Becoming an Artist

For the new year, I've decided that before I start a painting, I'll note the goals for that painting session and/or the finished product if I'm not painting alla prima (in one session). I've sort of informally been doing this for the last couple of months, but now I want to consciously follow these steps: 1) write down my goals, 2) paint, 3) acknowledge that the painting is crap ( see previous post ), 4) note how I did or did not meet my goals, and finally, 5) create a next steps list. Of course, these steps won't be executed until I've done the all-important value studies! Last October I painted a lesson from Dreama Tolle Perry's Flow class , a cute carafe of cream with a white ceramic basket of strawberries. The basket didn't read "white" in my painting, which I didn't like, and I wanted to figure out why...but I wanted to use my own still life to do it.  So I set up a scene informed by Dreama but all my own. My scene used my own props to...

I'm continuing to work on my value studies and bouncing all over the place, both with subject and with medium. I swear that one of these days I'll find my lane. There are things I like and dislike about oils, acrylic, and watercolor. There's not a perfect medium, but oils sure are easier for working on composition and value.  As the year is coming to an end, I'm wrapping some things up and getting ready to launch other things. I went through my last three years of paintings (about 150) and categorized them as keep for myself, make available for gifts or purchase, or repurpose (at first I had labeled them trash, but that just seemed so mean, and I really can use the paper for other things). With the gift/sell category, I created a PowerPoint file with all available paintings, categorized by subject. Each was labeled and priced...a scary declaration on my part that my creativity is valuable. In the coming year, I will use this file to create a new website for my growing a...

What's the best way to create a value study for me? I'm trying to figure that out. And how to paint from it once I've done it? I'm trying to figure that out, too. Been re-reading Ian Roberts' Mastering Composition . Have re-dedicated myself to working on a value composition a day (my original goal). He promises that a year of these daily compositions will make a HUGE difference in my art. Even with the few I've done, I'm seeing improvement and I'm asking a lot more questions, which I think means I'm on the right track for me right now.   Overall, I've done five value studies of the rose, and it's getting tedious. But each one had me asking another question, so I continued on. It was a great exercise, trying different methods. I should have done one last one, a pencil sketch, but I've run out of steam. What's interesting, though, is that they all look similar yet different. Referring to the quad image at right, the simplest studies (3 ...

 As mentioned in my last post, I've signed up for Dreama Tolle Perry's Flow class. My intention with this class is to watch one of her demos and replay it while I paint along with it, recreating "her" painting. Then I plan to take what I learned in that demo and create "my" version. Eventually, I'd like to paint my version in oil, acrylics, and watercolor...trying to figure out which medium I prefer.  The first oil painting demo I chose to watch was a backlit rose in a small glass jar. I love roses, and when I ventured into oils the first time, I painted a lovely rose from my garden. This is the only painting from that era that I liked. As a side note, I have nine hybrid tea roses and four floribundas around the house. And since I'm in northern California, there are blooms on these plants for nine months out of the year! What a treat.  I really should paint these beauties more often.  I'm happy with both paintings but for different reasons. The p...

My gelato oil painting from the  introduction to oils lesson in Dreama Tolle Perry's "Flow" class.   Three years ago I temporarily gave up watercolors and embarked on a oil painting journey. I had experienced a watercolor meltdown (yes, it's a thing) during a plein air vacation, so I spent the last day watching a fellow painter render a scene in oils. WHOA, oils are so much more forgiving than watercolors! OK, so I bought myself some oil paints,  new gear,   read some books and dabbled a bit, then signed up for a three-day plein air oil painting class with a famous local artist. Then I promptly gave up oils. They are messy and thick, and it's impossible to pull a nice watercolor wash with them (duh). John F. Carlson  recommends in his famous landscape painting book to start your painting career with oils and to not touch watercolors for at least a year. Too bad I hadn't read that ten years ago. And John Singer Sargent said that to paint watercolors is to ...

I'm rereading Carlson's Guide to Landscape Painting, as I've decided that I really miss painting landscapes, especially in plein air, but the reason I stopped doing it was because I wasn't happy with my results and I wasn't making progress (ugh, watercolors!). Carlson's book is  DENSE. I gave up highlighting it because almost every paragraph would need a highlight, but I am typing up notes as I read, with the hopes of eventually creating a cheat sheet for myself.  One of the first lessons he writes about is his "theory of angles," where, for an average landscape, the sky, ground, trees, and mountains have certain relative values. Thinking about the six studies I just completed , I realized that I had arbitrarily assigned the sky a mid value, to make the house more the focal point, but according to Carlson, the sky should be the lightest value of the natural objects. Oops. So I redid the value study, using his theory. I kind of like it. Looks more ...

Progress on my value study a day? Slowed to a halt. But I have been making progress and moving forward on my goal of considering myself an artist by the time this Corona Virus ordeal is over. Mostly working on things that make me happy during this summer of staying home. No need to add any more stress to the anxiety we all already feel.  For the past week, I've been using a  previous value study  to work on my my color theory knowledge while continuing to explore acrylics. I'm not a new-comer to color theory. It's a subject I love and find fascinating. But I will say, there's a difference between reading about it and actually using it for a painting.  I picked up a used copy of Stephen Quiller's  Acrylic Painting Techniques , and I've been devouring it. (I have several other books by him; his theories aren't new to me, but they were challenging to use with watercolor). The first exercise asks you to paint six small, simple paintings using two complementary c...

Value studies #14, #15, #16. I thought I was getting better, but then I realized they really don't look like anything. Oh no.  Took a little break there. Not a good one. Prescription drug-related side effects. But I've got the issues worked out (I hope) and I'm back to work on my year of value studies. (I'm also rereading " Coaching the Artist Within ," by Eric Maisel, which is a GREAT book to use to tame the inner critic so that you/I can get back to making art.) A few days ago I watched a great promo teaching video from the Tucson Art Academy Online on value. Afterwards, I created three value studies from vacation photos. Studies #14 and #15 are from the same photo, but they don't read as masses that make up an interesting scene. Study #16 reads as three distinct value masses, but you really don't know what it is (a canyon in Zion). I'll need to think about these some more. Barn near Holdener Park, Livermore, CA Meanwhile, I reread ...

Composition #12, working on value masses. Today I challenged myself to create my value composition in five minutes. The goal was to construct a landscape, loosely based on a photo I took at Arches National Park, with a focus on distinct value masses. I set my timer and got to work. When it buzzed, I took a few more minutes to see if I had a "papa, mama, baby" distribution of lights, darks, and mid-values. I didn't, so I reworked the composition a bit until I did. Success. Papa: mid-tones. Mama: white. Baby: black. My finished landscape.  I then worked out a color palette for my small (5"x7") test painting, choosing a triadic color scheme of yellow ochre, naphthol red, and both phthalocyanine blue and ultramarine blue. I added in titanium white and that crazy baby blue I'm using up (see it in the sky), and started painting. My goal: staying true to my value plan. Overall, I'm pleased with my little painting. I think it holds true to my value ...

Untitled. Abstract following composition #11, trying to find some peace and joy in these crazy times. This morning I woke up angry. It started with the crow at 5 a.m., and I never got back to sleep. But really it might have been the day before, when I went to work in my studio and decided on four things I wanted to get done. I tackled the hard one first, a full-scale drawing for a "real" painting I'm working on. That took an hour and a half, at which time I was tired, hungry, and had a headache. I never got back to the studio to finish the other three. I enjoy drawing, and this morning when I looked at the drawing, it actually made me smile. So I'm not sure why I was so angry about my studio time yesterday. I drew on drawing paper instead of directly on my painting, so I can reuse it for future paintings. It was time well spent! I think my anger (maybe it's just frustration) has something to do with how "easy" making art is for everyone else and ho...

Trying different color approaches using open acrylics and composition #7. Recently I realized it might make sense for me to have three painting projects going on at a time: a landscape, a floral, and a still life to use as a vehicle to hone my skills. I've never been one to work on multiple paintings as I get confused (read frustrated) easily, and I haven't had enough time to work this way. (OK, I admit, I haven't prioritized enough time to do that. I could have easily fit in some art time by not watching Big Bang Theory reruns.) Trying two versions of my scene, one that focuses on the sky and one that focuses on the land.  Here's the interesting part—I'm already starting down this path, almost by accident. I finished composition #9, which is round two of trying to figure out a scene from Arches National Park. I think I'm getting somewhere! I like the second version better, which surprised me as it was the sky that originally drew me to the scene....

So much for posting every day, for doing a daily composition. I am moving forward but being kind to myself when my progress is slow. When I wasn't working on my compositions because I was—once again—discouraged, I spent several hours loading my photos from my new camera into the classic version of Lightroom. I had been using the cloud version, was frustrated, and my husband had determined that the desktop version would suit both our purposes better. So I had a chance to revisit my 500+ photos from our trip to Arches National Park over Christmas. I also applied the "auto" filter to many of the photos, and poof, like magic, the photos were taken from good to amazing. I have some really good photos in the bunch! It got me to thinking, why aren't I satisfied with the photos as a means of artistic expression? Why do I want to paint from them? What can I not express by printing/sharing the photos that I want to express via painting? And furthermore, what do I want to ex...

Over Christmas we spent three days in Moab. Glorious. Arches National Park is one of my favorite places in this country (not that I've seen everything I want to see yet). We both had new cameras and set out to capture this beautiful park. We first entered on Christmas day after a fresh snowfall. No one was there, literally. So amazing. I didn't do any sketching or creative journaling when we were there and I regret that now, five months later. I wish I had captured my feelings there and then; now I have to rely on memory. Both weak. Need to try again. It would have been so easy to do one of these composition sketches right there, in the car, with the scene directly in front of me. Then pull out my mini travel watercolor set and capture some of the colors and values that were intriguing to me, along with a few words to describe the joy I was feeling. But I didn't. It was cold, it would take time, I just wanted to "be" and not do. About a month ago, working ...

And the winner is, #9! This morning I reread the first chapter in Patti Mollica's book, How to Paint Fast, Loose, and Bold , in preparation for today's composition practice. I have to admit, doing the pear again sounded pretty boring and I really wasn't looking forward to it, but I'm SO BORED of the day in and day out sameness of sheltering in place that I decided my daily composition couldn't be any worse. Besides, I was curious about one of the methods Mollica suggests: using white and black drawing tools on gray paper. I knew I had bought a gray sketchbook last year that I'd never used; took 30 minutes to find it. And I remembered the cutest Conte Crayon stocking stuffer I had bought, I don't know, 10 years ago and had never used (seeing a pattern here?), and luckily we still had a pear in the house. (By the way, I've been drawing Packham pears, which are quite oddly shaped.) Today I decided to work in a square format, thinking that maybe, eve...

Composition #6. Unclear values; boring arrangement. Ended my five-day streak and took a day off from these maddening compositions. The next day, for composition #6, I set up my three Roshi teapots and lit them from the side to noodle on an idea I've had rolling around in my head. These teapots are HEAVY. And when I think of them, I think solid, strength, reliability. I thought a horizontal composition would support that concept. An hour later, I had a three-value drawing with five values, an awkward light pattern that seemed inexplicable, no focal area, and an idea that's a dud. Even my husband thought the layout was a tad boring (he was trying to be supportive). UGH. The only good thing was that I got to draw my teapots, which I enjoyed greatly. The one on the left looks like a cantaloupe, the middle is a beautiful grayed violet, and the tiny one on the right is a patterned white. Luckily for me, a book I ordered several weeks ago, to help me learn acrylics, arrived: H...

For composition #5, I searched the backyard again. (I miss Sycamore Grove park.) Not much in the backyard, especially at 4 pm, before the sun is low in the sky. This morning I had reread the section on armature in Ian Roberts' book, and I was looking for an armature that would hold my daily composition together. Something easy, preferably. Composition #4, with mutated chair. It turns out I had used a triangle armature (converging lines) without even thinking about it in my single pear composition (the two lines where the table top meets the wall). And my area of interest fell on those lines. These are all good things. I just wish I had done them on purpose instead of by accident. So when I set out to find something to work on in the backyard, I kept the possible armatures from the book in my head. There were some nice shadows across the patio and sliding glass door, so I positioned one of our patio chairs in the light, half shade, half shadow, creating (so I thought), a ni...

Composition #4. I think this one works.  Yesterday I realized that I had messed up my values after seeing the black & white photo, but it turns out, I was only partly to blame. It was that red filter I used to help me see the values. Turns out that a red filter doesn't see value in red the same way as it sees other colors. Probably something about wavelengths of light, but I don't want to study that right now. For my still life, I had used a red sheet of paper for part of the background, and the filter read that a lot lighter than it actually was. My quick, small acrylic painting. Finally, I get the composition/painting duo done in one session. A quick Google search reveals that a lot of artist use TWO filters, a red and a green. I suppose that makes sense, for instance, in the case of landscapes, where one scene could have a lot of trees and another could have a lot of red land (Sedona!). I might buy a green one to add to my art kit, but then again, maybe after c...

Grayscale photograph of simple still life.  I've been rereading Carol Marine's book (and thinking I should change back to oils as acrylics are only slightly easier than watercolors) and came across her three-value wording: dominant, secondary, and smidge. Of course, everyone talks about mama, papa, baby (which I first read in Tony Couch's amazing book, Watercolor: You Can Do It ). So I set about to create a very simple still life to force three distinct values, each being of a different size. This was more of a challenge than I thought it would be! Composition #3. The intention was that the light value be "dominant," the dark value be "secondary,"  and the medium value be the "smidge." OOPS. And composition #3 STILL took me 30 minutes to draw/shade (plus another 15 minutes to set up the still life). Here's my critical voice chirping in...I'm not happy with the drawing; wish it were more accurate. But the values! Now I'm c...

Oh, values. The bane of my art existence. Why can't I get this? We're talking basics here, but I just can't seem to translate what I see/want to paint into something that is effective from a value point of view. So for composition #2, I dug into my plein air bag (dusty from long storage), and pulled out some tools I bought years ago and never really used: the EASyL Viewfinder and ValueComp from Artwork Essentials. Composition #2. Started as a rectangle but the value masses looked better in a square format. Since it was a beautiful spring day and we're still under shelter-in-place rules, I walked around the backyard with the red film to my face until something came into view where I could see three distinct values (light, medium, dark). It actually wasn't easy to find. Most everything was mid-tone. Anything I would have considered painting in the past was mid-tone. Even light shading an object was not enough to create a "value mass," as Ian Roberts s...

So, reader, let's jump right in. It's week six (or so) of California's shelter in place for Covid-19 and after much thinking, journaling, dabbling, I've decided once and for all I want to "figure out" this art stuff or quit. Well, maybe not quit, but at least decide not to be a "real" artist and instead just play. The problem is, it's not in my nature to just play. Composition #1. My drawing skills are rusty, to say the least. Here's the plan I've been using for years, which really hasn't been working: order more books, watch more videos, buy more online classes, take more in-person classes, try this method and that method, get confused, go insane; repeat. But with all this time on my hands and no outside distractions, I've had a chance to ponder, what do all these other artists I admire have in common? I've decided it's a dedication, a plan, a method of self-study. So I've borrowed from a few of my heroes, and I...