I still can’t render

I worked for hours on my apple painting (see below), and I’m still no better at rendering. Those brush strokes can be seen across the room. My values are good, it’s just that my blending is shite. And I’m going to half to keep doing the apples over and over again until I get it right.

Goals for the week:

1. Make some changes to the tree marsh painting, now called Baucis and Philomen after someone on a message board told me it reminded her of that story. I am going to gray out the marshes – not a lot, not enough to destroy the dramatic lighting – but enough to create more depth. And I am going to add a bit of detail at the base of the tree on the right.

2. Get a lot of work done on the monster portrait. I’m really wishing now that I hadn’t done this as a grisaille, but it’s too late now.
3. Keep glazing the portrait of Gus.

Next week I hope to start attending an open figure studio on Mondays, and shift my general painting class to another day.

Marsh Trees

I think this might be done. Oil on board, 12″ x 24″.

edit … no, I don’t think it’s done.

Dealing with multiple palettes

Right now I have several paintings going, and for each painting there is a different palette. When I paint grisailles, I use only grays. The palette I’m using for these coastal landscapes is different from the palette I’m using to glaze the portrait of Gus. And I’m about to do a still life using yet another palette. It’s started to get wasteful and confusing.

I think I will be getting a stack of those Masterson palette seals. Oil paint keeps for weeks inside one of those if you put it in the freezer. Our freezer is tiny, though, so I don’t think I’ll be doing much of that. However, it would be wonderful to just be able to grab the colors I need when I want to set one painting aside and work on another. I think a trip to the art store is on today’s agenda.

Amy Talluto is amazing!

Click here to check out her work.

Texture studies

I did these texture studies some time ago, and I found them today while going through some old drawings.
Top: Fabric
Middle: Tin foil
Bottom: Paper

Click to view larger. 

A work-in-progress

This is a work in progress. It’s oil on board, 12″ x 24″. I’ve got a long way to go yet. The chroma on the marshes is way too high; I’m looking for dramatic lighting but I don’t want my viewers’ corneas to get burned out. Also, I do not want to detract from the tree in the foreground. The painting is about the tree more than the setting.

October Morning, Lake Glenville, NC

I took this photo on Saturday, October 21st, around 8:30 AM. There was a lovely mist on the lake.

I’m not great at rendering

This is the current exercise I’m doing in my art class. I am to render the form of the apples using five values each for the light side, the mid side and the dark side. The lightest light starts with winsor yellow and white, the mid tone is cadmium red, and the darkest dark is a mixture of alizarin crimson and French ultramarine blue. In rendering I must make it perfectly smooth, as if an airbrush was used. And that is kicking my ass.

In art school before, precise rendering was discouraged. We were told to be bold and expressive with our brush strokes. This perfectly smooth stuff is really difficult for me. I definitely recognize the value in it – once I learn to have a precise level of control over the brush and paint, then I will be more free to do what I want, and this is something I need. But, I’m not above whining about how hard it is in the meantime.

Thursday

So I took the grisaille to my teacher to critique, and he obliged. He didn’t rip it to shreds, but he chided me for not adhering closely to what he’s taught – or, not adhering as closely as he’d like. He teaches a fairly rigid adherence to the use of certain formulas to make pictures look realistic. The formulas can be summed as: things closer to you have more contrast and things farther away from you have less contrast, and things that are most important have the most contrast. Good ideas all, but he took exception to how I applied them.

I’m different from the majority of his students in that I have prior art training and practice, and therefore while I do exactly what he says in class, when I get home I simply file away what he’s taught me to use in addition to what I already know. If I had painted the grisaille of Gus exactly as if it were a class exercise, I’d be frustrated, because the painting would not have communicated what I wanted to communicate.

However, he did have some useful commentary on how I painted the eyes. I am pretty rough at eye-painting and I need a lot of practice and study.

…

I’ve got several paintings going right now and ideas for more. The next few paintings I do will be on hardboard and in two sizes, since I got a couple of sheets from Home Depot cut in specific sizes. There’s a ton of reference material I’ve gotten in the past three months in North Carolina and on the coast. I suppose I should finish the ones I’ve started before starting new ones. My problem is that I’ve been approaching every painting differently and can’t seem to settle on one way of working. I guess I’m trying to integrate all that I’ve been learning.

About that grisaille.

I did that little grisaille of Gus on a whim starting last Thursday. I used Studio Product’s premixed grays set to do it. That set is one of the more useful art items I have ever bought. In addition to using it to do grisaille paintings, it’s also great for mixing into tube colors to lower the chroma. Anyway I’m trying to decide whether to tweak the grisaille, or start glazing and fix those little things as I go.

I’m also trying to decide whether I should take it in and show my teacher. It’s certain that his training on how to work with value helped me do this painting, but I have a feeling that if I show it to him, he will rip it to shreds, because that’s what art teachers do. I sound like a real wuss, don’t I? I guess I have to take it in now, after writing that. He does have a nasty habit of drawing on his students’ works. I will have to tell him up front that if he touches that painting, he’s lost a student. Politely.