Category: Still Life

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Drawing Flower Art Gouache Painting Still Life

Playing with my flowers

20080521-black+gouache-mothersday-flowers

White ink, gouache on black Canford paper 10″x8″ (larger)

I got home from work just as my painting group was arriving for our weekly painting session in my studio. I grabbed a quick bowl of shredded wheat for dinner, fed the cats and plopped this little vase of white flowers on my drawing table.

I looked at the dainty, delicate white flowers, and feeling a little rebellious decided to draw them with white ink (using my favorite white ink pen, a Uni-ball Signo) on black paper, with no idea what I’d do after that. This was a “let’s try this and that and see what happens” sort of thing.

Once I had the drawing I decided to fool around with adding a little gouache. Just for fun I stopped before I’d covered all the petals, leaving some random black spots.

What I discovered is how much fun it is to paint with gouache on a dark background, which I’d never done before. It reminded me of those cool coloring books I always wanted (but rarely got) when I was a kid where you painted with water and the painting appeared magically.

It might have been a “better” painting if I’d paid attention to value, composition, light, etc. but tonight I just felt like playing like a kid, not trying to make a good painting.

Here’s the drawing without the gouache:
20080521-bw-mothersday-flowers

Which do you like better?

Categories
Oil Painting Painting Still Life

Avocado Study & Painting Fleas

Avocado finished study

Oil on panel, 10×8″ (larger)

“Paint the dog before the fleas” is something that painting teacher Elio Camacho told me over and over again when I started painting details in a scene before I had the big shapes blocked in. After messing up a painting yesterday by getting lost in the tiny details too soon, I really tried to focus on big shapes and color today.

I read this quote today that reaffirmed what I wrote in my last post about assimilating knowledge. It’s by Marques de Lozoya in the book Joaquin Sorolla by Blanca Pons-Sorolla:

“There is a moment in every artist’s career which usually follows many years of strenuous effort, in which experiences are accumulated in an intuition of marvelous clarity; the artist’s vision becomes precise and clear; the paths that lead to success are firmly perceived and easily and happily pursued, without any effort at all…”

Sounds good, doesn’t it! It gives me hope. I’d occasionally felt that intuition, clarity and happiness with watercolor and I look forward to finding it with oils too. At least I’m more frequently understanding where I’ve gone wrong.

Click “continue reading” below to see the steps I took for this study today. (If the link isn’t visible below, just click on the image above and you can see the steps on Flickr.

Continue reading “Avocado Study & Painting Fleas”
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Art theory Drawing Life in general Painting Sketchbook Pages Still Life Watercolor

Mothers’ Day Bouquet Snippet

Mothers' Day Bouquet

Ink & watercolor 5.5″x3.25″ (larger)

I’m back from my week-long workshop with Camille Przewodek in Petaluma. It was a powerful learning experience and an incredible opportunity two learn from two masters, Camille and her husband Dale Axelrod.  They studied for many years with Henry Hensche at the Cape Cod School of Art and are carrying on and expanding upon Hensche‘s and Hawthorne‘s work with color and light.

We painted in beautiful scenic locations from wetland marshes to the quaint village of Nicasio and the last day painted four models by the river that runs alongside Camille’s studio in charming and historic downtown Petaluma. We also did Hensche’s traditional colored block studies. All painting was done outdoors in bright sunlight and the weather couldn’t have been better.

I’ll write more about what I learned at the workshop when my paintings are dry and easier to handle, photograph and post.  In the meantime, here’s just a corner of the huge Mothers Day bouquet my son Cody surprised me with before we went to Brushstrokes Studio, a cute little pottery painting place in Berkeley. Cody and I decorated catfood bowls while his significant other designed a beautiful cup and daughter M painted a plate with a beach scene as a memorial for her grandmother who recently passed away. Then it was off to Pyramid Brewery for a yummy Mothers Day dinner accompanied by refreshing Pyramid Hefeweizen Ale served with a wedge of lemon.

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Drawing Life in general Painting Sketchbook Pages Still Life Watercolor

Living Alone Means Never Losing Your Socks

Socks

Ink & watercolor (larger)

I was folding my laundry and admiring my collection of wonderful SmartWool socks when it struck me: I haven’t lost a single sock since I began living alone. When I was married with kids, socks disappeared on a regular basis and I had a drawerful of one-of-a-kind socks.

My son still comes over to do his laundry but even so, only one sock temporarily migrated but he brought it back (a year later at the insistence of his girlfriend), along with a pair of my undies that had somehow ended up in his laundry.

There’s pros and cons to living alone, of course. One downside is that if you do lose something, you have nobody to blame for it. Even now, when something goes missing, my first thought is that one of my sons must have taken it. But my only available scapegoats are my cats.

Fiona the calico does like to steal my SmartWool socks (maybe they smell a bit like animals, being made of wool?). I try to keep them away from her, since she tosses them around and wrestles with them and when I find them under the bed they are shredded and holey.

At least she doesn’t eat them. My friend Marean has a beautiful Sheltie who eats her socks whole, and has had to have stomach surgery to have a “sock-ectomy.”

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Drawing Flower Art Gardening Glass Painting Plants Sketchbook Pages Still Life Watercolor

Zen & First Spring Roses

First spring roses

Ink & watercolor, 9×6″ (larger)

When I picked these roses yesterday evening, they were heartbreakingly fresh, new and beautiful. I put them in a vase of water in the kitchen, planning to paint them today. This morning I found them laying on the counter where they’d obviously been without water too long and looked limp.

Either they jumped out of their vase or my cats had a hand (er… paw) in their escape. After a few hours back in water they plumped right back up and were a joy to draw. I only had about an hour and that was just enough time to make a happy ink and watercolor.

But why do I feel so sad seeing the beauty of my seven rose bushes and thick patch of irises all loaded with flowers? It’s as if I’m already mourning their demise, knowing how temporary their burst of color and vibrancy is before winter comes again.

Is it my enhanced awareness of the cycle of life and death as I approach one of those milestone birthdays this June? Or is that time seems to be moving so fast these days that I can picture the blooming season flying by like those time-lapse films where the flowers sprout, bloom, shrivel and die within moments.

Instead of feeling sad about their demise (and my own, for that matter), I need to remember the Buddhist teaching of being in the present moment, accepting that everything changes, everything dies; that desire and clinging cause suffering and that letting go relieves it.

So with that, I will allow my flowers to live and die as nature sees fit (as if I had any other choice!), and will enjoy them while they’re here. I’ll try to make the most of my own moments while I’m here too, with as much acceptance as I can. And maybe I’ll finally return to my Zen meditation practice which always brought me such joy and peace, and made all of life more vibrant.

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Drawing Life in general Painting Sketchbook Pages Still Life Watercolor

Still Life for a Spring Cold

Still Life for a Spring Cold

Brown Micron Pigma ink and watercolor in homemade sketchbook, 5×7″ (larger)

Need I say more?

I had a quiet, restful weekend, got enough sleep, didn’t stand out in the wind painting, and what do I get for it? A cold! That will teach me to slow down. Maybe if I just keep moving as fast as I usually do, always staying busy, the darn bugs don’t have a chance to take hold. The minute I slowed down they went to work.

Or maybe the cold was already taking hold and that’s why I chose quiet indoor painting this weekend?

With some Vitamin C, tea with lemon, and chicken soup, I’m usually able to kick a cold in 24 hours. That’s what I’m counting on this time.

Categories
Gouache Painting Sketchbook Pages Still Life

Vegetable Medley to Celebrate: Taxes Done!

Vegetable medley

Gouache on hot-pressed Arches paper, 7×5” (larger)

To celebrate E-filing my taxes tonight I wanted to paint something bright, cheery (and low calorie to make up for all the chocolate I ate while preparing the return). For years I fueled my tax preparation with a big bag of Mother’s Iced Circus Cookies that I stuck in the freezer and munched on until my taxes were done. I needed all that sugar to be able to do the math, understand the forms, and reward myself for doing such an unpleasant task.

This year I skipped the toxic cookies (loaded with artificial color, flavor and hydrogenated fats but oh so yummy)…and bought organic, fair trade chocolate at my neighborhood health food store, El Cerrito Natural. I waited a week to let the tax returns “simmer on the back burner” to make sure I hadn’t forgotten anything. Then tonight I reviewed everything and clicked “Submit.”

It’s much easier to do taxes these days: Turbotax does the math and I just have to gather and enter all the information. But I still experience all the same old fear and loathing plus resentment at where my tax money goes. But it’s done for another year! Woohoo!

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Oil Painting Other Art Blogs I Read Painting Still Life Studio

Red Onion, Wrench & Lighting Still Lifes

Red Onion & Wrench

Oil on panel, 8×6″ (larger)

My favorite part of this quick oil sketch are the little flag or wing-like thingees on the top of the onion. I had a variety of problems with this painting, some of which I solved and some I didn’t.

I still haven’t gotten still life lighting worked out. I was about to build a set up like I saw on Carole Marine’s blog here and here, but discovered that while the pvc pipe she used is very inexpensive, the fittings are not. It was going to cost around $50 for the fittings and pipe so I decided to go back to using my 3-sided cardboard box still life “stage.” But my overhead full-spectrum fluorescent lights are right next to the table beside my easel, so it’s hard to block out the overhead light to prevent light sources coming from different directions.

I’ve also been experimenting with different kinds of light bulbs to direct at the still life, from color balanced fluorescents and incandescents to halogen. I even bought some sheets of colored photographic “gels” to use as filters on the lights to create a warm or cool light. So far nothing has worked as well as painting outdoors;  Mother Nature is the best.But in my neighborhood near the San Francisco Bay where it’s often foggy and windy and the light changes constantly, outdoor still life painting can be frustrating.

If you have any tips on lighting still lifes, I’d be most grateful to hear about them!

Categories
Art theory Oil Painting Painting Plein Air Still Life

Citrus and Camelia Plein Air

Citrus & Camelia Plein Air

Oil on panel, 9×12″ (Larger)

You really have to work fast to do a still life outdoors in the afternoon. In less than two hours the sun moved overhead far enough that I had to stop because everything was in shadow. I’d gotten all the objects and their shadows well blocked in and probably should have stopped there, calling it a sketch or a study. But of course I couldn’t.

I had to bring it into the studio to “just touch up the edges.” Then I was going to do another quick painting. But I spaced out and before I knew it, overworked areas that I’d originally painted very freely, made more problematic since I’d forgetten exactly what the pattern of light and shadow was on the objects.

Someday I’ll learn to stop while it’s fresh. Nevertheless, I think I did capture the feeling of a bright sunny afternoon, which was my main goal.

Categories
Life in general Sketchbook Pages Still Life Watercolor

Stanley 93E Box Cutter & Polish

Stanley 93E & Polish

Watercolor on hot press paper, 5 x 7″ (Larger)

Yesterday at work someone had left a strange little still-life set up on a table in the ladies restroom: a little cosmetic bag and a a heavy metal box cutter (well, to me it looked like a still life, probably nobody else would have thought so). I recreated it on my drawing table tonight, adding a bottle of nail polish that I keep in a similar cosmetic bag.

I like the way the box cutter came out looking like a fish with a little rooster comb on top (the brass thingee you push to move the blade in and out). It felt so good to do this painting after a frustrating day in which I never made it out of my pajamas.

Hamster Brain Part One

Fridays I work half a day from home, but today the half day stretched out into the late afternoon, due to problems needing my attention and because I got a late start due to spending a frustrating hour trying to reassemble my wonderful Capresso coffee grinder after finally receiving the missing part in the mail (it had fallen on the floor when I cleaned the grinder, and was promptly stolen and hidden by my plastic-gizmo loving calico cat Fiona). It turns out I’d put the burr grinder piece in wrong and it was jammed and I could not remove it and so the bean hopper wouldn’t screw back in on top. Now the whole thing needs to go back to Capresso for repair. Makes me think it’s time to give up coffee (again!).

It was the first sunny day in a long time and I wanted to get outdoors and paint…and I needed to get some exercise…and I had some errands and phone calls to make. Plus I had a bunch of studio art projects I wanted to do — some dream paintings, color exercises, and this one.

I got into one of those stuck places, going around in circles…I’ll go to the gym first, no to the store first, no outside to paint first, but really I should vacuum…I’ll just check my email….and around and around. I call it Hamster Brain, since it feels like running in one of those hamster wheels.

Finally, at 8:00 P.M. I pulled myself out of it, did about half an hour of Pilates (while simultaneously putting in my weekly call to my mother) and having accomplished both those things, got to my drawing table and made this picture. Now it’s 11:00 p.m. and I’m free! My weekend has begun and it will joyfully include exercise, painting, and as little erranding and hamstering as possible!