Just a Tad

Pushing Outside the Comfort Zone

Gotta admit to a big screw up right up top. I added a darker blue pastel pencil to vignette the image. However, when I went to put wax on the painting, I was thinking "watercolor pencils." The difference is that you can smear protective wax medium on watercolor pencil, no problem. When you do that to pastel, it makes a huge mess. I corrected it a bit in photoshop in the above version.

On the plus side, by not coating it with wax, I was able to go back in and reactivate the paint to make corrections, mostly for the better. Normally, I put on wax when I'm tired of working on the painting, or think it's finished, or to purposely seal it to move on and avoid over working it. But here I made subtle corrections that really helped.

I painted this from a news photograph. It was a simple composition with the challenge of capturing the glow of the candle on the center woman, along with the warm light hitting her face from out of frame. I didn't quite get what was in the photo but I think it's a striking color scheme. I see that I wiped over the mask strings around her ear. But the net result of the changes are positive.

What's really outside my comfort zone is the fact that I'd try her face at all. I haven't tried close up humans since my cosplaying vikings piece. Human faces are just more shapes with varying values and color temperature. They should be no different than painting a flower. But we know what humans are supposed to look like. When it's a little off it can quickly look weird, even alien.

I'm still not sure what I want to do with painting. All these things I'm trying in my sketchbook are about getting more comfortable with the basics. Ultimately, I think I want to do more fanciful things. Early on. I planned on doing a western painting of cowboys riding herd on a bunch of giant bees. I did a test painting of a single bee and decided I had more to learn. Still may return to that one. But for now, I'm trying to get good enough so that I can do a decent job of getting my imagination down on canvas. Actually, more likely a heavy weight watercolor paper.

Here's the un-shopped image.  Stay safe!

Palette Challenge

My palette was a bit messier than this after I finished some tinting exercises. Actually, not exercises really, just answering my own questions about how certain earthtones looked as they were mixed with more and more white. But painting little squares takes very little paint which left a lot untouched. Even though I paid for my paints from the money I earn at cons, my "fun money" if you will, I hate to waste paint.

So I decided to try a painting or two using along with permanent white. I think I add some Cadmium Red to the second image but other than that it was all from leftover paint. The "downside" of this is that much of the painting is more like working with watercolor because there's no really juicy paint to dip the brush into. But it still can get thick enough to be opaque. My first painting was of a landscape just outside Sedona, AZ. That's Bell Rock on the left. I have one work in progress shot.

I laid in the basic colors quickly. I should have continued to work the whole painting, but instead I started with the foreground and cliffs on the right. I increased contrast and added details. Fell into some of my overworking habits on the cliffs and they began to look like a row of cylinders instead of a flat cliff face. Then life intervened and the painting sat on my easel where I saw it everyday. I kept thinking about what I needed to do: try to get the cliffs to look flat and recapture some of the glow of the light on its face that I had earlier then add more contrast to Bell Rock. But I wasn't looking forward to it.

Finally, I looked at it and remembered the wonderful question my wife had asked months before, "Isn't it supposed to be fun?" I decided to just take the tape off and call it done. I'm constantly berating myself for overworking the paint and realized that Bell Rock looked fine as a loose representation that looked fine. I will definitely be returning to the red rocks. We used to vacation there all the time and I want to be ready to really paint them pleine air.

The process of creating the painting below was the opposite experience. I think it came out great. I can tell because I look at it and can't believe I did it. Done all in one day, I loosely blocked in the major colors, concentrating on placing the darks. It might have gone even more quickly if I wasn't bingeing a rewatch of Ted Lasso. It's from a photo from the Paris catacombs but I pushed more color into it. I didn't worry about copying the photo exactly. I was more interested in controlling the focus to concentrate on the front skulls.

That catches me up to where I am now with a painting started on my easel from this morning. I stopped after laying in the basic colors because the paper buckled and I needed it to dry more. And then democracy was threatened by insurrectionists storming the Capitol building in Washington DC and I felt the need to watch.

 

Stay Safe!    -- Tad

Rusty Birds

More painting from life, albeit just another spot in the backyard. This is a wind mobile in the garden, a pair of very rusty birds balanced on a simple cup at the top of a pole. Why not? The point was to get out and do something.

I have to say that I didn't like this painting for most of the time working on it. I don't have any process photos so you'll have to take my word for how messy and mediocre it was. But ultimately I embraced the idea that the artist is not a camera. Yes, the foreground bird is too small and I wish I could change that without wiping out what's there, but at some point I tried making it a better painting instead of an accurate representation.

I left out the black steel fence that's behind the scene. The vertical shadow at the tip of left wing of the right bird, and another over the bend in his right wing were completely random. However, as I look at them now, they suggest how subtly I could have laid in the fence, putting all the blue grey foliage behind it, where it actually is.

Probably because I was working with a limited palette of the colors left from the previous painting, I was frustrated that I couldn't get closer to the color of the large bush. As I shifted to the mindset of the painter instead of a photographer, I stopped worrying about it. I worked in cooler colors around the left bird to make it pop more. I also made the shadows on the stucco cooler, as well as some of the underside shadows on the birds.

Ultimately the stucco is one of my favorite things in this one. If I painted an adobe mission doorway like this, it could be really striking. My wife loves the rust on the birds.

I'm learning that even when I don't feel completely in control when trying to match painted color to life, I can still produce something I like. Again, it's just a page in a sketchbook. I'm not producing "masterpieces" meant for sale. I still can't dive into a painting with complete confidence but working through it doesn't feel as arduous.

                                             --Tad