with a palette knife.  We were also supposed to finish the painting in class, which i was unable to do (as were my classmates.). So i have worked on it a  bit at home this week.  Because you use very thick paint and no medium it takes forever to dry.  therefore fixing mistakes is somewhere between tricky and impossible.  So — i attach  the reference photo and my attempt.  It was challenging but fun.

(P.S. this week we’re all going to paint a pear>)