Before/After

Dug around in my closet yesterday and decided to renovate an old painting to add in shading. This led to lots of other changes.  None of it was a quick process, given that I'm still training my eyes to see the effect of light, and translate shape onto the canvas more effectively, but the changes in the overall impact of the painting ended up being substantial.

Bite Wounds, before and after changes.  

Shifting Views

Artful Mistakes is on the move! I leave on Tuesday to begin the long drive to my new home in La Mesa, NM. 222 pounds of my books are already wending their way west courtesy of the magic of media mail.

Meanwhile, my living room is awash with more boxes. Unless I find a way to bend the laws of physics, shrinking some of that empty space between electrons perhaps, I will still have a stack of stuff significantly larger than the space available in my car. The next few days pre-departure should involve a lot of heavy lifting and UPS fees.

The cats are giving me increasingly dirty looks as more and more furniture disappears.  Clearly, I am up to no good. There will be yowling, they say, yellow eyes ablaze.  

Art thoughts have continued amid the chaos and goodbye lunches. I have managed to squeeze in a few last painting classes with my teacher Dana Ellyn, and so, in brief, here are a few painting updates.

Another portrait, Boxed In, which (once again) does not look like the original subject, went from here:

Boxed In, old version

to here,

Boxed In, more recent version. 

after reworking it in class. He seems to be rockin' an Edward Norton look a bit now.  

Bringing down his hairline widened his face. His hair looks somewhat more hair-like because of using a dry brush technique (although I need to fix that further); this will come up again as I rework other pieces and remove helmet hair issues.  I also widened his neck.

The largest changes, however, involved adding in shadows and light.  The first strokes of heavy shadow felt not at all right -- too much! too dark! too bold! -- but they brought the face further to life. True, he still doesn't look like the photo. But he does look more like a person and less like a cartoon.  

A note for painting men: no ruby red lips, lest they look like they are wearing lipstick. Lips are actually flesh colored, with the upper lip being slightly darker than the lower.  

Emboldened by the drastic difference in those changes, I dragged an old painting into another class. On Moonsoaked, Dana pointed out that, umm, the right arm was completely off, and possibly not physically possible, and it might be more attractive if her boob wasn't sliding around the front of her body (as in, add a crease line).

Old Moonsoaked

Once I started playing around with those issues, I started seeing where everything else was off.  So I moved her neck, which helped matters with her excessively large head.

Another class and consultation with Dana led to reshaping her butt and changing her elbows, and finally, addressing the lobster claw that was her hand.

Currently, she looks like this:

Moonsoaked Redux

The good news is that the detail on the hand really helps; the bad news is that now I'll have to go back again and add that level of detail elsewhere. Still, progress.

For right now, however, Boxed In and Moonsoaked are getting taped up in a box to prepare for a long car ride.

The Land of Enchantment, with its sunshine and light, and the 106 acres of my new locale, will bring all kinds of fresh perspectives, art and otherwise.

No Van Gogh

The faux Van Gogh (as discussed in this post), is now significantly further along

The faux Van Gogh, now further along. 

Progress now merits a photo, if, umm, no awards.  More details (on the flowers, particularly) and corrections necessary (what is up with the shadow?  And the vase is still weird), but closer.

Books & Flowers

In an effort to loosen the hold of my "Depression-era" painting style, where I use the skimpiest amount of paint possible (and have thin colors and coverage as a result), my next effort is playing around with mimicking a Van Gogh painting of flowers in a vase. His paintings, of course, have gobs of paint and fantastic texture.

When I started this painting out, I could easily recreate the background color -- but there it was, thin again, flat. It took me another try to really go for it and use lots of paint. Teacher Dana Ellyn kindly helped me out with my inherent cheapness/conservation suggesting using gel medium to thicken things up a bit without using more paint, and getting busy with a palette knife.

Here's what I can tell you about painting with a palette knife: it's way harder than it looks. Brushes provide a much larger measure of control than I had ever realized. I do now understand why art stores sell twelves different sizes of palette knives though; angle and flexibility make a difference.

Once you have those big lumps of paint on there, unlike my usual thin, thin coats of paint, the paint stays wet much longer, hence the term wet-on-wet painting. This is a lot more like painting with oils, which is good in that it gives you time to blend colors together...and bad because it gives you time to turn everything into a brown lump if you're not paying careful. Ask me how I know.

No photos of my painting yet, because it's still in too too ugly in beginning mode. When I crabbily grumbled to a classmate that it was no Van Gogh (rainy day blues), she pointed out that, eh, big deal, and besides, I was less likely to cut off an ear. Good point.

Oleanders by Vincent Van Gogh

Have a gander at the Van Gogh. It remains one of my favorites. Books and flowers: crucial elements of any good day.

Evolution of a Naked Man



Spent
acrylic on canvas
36 x 30

This one I painted a few months ago, futzed with endlessly, and then put aside because it still didn't capture what I wanted. The frustration of seeing something in your mind that you can't create plagues most artists, I imagine, even those with more developed technical skills. 

Still, he looks a whole lot more like a person than the creepy monster he started out as. I am learning something. Various stages are displayed in the clip below. 

Evolution of a Painting

For the first time in a long time, I attempted to paint people -- and it became an absorbing exercise.

Our models!

I started with a photograph (which I like to think of as models that don't move). I selected one with which I've actually always had a somewhat awkward relationship; I find something unsettling about their expressions. But that was exactly the draw in terms of painting: strong emotional content and body language.    

Edited photo

Then I edited the photography down to the composition I wanted, one highlighting their faces, and which also mirrored the scale of the canvas I would be using. I ended up moving them closer together so they fit better, hence the noticeable line at their shoulders.

Next, I printed out the photo on my black and white printer. Given that I was fairly sure I wouldn't be using the same color scheme, I was more interested in seeing the light and dark of shadows. And, well, I don't have a color printer. 

I folded that paper in quarters and drew the same guidelines on the canvas, with the hope that I wouldn't get so hopefully off that way. I used pencil -- bad idea, as I had to paint over it.  I'll use charcoal in the future, since that will smudge away when I no longer need it. I heard recently that some people now use projectors, but that seems a little bit like cheating to me.  And while I am trying to plan more, I like the unexpected that produces new directions, the discovery in the process of painting.   

The first completed draft of the painting looked like this:

First complete draft

This was after I'd redone her mouth twice and his nose once (with somewhat limited success, but hey, it's better than it was), but before I re-did both their eyes (so that, for instance, he no longer looked like he was wearing eye shadow) The first wash of the painting was a background shade, the light gold that you see coming through the window, was almost entirely swallowed by other elements, but somehow, it was nice to have that base color, rather than straight white.  And it turned out to be a happy accident - the idea of a growing, light-filled window connecting them on a symbolic level really worked for me so I eliminated the weird curtains from the photo, making the window both more central, but also its detail more diffuse.   

The painting as it stands now looks like this:

As it stands right now

I wouldn't say it's done, but it's resting for the moment, until I can come to it with fresh eyes.  Relative to the original photo, umm, ok, not exactly an amazing copy, no.  But I am pleased that they do a) look recognizable as people and b) have emotional exchange. 

I was reading more of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain last night as part of my project to be a little less inept in the drawing department. I have not yet comfortably gotten to the point where everything is just shapes with no symbolic value.  But I am starting to get a glimmerings of how that works, of being able to make that transition to a different kind of thinking when I'm working on art.  Progress, however, slow, is satisfying. One thing that amused me is that one of the items that often harder for beginners to draw (or paint, in this case) because of the high symbolic value is a shirt collar.  We think we know what it looks like, so we don't actually see it as it is. I definitely had that with her turtleneck, which, I am aware, looks more like a priest collar.

I also completely eliminated the hood of her coat, which instead turned into a background image, that of a couch under the window (which may not be clear to anyone but me, but that's what it is). 

Yes, a long way to go.  But progress. 

Afterall, let's consider many years ago, when during a very brief spate of painting, I tried to paint a face, and it ended up looking like this:

Eek!

Scary. 

And with no recognizable personality.

You can sort of see why I gave up on people for a while, given the inauspicious beginning.

But I'm going to keep going with the people this time. One recommedation I can make to new painters: if you have opportunity to use BIG canvases, go for it. My new painting is enormous -- 4 foot by 5 foot or so (part of the stash of old canvases with which I was gifted when I was living in in the artist's studio).  While it's a little daunting having larger than life people looking down on you, it's also much easier to put in details, as on that scale, even the details are broad strokes. 

Happy painting!

Kid Canvas Transformation

It takes a certain amount of hutzpah to start a blog, to proclaim I am So Sure that people out there in the world want to hear what I have to say. In normal life, we can see people's eyes glaze over if we wander into murky territories and clam up, but here in blog land, the rambling never stops.

Of course, it also takes a certain amount of guts to step out on the stage and give folks opportunity to take pot shots at my art. On that note, this weekend, I went out to Lewes, DE, again, to the Novak beach house to collect some prints, walk on the beach, and (the most fun) play with oil paints in the studio there. I have permission to work on unfinished canvases, so I started with a canvas that was clearly identified as a Kid Canvas (that is, a canvas Karen donated over to her children, presumably so she could do a little of her own painting as well).

So it started out looking like this:

This is what I did to it:

It's, uh, abstract. I'm thinking about calling it Squid's Garden.  Oil paints are way more forgiving than arcrylics in some ways, as you have more time to mess around with them, and blend them into each other.  I haven't quite figured out how to work with all the mixing, stand oil, stinky turpentine, etc., and different kinds of consistencies and brushes and such, but I had a great time experimenting with the possibilities, and occassionally pausing to dance to some very bad pop music on the radio.  A good weekend all around.