Category: Uncategorized

I’m reading a great book on Color by Stephen Quiller that I will review at a later date.  I tend to go a bit wild with colors.  Sometimes my tones are all too bright and there are so many colors it hurts your eyes and it’s hard to see the main focus from the background.

I decided to do a few paintings base on color schemes I’m learning from this book.  While I’m not fond of the still life, I did one in analogous colors with semi-neutrals for this exercise.  I used greens next to each other on the color wheel, a yellow green, viridian, and a blue green.  I mixed the yellow and the blue-green myself using the viridian.

Here is my palette:

 The colors at the bottom are the semi-neutrals where the opposing color from the color wheel was mixed, for instance quinicone red with viridian green.   This gave me a semi-neutral.  I added white to the main hue as well as the neutral to give me a larger palette.

I set up this still life:

 I then did the following painting with the idea of it being soothing and calm. 

Take 2 The Teddy Bears Go Camping

I posted the comment below on Facebook and an artist friend made some suggestions so here is Take 2 of The Three Teddy Bears Go Camping.  What she suggested was that I make the cold sky and background warmer and fill in the trees.  So here is the new and improved The Three Teddy Bears Go Camping

Take 1

I’m still trying to find a balance between careful clean brushwork and the more interesting combinations of  “dirty” brush.   I just bought a book on color theory which should help me.   I feel at this point I’m diving into too many colors at once and loosing clarity.  But I’m also getting interesting textures and brushwork.  

Sometimes the cow jumps over the moon and sometimes the brush runs away with the paint.  I have a fabulous picture of Tila rolling in the snow making a snow angel.  I really meant to try and do something realistic, but I’m finding I still have some impressionistic canvases that need to be painted.  It is as if the ideas are waiting in the wings and they are clamoring, “Me next! No Me!”.  

I have actually bought all the canvases I need for the ideas waiting in line.  And I’m sure when they are done, my muse will go out and fetch me some more.

So here is Spirit of the Snow Angel.  Some day I will try to do the realistic version, Snow Angel.   But when I tried this time the brush just ran away with the paint. 

This spring I heard many birds twittering and tweeting in my backyard.  And they did it without I-Phones!

I remember back in the day when someone said “Twitter” then it meant a noise birds made.  The logo for twitter.com is even Larry the Bird.  So I decided to call this painting “Twitter, The Original By Nature”. 

I also was playing around with glazing at the time and glazed many shades and layers on the cardinal.   So if you like it, Tweet it! 

I decided to take one scene and paint it three ways, a realistic the way “I think” a painting should be painted, an impressionistic, where I tried to paint the color and the light and the contrast, and a palette knife style.  I have since learned more about the impressionistic palette which I use in two paintings that will be the subject of a future post. 

So here is my reference photo.  The beautiful Blue Grotto in Malta.  On my honeymoon my husband and I actually visited this and this is one of our vacation photos.  Sadly, little motorboat after little motorboat arrived almost on a train schedule to this peaceful grotto.  In a another time it was probably a lovely place to sit in a boat, gently bobbing along, uncorking a bottle of wine and breaking some fresh bread and perhaps stealing a few kisses from one another.   However, we, along with others, came, looked, shot a few pictures and buzzed out again because there was a boat in front of us and one behind.

Now here is my favorite of the three.  The “impressionistic style”.  I somehow feel I captured more of the spirit of the place in this one.  But the photo is rock and water.  Easy peasy right?  NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!  I have since learned painting realistic rock is extremely hard (at least for me) and water as well is an “advanced” technique.

 Next, side by side are my realistic and impressionistic style.

 The realistic (right) seems to lack the “poetry” the impressionistic one has.  It seems a bit flat.

And lastly my palette knife technique.   This one was almost an afterthought and done on a very small canvas.  But I wanted to try this technique.

 One of the things I found very difficult with this is that the rock is almost all creamy white with very slight variations in it.  To try and give the depth and the texture I had to exaggerate, and almost intensify colors that were only barely visible.   I found this a challenging exercise.  After doing this I had a complex dream that caused me to look more at the impressionists.  Perhaps I’ll tell you a little about the dream in my next posting which will be about using the impressionistic palette.