Here are two recent little paintings, each 6” x 6”. the gallery where i take lessons offers a community show twice a year. Anyone can enter, and you can do a painting, fabric art, whatever. Only limitation is you have to use these small cradled panels. This time i decided to try for one landscape and one still life.

After an early spring snow.

Over the past couple of weeks i’ve been playing around with using a limited palette. For quite a while, now, i’ve tried to limit myself to using the three primary colors —- red, blue and yellow; and white. From these colors you can create almost any other color. This past week, following a discussion in our painting class, i decided to try doing a painting using only three colors plus white, but not the traditional primary colors. I chose Quinacradone Red, Payne’s Gray, and a yellow ochre, plus a titanium white. I knew going into this experiment that i could forget about getting a true blue or a true green. And my teacher had said to expect to feel a good deal of frustration at the limitations. Actually, though, i had quite a good time with this one. So below i will show the palette, the reference photo, and my not-quite-done painting.

Recently i’ve been playing around with a few still life setups, to try to learn a bit about painting glass and metal. teacher talked about relevant issues in class, and i did a couple assignments with glass bowl and copper mug. Then i decided to try one at home on my own. Norma had equipment for a set up with a light box, and i used that. Dark material surrounding the ”subject”: a wine bottle, a bottle opener and a wine glass. With focused light source the reflections were everywhere and it was not going to work to try to take a photo. So ended up with much more diffuse light source. You can see that there are almost no shadows showing. Also, note that when you look at the reference photo, the bottle opener is quite different from the painted one. That’s because the ”real” one was just too complicated to pull off — would’ve taken me a long, long time to get that one with all its parts.