Lemons in Paint

Both were painted in Super bright daylight. These were in the sunshine. Even though I was in the shade, the sun was bright enough to illuminate everything. It also causes an influence on the colors. The white appeared superbright when painting, but when I took it inside the whites of the rind looked more like a very pale yellow. Also the yellow of the lemons has a bit of an orangy-ness to them. Still fun to paint, and these were quick: 3 hours from set up to clean up, and I got two paintings out of it.

Oil paint on 4x4 inch gessoboard.

Plans for a new painting series

When I daydream that I will actually have the time to carry out one of my ideas, I tend to imagine painting. Or I should say, images in my head that I would like to execute in one way or another. The funny thing is I see these images in time: moving, or my perspective moving around them, giving them a 3-d feel. It's hard to explain. It's also hard to translate into a finished artwork, because a moving image means I can't exactly memorize it as it is, the vision is always morphing or changing.

One Series I have been wanting to create is the a series of figures that are being taken over by an element. The images here are for earth. "Being taken over" is probably a bad description. They are not really moving toward or away from the element in question they are half element, half human (or half figure). This is a multilayered idea: I wanted the opportunity to take my drawings and make them more permanent (pencil and paper do not seem like they will survive to me), and I wanted an opportunity to marry some styles and paint from my head in the same way I draw from my head (as opposed to a model or reference).

Shown above is the original drawing (and detail), which I liked a lot and so I wanted to record it before I messed it all up with nonsense. I'm offerring you all a close up so you can scrutinize my drawing style. When I was in highschool, studying drawing I would draw every last detail and it would take forever. Great results, but it made me hate the thought of drawing because it was so boring and labor intensive. I have lost my patience and now do this quicker sketchy style, which to me has more "AhA!" moments. Lovely lines that surprise me, making me look at the piece and think, "Wow, I did that?" Plus it is a lot more expressive. I'm not trying to make everything perfect, and because I'm a little lax on the location of body parts, things become a little more elongated, angular, etc. It's also due to the fact that I left my hand move through it's natural rotation more, being to lazy to pick it up and move it. It all works out in the end.

Finished eggplant painting

So Here is the finished eggplant piece for your viewing pleasure. The shadows were indicated by lines when I left off, and haven eaten the eggplant, I couldn't do the shadows/background from observation which leads to me doing a vague and non descript background, which is fine, considering the subject matter.

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.

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.

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.

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.