How I learned to paint from imagination at age 48 (part 2)

October 4, 2020March 4, 2021 ~ jcaritas ~ 3 Comments

In my last post, I wrote about programs that have helped me begin to overcome the main challenge in learning to draw: understanding form in 3-d space. In this post, I want to give a shout out to my absolute favorite resources in a bunch of different categories. And hey, if anyone’s reading this and wants to share theirs as well, please do!!

Anatomy

Proko’s anatomy classes are da bomb, no doubt. But for me, the benefits of them were the model poses (and subsequent draw-alongs) and the e-books. Sure, I’d watch the videos, and they were cute and sometimes laugh-aloud funny — but I don’t really learn that way. I’d watch them once, but any information I absorbed was really through the e-books — videos are simply too fast for my middle-aged brain. Sometimes, unfortunately, the e-books didn’t show enough different poses to make me understand (especially with the forearms — don’t know what God was thinking with those things) and in those cases I needed other references. I have lots of anatomy books, but the ones I find myself referring to most often, are:

Artistic Anatomy by Paul Richer and Robert Beverly Hale. Honestly, this is less of a shout-out than a half-hearted mumble. I don’t particularly like this book: Most of it is text (I wonder if anyone, anywhere has ever read it?), and the limited number of drawings at the end are really grainy and, again, limited in number. BUT every muscle is labeled, and we do see at least a few different angles of each body part, making it the best book I have for looking up a particular muscle by name. If anyone knows of a better one, though, do tell.

Morpho, Simplified Forms by Michel Lauricella. This is a teeny tiny book of unlabeled sketches of different body parts, with muscles broken down by group rather than individually. When I have trouble getting my mind around the shape of something (such as those dang twisty forearms), it’s been helpful to refer to this to see it broken down into its, well, simplified form.

However, my most favorite of all anatomy books is:

Anatomy for Sculptors by Uldis Zarins and Sandis Kondrats. This is the most money I’ve ever spent on a book. Ever. I think my fingernails were sweating as I pressed the order button. But I don’t regret buying it — what I regret is all the other ones I bought when I should’ve just pulled the trigger on this one to begin with. What I like about this book is that each area of the body is photographed in several different poses, and then each of these photo sets is repeated with the muscle groups overlayed in a particular color. This same color is used every time you see those muscles in other poses, so it really clarifies what’s happening when a particular muscle seems to be in the neck in one pose and the butt in another (perhaps a SLIGHT exaggeration). Like this:

There’s very little text or labeling here, but they do have helpful little asides throughout that help you understand some of the trickier areas. Like this:

Nope, still not getting it. But most people probably will. (As an aside: One odd thing about this book is that many of the women models seem taken from Pornhub [ahem — so I’m told] while the men have pixelated, um, parts. Personally, this latter fact doesn’t bother me — most likely I wouldn’t be drawing those parts anyway in my eventual goal of illustrating children’s books. But, FYI.)

Facial Expression and Portraiture

As much as I like Proko for anatomy, he really phoned it in with his portrait class. Honestly, it offered so little value above the free content that I actually wrote and complained. (And if they’d offered me anything other than excuses you wouldn’t be hearing about it now. KARMA.)

This category has one VERY clear winner:

The Artist’s Complete Guide to Facial Expression by Gary Faigin. If you’re interested in narrative art, you MUST buy this book. If you’re interested in portraiture, you MUST buy this book. The beginning chapters break down each feature in great detail, with finished drawings that indicate how each is affected by age and sex. Later chapters break down how each feature is affected by the six basic emotions — sadness, anger, joy, fear, disgust, and surprise — and the nuances in between (the differences between horror and terror; between the [surprisingly similar] grief and laughter). In addition to the very finished portraiture examples, the author also includes an encyclopedia of emotions represented in more of a cartoon style, to really synthesize what each feature is doing in each expression. Ever been completely mystified by how the Pixar folks achieve those micro-expressions? It’s all in the facial muscles. This book will give you the key.

I’m currently leaning on this book heavily as I attempt to draw a picture of a girl jumping up after being frightened by a bear while camping:

Lighting

Color and Light by James Gurney. Once again, I feel like I’m choosing all of the books that everyone seems to know already, but there’s a reason a classic is a classic. Whether or not you appreciate Mr. Gurney’s style, he knows his stuff when it comes to lighting a scene. This book is geared toward painters, but the principles are applicable for anyone. It’s not a read-through book — more of an encyclopedia — but mine is already well-worn and I’ve barely begun in my “art journey.”

Clearly, Mr. Gurney could’ve lighted this better.

Each principle is allotted one page, with a smallish amount of text, and a few examples from the author’s own work. The writing is very accessible, and it’s brief and clear enough for you to completely absorb it when you’re in the middle of a project and looking for the solution to an art puzzle. While much of it is beyond what I’ll probably ever need, it’s answered all the questions I’ve had so far, and the rest is there when or if I’m ready. Drawing an underwater scene and want to understand how the light should be distorted? Don’t know where to begin with a limited palette? Gurney’s your man.

Alright, I’m going to be lame and stop here — breaking out my other suggestions to a Part Three. Apparently, I’m a prattler, and I’m also tired — after all, I’m now fift— now a little older than I was last week.

Stay tuned!

Never too late: How I learned to draw from imagination at age 48 (part one)

September 30, 2020February 1, 2021 ~ jcaritas ~ 8 Comments

Last weekend, I had a birthday. I turned fif–. Excuse me. I turned fift-.

Still working on that. Suffice it to say, it was a big one.

When I started this blog, I was just a tender, nubile lass of 48. My goals — apart from the bathtub full of money — were to motivate myself to keep up with an art and writing practice, and to have a record of my progress. I’d imagined I could be a resource for people wanting to learn to paint: I could pass on what I learned in my studies, and any readers I had could learn side-by-side with me.

I’ve since learned that people prefer to learn from folks who know what they’re doing. Go figure.

So in this (two-part) post, I’m going to turn it over to the experts. All of the resources that have brought me “aha” moments. But first, a bit of history.

I was not a kid who drew. That was Richie Lamb (SO cute). I was the kid who loved to read, and who wrote short stories, and who wanted to be a veterinarian. In college, I was an art history major, but only because I liked pretty things and had no idea what I wanted to do with my life (I’d discovered that being a vet was the world’s saddest job). I took a drawing class there, as well as a few other drawing and painting classes throughout my adulthood, and then started weekly painting classes at The Art Academy at the culmination of this blog.

You’ve probably taken similar drawing classes. The teacher puts apples on the tables, and everyone does their best to make their apple look better than the person’s sitting next to them. Every few moments someone sticks their pencil out in front of them to measure the exact angle of their stem. The next week it’s bottles. Bottles are harder, and people studiously try to capture the itty bitty reflections and the lettering on the label. You think yours looks pretty good, compared to the person sitting next to you.

At The Art Academy, it was the same. “There’s no reason to know how to draw in order to paint,” our teacher would say. “Just use your brush as an angle machine.” And so we drew with grids, breaking our canvas into squares and measuring every angle with our brush handles until it was a decent — if robotic — outline of the picture propped up next to us.

Doing this weekly, I got better at it. I no longer relied on my “angle machine” for every line — I could judge the direction and steepness of most of them closely enough. If someone had asked me at that point if I could draw, I would’ve said “Sure, if I’m looking at something.”

But if I tried to draw WITHOUT looking at something, it would look like this:

(That’s a person, by the way.)

WTF? What was I missing? How were some people able to create entire scenes of things that never happened? As much as my teachers tried to convince me that “anyone can learn to draw,” I really believed that only the Richie Lambs of the world (sigh!) would ever do it well. There was something I simply wasn’t born with.

When people who can “see” as an artist try to teach someone who can’t, it either comes off as overly tangible (a cat is simply two circles with five rectangles sticking out of them) or as so much mumbo jumbo (drawing is “seeing,” “believing,” “a lie”). And while I now know that much of that mumbo jumbo is actually true, it does little to help people understand what missing ingredient separates those who can from those who can’t.

I want to back up for a second, because I don’t want to come off as pretending to be some great artist. Clearly I am NOT. But the difference between where I started at 48:

… and where I am at fif– ahem — where I am now:

…is the difference of starting to SEE — of being able to put lines on paper and feel my way around a shape in 3d space, knowing as I do so which way I need to move, and more accurately discerning when I’ve judged incorrectly.

Clearly I’ve become fluent in mumbo-jumbo-ese. So I’ll just give you the regimen (part one).

Drawabox.com. To use a cliche, this is the equivalent of playing scales. It’s the most basic of basics — retraining your muscle memory to draw with your arm rather than your wrist, creating hundreds of boxes and checking how close you got to meeting at their vanishing points. Then cylinders. Then, if you want to go further, organic shapes like leaves. For some people, this would be unimaginable drudgery, but I’ve always thrived on this sort of busywork, especially when I feel like I’m laying a foundation. Every time I needed a break from work, or I was bored and waiting for something, out came the sketchbook. It took a couple of months of drawing boxes, but I was eventually able to visualize them in different positions, and fairly accurately draw them to their vanishing points. (I wasn’t quite sure yet WHY this was helpful, but I went with it.) And it became second nature to use my arm rather than my wrist for longer strokes, making my line quality much more confident and sure. (Bonus: Their content is FREE!)

Proko.com. After I’d gone as far as I wanted with Drawabox, I needed a new daily regimen. A friend of mine suggested Proko for figure drawing, and I jumped right in with the paid version (they have loads of free stuff as well; I can’t vouch for that). After months of drawing nothing but boxes and cylinders, it was a relief to draw humans, but… I’ll be honest: I sucked. I’d hoped to be further after my months of drudgery. It was true — definitely, unquestionably true — that my line quality was better. But comparing my ability to capture gesture from the model poses with that of the uber-talented instructor was humbling and disheartening. Much of the time, my “bean” (a form made from two oblongs that we used to synthesize the shape of a pose) was facing the wrong direction; on no occasion was I within the realm of accurate. Had I learned nothing? Furthermore, in his video critiques, the instructor kept criticizing students for “drawing the contours,” which seemed to me the art-equivalent of the thoroughly unhelpful “don’t be afraid of the ball.” If not the contours, what was I supposed to be drawing?

One of the issues I was finding was that Proko models are bumpy. Covering their arms, legs, and torsos were muscles I didn’t know existed (sorry, dear husband!) and that seemed to be in different places in every pose. While we could ignore these while drawing “the bean,” eventually the instructor was adding many of them to his drawing as “landmarks.” I couldn’t understand this. The church on the corner is a landmark, because it’s ALWAYS ON THE CORNER. It doesn’t sometimes appear two blocks up and shaped like a bank.

I realized that I didn’t know enough about the human body to be able to draw it intuitively. I was drawing the bumps, but I didn’t know what the bumps were, so I was once again simply relying on my “angle machine.” I’d always heard that you shouldn’t study anatomy until you’re comfortable with gesture, or your figures will be stiff, and that might be good advice. But I didn’t think I’d be capable of drawing gesture without better understanding anatomy. So I doubled down and invested in the 3-part Proko anatomy class. (Full disclosure: I attempted to memorize the dictionary in high school because I thought it would help me with my SATs. That’s just how I roll. This process may be more than many people need.)

This is where I started to understand what I’d gained by starting with Drawabox. When faced with an entire, contorted, bumpy body, I’d been overwhelmed and stymied. But when faced with drawing, say, the form of a ribcage, and then eventually visualizing where that ribcage would be placed, and how it would be rotated in certain poses, it was much more manageable to understand how it lived in 3-d space. My drawings — compared with the instructor’s drawing of the same — began to be more accurate. What’s more, I learned and began to understand the bones and muscles, so I was able to see the “landmarks” — tiny depressions or curves that were sometimes mere shadows on the surface but that helped to define form and proportion, and place other features.

Have you ever read Roald Dahl’s “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar”? (You MUST!) In this book within a book, Henry Sugar has just read the account of a man who can see without his eyes, Imhrat Kahn. Figuring he could use this skill to cheat at gambling, Henry undertakes a years-long meditation practice to attempt to harness the ability. Finally:

Sometime within the tenth month, Henry became aware, just as Imhrat Kahn had done before him, of a slight ability to see an object with his eyes closed. When he closed his eyes and stared at something hard, with fierce concentration, he could actually see the object he was looking at.
“It’s coming to me!” he cried. “I’m doing it! It’s fantastic!”

I had my Henry Sugar moment several months into my drawing regime. Until that moment, I’d only drawn what my regimen had told me to draw: boxes or cylinders, ribcages or pelvises, or –badly — the swoop of the human form. I’d never attempted to draw something from imagination, because, well, that just wasn’t something I did. But now I attempted it. I drew a giraffe.

I’m not going to claim it was a great giraffe — I’m not familiar enough with a giraffe’s body to visualize it well enough for accuracy. But as I moved my pencil on the page, I wasn’t just drawing the outline of a giraffe. My pencil was understanding how the giraffe’s body lived in 3-d space, with foreshortening and form. I suddenly understood what had been meant all along by “don’t draw the contours,” and “drawing is seeing.” I was starting to see. And it was fantastic!

Obviously, there’s more to drawing (and digital painting, which I like, and do) than this, and in part two of this post I’ll explore some of the other resources that I’ve found invaluable while learning about light, color, composition, facial expression, and digital painting.

Stay tuned!

Uncool

May 14, 2020May 16, 2020 ~ jcaritas ~ 2 Comments

As I expected, my last post must’ve been something really special, because it gave me FOUR TIMES the number of views I usually get.

That’s right. FOUR VIEWS! Thanks for coming back, Mom!

Without a doubt, the most difficult part of attempting to get some artistic recognition is the feeling of yelling into the abyss. New post I stayed up all night to write? Crickets. Big batch of manuscripts I kissed on my computer before sending off? Hellooo–ohhh–ohhh-ohhh…. At this point, I might even appreciate some hate mail, just to know I’m not alone out there.

(Actually, please don’t do that. I’m not ready.)

I realize that part of my problem is my aversion to social media. Oh sure, I go on Facebook as a middle-of-the-night lurker in my college alumni group and some other special interest groups. But I’m an introvert with a small group of real-life friends, and there comes a point where it’s just not possible to expand my “friends” group. It’s simply too embarrassing. I’ll happily accept the invitation of someone I’ve met who reaches out to me, but reach out to someone else, when I have, like, 30 “friends”? Umm, c-c-can I be your friend, p-p-please?

No.

So how can someone as uncool as I am get my work out there, without seeming mercenary? Well, here’s my latest attempt: shamelessly topical subject matter, which I’ll now enter into all the billions of contests that exist on social media. I mean, cute animals in masks?

What’s not to “like”?

Note to Self! The Importance of Picture Book Thumbnails

May 11, 2020May 14, 2020 ~ jcaritas ~ Leave a comment

Whoo-hooie — two down! I have to say, I’m pretty darn tickled with the way this one came out, though that could just be the afterglow of a particularly difficult birth, tricking me into thinking my ugly baby is beautiful. And good God, this was difficult. A bowing flower! A spotlight! A HUMAN HAND!

Another year from now, and I might look back on my crowing with absolute horror — I hope I do! — but when I look back at my earlier posts to where I started, I do feel I’ve earned my pat on the back. And accomplishing this has already given me more confidence in my illustration abilities — this week I need to design a logo for a client who asked for “a tree of life with birds in the branches, surrounded by dogs” (someone needs to explain to my client what a logo is, I think), and it feels within my grasp, and fun! That’s HUGE!

One thing that was enormously helpful in creating these two illustrations has been the thumbnailing process. Since I was unable to take my regular painting class at The Art Academy, I’m instead taking their “Manga, Superheroes, and Comics” online class (the class is supposedly for both kids and adults, but when I signed up they called me to ask the age of the child. Umm…49.). Although the class isn’t exactly what I’m looking for to accomplish my picture-booking goals, it has given me some good critiques and a couple of valuable tips — first and foremost the importance of forcing myself to do multiple thumbnails. I’m a web/graphic designer, and in twenty-five years of creating mockups, I’ve never once sketched out a little black-and-white image of my page ahead of time — I’d just pick a couple of directions and flesh them out to pixel-perfection. How much time I could save — and how much better my work could be — if I first took the time to explore multiple possibilities before committing.

To give you an idea of how this particular composition came about, let’s look at my first idea. Until I put it down on “paper,” this was what I had in my head:

Thank goodness I didn’t stop there! Although the scene is supposed to be about the sheer happiness of the tulip achieving his dreams, the angle of his face doesn’t allow any emotion — the viewer is gazing into the abyss of his head.

I was supposed to do five thumbnails, so I soldiered on:

Here I could at least see his face, but we’re so zoomed in on the body that I worried it wouldn’t read as a ballerina.

So onto the next:

Here I pulled back a little so we’re both seeing the face and the ballerina’s dress, but in trying to make the tulip appear to be bowing, I’ve put him in a terribly contorted position.

So, finally, I did this one:

Much better! I could’ve continued — the guideline was 5+ — but I was pretty happy with this composition and figured I’d be tweaking as I went. And indeed, my final illustration did veer from my thumbnail, in large part because my class critique revealed that people didn’t interpret the larger image as the imagination of the tulip.

In this case, each of my thumbnails was correcting the flaws in the previous one, but that certainly won’t always be the case — for my previous illustration in this series, my thumbnails were simply five different placements of the main characters.

I do hope I can remind myself in future to create a variety of views for each image, even if I’m already “certain” I know how it will look, and even if it feels like a boring and unnecessary step. My work will certainly be better for it.

The Midnight Disease

May 5, 2020October 10, 2020 ~ jcaritas ~ Leave a comment

It’s been a year since my last post, and what a year it’s been! Peace in the Middle East, President Obama back in the driver’s seat, that crazy giant fan they erected that seems like it might put an end to global warming — who would’ve thought that would work?

Erm… no. But we won’t dwell.

Looking back at my last post, I can see how it was a bit of a cliffhanger: Woman torches website of prominent organization… and then… nothing. Was she fired? Now living on the streets? Bumped off? Nah — as far as drama goes, it was a complete nonstarter. Got the site finished. Client happy. Got paid. Yawn. Plenty of other humiliations small and large since then.

But this blog is really only about my humiliations in one realm: “art.” And here, as with the world at large right now, there’s been both big changes and a feeling of constant stasis.

Over a year ago, I wrote about my classes at The Art Academy, and how after months of painting only in greyscale, we still had not yet been introduced to color. Well, that was a year ago! Now, after another year of weekly classes (up to, of course, a couple of months ago) we’re finally there! Color!

Well, one color. Brown.

One of the frustrating things I’ve found about classes at the Art Academy is the lack of a transparent agenda. Clearly they have a method. I’m now one table up from the kids’ table and I can see that nothing is winged: There are the same compositions of Dopey and the Oven Mitt, the same story about Jim’s sister and her school dance dress. But we, the students. are completely in the dark about where we’re headed. Thus it was that after endless weeks of painting and repainting the same ghastly grey head, my friend Becky finally reached the precipice — she was given a list of colors to buy and told to come in the next week with 16 toned canvasses. Oh, the excitement! We were all grey with envy. But alas, those 16 toned canvasses were fated not for great masterworks of color, but for the next stage of the mysterious process: underpaintings. An endless slog of single-color copies of NC and Andrew Wyeths, designed to break us down until only the strong are left standing. (Or maybe it’s to teach us about value. But I don’t know, do I?)

And now we’re in a pandemic, and I’m stalled out painting in one single, dark color. Pretty frickin symbolic, no?

I needed something else.

Have you ever heard of the Midnight Disease? It may or may not have been coined in Michael Chabon’s great novel about the creative life, “Wonder Boys” — at least that’s where I heard it. To quote Chabon:

“The midnight disease is a kind of emotional insomnia; at every conscious moment its victim—even if he or she writes at dawn, or in the middle of the afternoon—feels like a person lying in a sweltering bedroom, with the window thrown open, looking up at a sky filled with stars and airplanes, listening to the narrative of a rattling blind, an ambulance, a fly trapped in a Coke bottle, while all around him the neighbours soundly sleep.”

Not sure if you’ve experienced the midnight disease? You haven’t experienced the midnight disease.

Before these last few weeks, it had been awhile for me. 2016. I know that, because I recently dug up the picture book manuscripts I’d written back then, and once again those dang manuscripts started rattling around in my head like “a fly trapped in a Coke bottle,” waking me up in the middle of the night, and sending me to my computer early, early, early — this time not to fiddle with the story, but to attempt to illustrate them. Myself. (You did see Dopey and the Oven Mitt, didn’t you?)

Now, I’m not someone who really loves kids. I mean, they’re fine. Whatevs. But the picture book form is so… elegant. It’s poetry, really (even if it’s not!) — every word has to be carefully chosen, every image has to advance the story, every character needs to express his emotion clearly enough for a nonreader. What an incredibly fulfilling challenge for someone who loves both art and writing!

But I do realize that I’m not the only one who feels that way. Thousands of actual artists and writers want to publish a picture book. I’ve seen the work of some incredibly talented people who somehow have never managed to get published.

It makes my stomach hurt a little.

And I also know from experience, because I sent out several of these same stories to agents years ago, and heard… nothing. And looking back at them again, I still like many of them. I’m not going to be convinced that they’re not good stories. Sending them out into the void and getting no feedback whatsoever was enough of a crotch-kick that I stopped writing them completely.

So I know. You don’t have to look at me that way.

I’ve created the first of 5 or so illustrations I’ll do for this first story, about a dandelion with big aspirations, and her naysayer neighbors (that would be YOU). I’ll continue to post as I go along, along with resources and things that I learn along this new path.

Back soon!

Taking it slow

May 3, 2019 ~ jcaritas ~ Leave a comment

I’m sure everyone has a “worst day at work EVER” story, but I think mine can rival the best of them. I won’t get into the technical details, but due to a perfect storm of miscommunications I ended up DELETING the high-traffic website of a prominent organization. Luckily, there were server backups, and it was only eight hours of information that was permanently lost and not years, but the client was NOT HAPPY and is billing us for time they spent checking everything over; moreover, they’ll have their eyes closely on me for the remainder of the project. Ugh, the shame.

So it’s been a bit of a refuge for me to sit down and think about nothing but whether the shadow on my orange is convincing in this latest still life:

As I talked about a bit in my last post, I’m still trying to find my style… and clearly I’m looking everywhere! While I admire the Old Masters — and LOVE their color palette — I respond most viscerally to work that looks more, well, visceral — loose, raw, and emotional, even if the subject is only sliced oranges.

Unfortunately, when I try to paint alla prima in a loose, bold style, I end up with a sticky mess — it doesn’t look free and raw, it looks unfinished and incompetent. Meanwhile, the more careful work we’ve been completing in class — where we labor over each painting for weeks — ends up looking better to me. Heart-singingly better? No. But slightly less amateur.

So after setting up this still life, I painted only until I began to feel tired — no longer. Then, the next day, I fixed a bit of what I’d done and painted a bit further. And etc., and etc. And although the work looks a bit…labored… I felt loose and free because I wasn’t under the gun to stick with the dang Daily Painting credo. Now I just need to find a way to make my painting more expressive and less “tight” while actually taking it slow.

I’m also still trying to figure out what to do about light. Every morning — if I don’t close myself into my new curtained cave — there’s a moment when the sun first crests over my third-storey sills and for just five minutes or so makes the most perfect pool on my still life. When that happened, my days-old orange slices would suddenly look fresh and juicy, there would be gorgeous swaths of bright fresh sunlight mottling the sheet, and I’d rush to get my camera, only to find that it sucked the life right out of what I was seeing. I’d attempted to produce the same effect artificially — using several carefully positioned daylight bulbs — but everything I’ve tried has fallen far short. I guess I’ll just need to someday learn to paint in hyperdrive (or look over the shoulder of Thomas Kinkade). But for now, I’m taking it slow!

Things I did well:
I like the pinkish shadows that the orange was creating. I also like the two sliced oranges. They look a bit dried out, but in truth they were mummified by the time I finished.

Things I could do better:
The composition is still a bit staid. This is the part I thought would come naturally to me!
It looks as if the butterfly should be creating a harder shadow. I believe that’s a fault of the composition — the butterfly was actually pinned too far above .
The texture on the orange isn’t convincing — it looks like the side of my nose. I’m still not sure how a convincing orange texture is attained!

Street scenes in San Antonio

April 25, 2019August 31, 2020 ~ jcaritas ~ Leave a comment

For spring break from my daughter’s school, the three of us joined our friends Dave and Sinee on a trip down to San Antonio, Texas, where Pete and I used to live before having Olive. Neither of us had been back for fifteen years, and Dave and his daughter never at all, so we were all essentially tourists, and did all the touristy things I never managed to do in my five years as a resident: boat shuttles on the riverwalk, SeaWorld, the Alamo.

Except for my classwork, I’d been painting exclusively still lifes, and I was excited to use the opportunity of outside time in a colorful city to take some photos to paint from. As I’ve mentioned, I’m a fan of Carole Marine, especially her street scenes, and I wanted to see what I could do with similar subject matter.

Once I got over my initial self-consciousness of feeling SO touristy (taking photos from a tour boat on the Riverwalk? Could I be any more cliched?) I did take some interesting pictures, though most wouldn’t work for my purposes:

Unfortunately, I rarely take photos, and I wasn’t aware that when I zoomed in to get a good simple image with my iPhone 6, I’d end up with something like this:

*This one painted itself! Nothing left to do!*

When we got back from our trip, I printed out a few of the more simple ones to try (I’ve since realized I didn’t need to have a hard copy — I could just have them open on my laptop. So much easier!). First, though, I bought Carole Marine’s ArtByte tutorial on painting people. The tutorial was so simple to follow, and –like Bob Ross before her — she made it look incredibly attainable.

Here’s my attempt:

I’m pretty sure that where I went wrong here was in attempting to do too much in a very small space. This was only a 6″x6″ canvas, which makes the guy, and all those little chairs less than an inch high. Looking at Carole Marine’s street scene paintings again, it does look as if she limits herself to a smaller number of larger-sized people when she’s painting her small canvasses, because this kind of expressive painting just looks messy at a small size.

I also found that at this small size alla prima was really limiting. In fact, I’ve been thinking that my attempts at Daily Painting — completing a work in a small period of time, hopefully fairly regularly (though not daily) — are hurting rather than helping. When attempting to paint the details of the chairs, they were so tiny and the paint was still so wet, that it was nearly impossible to neaten it up and make my colors work the way I wanted. It would’ve made more sense to put this down for a few days and come back to it when it had dried enough to finesse it, but I felt pressured by the Daily Painting credo. I’m also wondering if attempting to paint expressively is right for me right now — I think I need to focus on trying to learn the rules before I break them!

Some rethinking to do…

Back to school!

April 21, 2019 ~ jcaritas ~ Leave a comment

During the time when I was kept from the gym by my splinter (now healed), and kept from my studio by Jim’s admonitions on my light situation (now fixed), I was also kept from class by… well, there wasn’t any class. It was spring break (now over).

Since the assumption at The Art Academy seems to be that once you’re there, you never leave (there are people there who have been working on the same painting for years, apparently), there was no rushing to finish up the marble horse head paintings we were working on before we left before break; they were there waiting for us when we got in.

It was weird to go back to grey after my forays into color, but much much easier. I realized that I’ve been a bit lazy when it comes to color mixing at home — often I just mix something I think is in the ballpark and then go back and tweak it after the fact (that’s the beauty of oil painting — it’s incredibly forgiving). So I have been asking myself whether painting with color on my own is even a good idea — am I just teaching myself bad habits? I continue with it, though, because it’s fun, and ultimately, even if truly imperfect, I like the results much better — who wants to keep a grey painting? The last thing I want is to start feeling bored and uninspired — I figure, anything that keeps me painting on a regular basis has got to be for the best.

For this painting, we did what Jim called a “lay in”: We spent a couple of sessions painting the horse in a simplified form — blocking in the outline, background and some of the shading — and then our reference images were switched for others that had a lot more detail and we spent a couple more sessions painting those as well. The biggest issue I found was that in between session one or two of the detail work, I was given a different reference image (a common issue — I think they’re just handed out randomly in each class, and they’re all a bit different) and all the details were in different places than they were when I started them. This threw me for a loop, but Jim insisted that it really didn’t matter — ultimately, the exercise was just to practice recognizing and reproducing subtle values, as well as the process of first blocking in a simpler shape and then coming back to it for detail.

To me this felt like a big leap ahead from the box paintings we did for our last project, but completely manageable. Of course, I’ve obviously been painting on my own, but even if I hadn’t it would’ve still felt like the logical next step after shading and blurring. My nerdy self is still very excited by just how systematic this program seems to be. Looking forward to the next project!

…And one step back.

April 16, 2019April 16, 2019 ~ jcaritas ~ Leave a comment

It’s funny how I can mention the same thing week after week — “I did a good job with my values,” “We’re waiting on color so we can work on our values,”– and still manage to miss the mark. I’d been admiring the work on Etsy of this amazing Ukrainian pet portrait artist, and wanted to see if I could create a background like his — loose, unstudied, the perfect complement to the (also perfect) subject. Turns out…I couldn’t.

My original thought was that the green bug would be the focal point and the butterfly and blue beetle would be a similar color to the background and therefore less prominent (I’d read that the area with the most contrast draws the eye the most and should therefore be your focal point). And it is true that parts of the butterfly and blue beetle are fairly subdued next to the dark background — their values are fairly similar. But instead of doing what I should’ve done — simplifying and darkening the background beneath the green beetle so that the contrast is greater, perhaps increasing its size — I plopped a very small beetle on top of a busy area of varying values. Perhaps, if you squint, you still notice it first because of the contrast between the bright yellow and the very dark green beside it, but it’s a close toss-up with the butterfly wing (which has the advantage, of course, of being much larger), and that, in my opinion, makes for a pretty unfocused painting.

While I’m glad that I don’t have even more detail in the background, I’m no Ukrainian Etsy artist. It would’ve been helpful to have a horizon, or some depth of field, and certainly the line of the driftwood should’ve been softened to integrate better with the background. As it is, it looks more like a collage than a painted-from-life still life.

In general, though, the entire thing is just way too complex for such a small (6×6) painting.

What?! Way too complex? Who are you, Jennifer Caritas!

(As an aside, if anyone’s curious about my subject matter, I used to make these fancy insect displays, and still have tons of insect inventory. Look for more bugs in future paintings!)

What I did well:
Individual elements are okay — I actually quite like the blue beetle.
I attempted some brushwork of varying directions and colors — a first for me. A for effort!

What I could’ve done better:
Too much going on!
Too much similarity in values — need a more obvious focal point
Better integration with background

Still life with veggies: I’m a complicated gal!

April 15, 2019April 15, 2019 ~ jcaritas ~ Leave a comment

One thing I always tend to do when taking up a new endeavor is to rush in and take on the most complicated challenge I think I might possibly be able to handle, skipping over those baby steps that really build a solid foundation. With painting, it’s not just the challenge though: I worry that if I were to, say, paint apples, my painting would be one of five billion other apple paintings with nothing to really separate it. Logically I know, of course, that focusing on more simple subject matter is a way to develop a style (as a hack — I mean, a novice — I haven’t yet found my style), and that I’ve seen apple paintings that have taken my breath away. This tussle between my logical self and my…self-self (for lack of a better word) is on display in my latest still life: Veggies.

My logical self led the way: I was going to skip the shells and driftwood this time and find something from my fridge to paint. But me being me, I once again got over-complicated (in my defense, though, I’d eaten the other half of my still life the night before).

My proportions seem pretty far off here — the purple cabbage looks more like a purple Brussels sprout (though would a Brussels sprout leave a big purple mark on my husband’s pink shirt?) — and both veggies look a bit cut-and-pasted. Part of that, I think, is because the cabbage is actually half-eaten as well (it’s missing its entire back half), so it’s not casting the shadows one would expect of a spherical object. The pepper, though, also has that effect and I have no excuse for that (I…suck?). I suppose I’m at the stage with this whole painting thing where I can see my flaws but can’t quite identify why they’re happening or how to put a stop to them. It’s a frustrating place to be, but I know, logically, that it’s one step further than not being able to see my flaws at all (I’ve evolved from the Trumpian stage, happily).

Things I did well:
Decent composition — objects aren’t simply plopped in the center any longer — and decent values/contrast
I like the brushwork on the top part of my cabbage — it says a lot with just a few brushstrokes

Things I could do better:
Proportions
Better integration into background