Sunday, May 18, 2008

Eggplant part 2

The thing that's tricky with eggplant is the leaf thingy/stem has nowhere near the amount of contrast or richness that the body does. In other words it looks flat. So with the painting I took a bit of artistic licence and added some bolder colors so in the painting the leaves could hold there own.
A real life photograph can pull of things that a painting can't. If I left them alone and kept painting a pretty benign green-brown, it would look like there was something wrong with the painting, as opposed to the plant.
So what I did to help that out was I painted those leaves closer to sunset. There is a harsher shadow available, which gave me something to work with. I used dark browns but also a little bit of the watered-down purple that I did in the plant. Which really helps it hold it's own, and helps the leaves look like they belong on top of the eggplant. The photograph shown here was taken the morning after the painting, and in my kitchen under yellow-ish flourescent lights. Seee what I mean... your lighting changes everything.

Saturday, May 17, 2008

Eggplant painting



So here are some pictures of eggplants. I haven't finished them, cause the sun was setting and I was losing light. So I did what is usually a bad way to work on a painting: I completely finished both eggplants, instead of brinnging everything (both the background and subject) to level of completion. I marked the background in, and tomorrow will add lib it.

Sunday, May 11, 2008

Garlic Still Life


I thought this would be fun to play with subtle colors: white on white, and all the slight tints in between. This painting is gouache on gray printmaking paper, and is 4.75 by 6 inches. It's also fun to play with the color opposites. Opposite colors on the color wheel are called complimentary colors (purple & yellow, red and green, and orange and blue).

I took a color workshop class in high school taught by landscape painter Dwane Sabistan. He followed a lot of the work of Wayne Thiebaud, specifically Thiebaud's use of colors to create the illusion of form. He waould use complimentary colors (one for shadows and one for highlights) which naturally fight each other visually, to really make objects in his paintings "pop." Not that this is the most in depth study of that practice, but since I learned it early on, it has been a natural tendency for me to do.

In the Garlic here you have the lighter parts in warm whites and even shades of yellow. The midtones are brown, and some of the darker areas are a cooler brown. But the darkest shadows are purples. The yellow tones throughout the lighter areas are more exagerated by the purple shadows. It also is a great solution for painting shadows without black. Black anywhere in a colored painting can cause the painting to look flat and not as rich. Using dark colors for shadows instead make for more of a rich, lively piece. Also it makes it so the shadows can hold their own against the highlights.

Saturday, May 10, 2008

Painted Tree

Here is a piece I did today, just to get back in the swing of things. This is a tree outside my front patio. I have been looking for a source of grey printmaking paper, and this is all I could find. It's ok, but a bit of a grey-yellow. I think would like something a little darker and more of a true, flat grey because it would show off my colors better. Painted in gouache on grey printmaking paper. (6 inches by 4.75 inches) This is for sale... it comes matted and framed for $150.00 (black frame 16 by 20 inches, white mat).
I did several today, and I will be posting more of the paintings throughout the week so be sure to check back.