Category: Painting 101

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

~ 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:

Coming for your job, Mr. Lasseter!

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)

~ 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!

Back to school!

~ 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!

Another still-life: the perils of trying way too hard

~ jcaritas ~ 5 Comments

As happens, life got in the way and I’ve let my blog slip for a bit as I dealt with some annoying and painful events that I’m now on the other side of. In my commitment to document every one of my paintings, though, I’m going to drift back in time to when I thought I was pretty hot stuff for creating my first work in color (extremely dark and under-saturated color, but color nonetheless). Now it’s — let’s say — a few days later.

Let me preface this next image by letting you know that I’m a little embarrassed by it. It’s no Dopey and the Oven Mitt. But hopefully someday when I’m famous(!), some insecure beginner like myself will see it and say, “What?! Jennifer Caritas started like this?!”

Yeesh. I think I hate it even more in digital form.

Okay, first off — what the heck is going on with that little bowl on the left? It appears to be doing some Dali-esque melting. And all of my little stones seem caught in their own little tornados. Maybe this is actually a masterwork of surrealism!

I’d probably forgive myself the odd perspectives and brushwork missteps, though, if I were happy with the style. What I’ve done here, though, is an unsuccessful mashup of realistic and expressive, which reads as unrealistic, and very messy. Hyper-realistic painting is not a style I care for anyway, but I’m realizing that once I start adding all the small-brush details (like the grain on the vase and the table), I’ve upped the ante for how perfect all the other aspects of the painting need to be. No little halos or tornados allowed! Now I have to figure out how I can suggest grain (and other details) without resorting to all the little ticky-tacky lines I’ve used here.

So much to learn!

What I did well:
I like the two stones on the right.
The composition was somewhat thought-out.

What I could’ve done better:
Too much to list! Odd distortion on bowl, too many little lines to suggest grain, light from several sources…

C-c-c-color!

~ jcaritas ~ 5 Comments

We’re still at the stage where all of our paintings for class have been in shades of grey: grey oven mitts, grey boxes, the beginning stages of grey horse heads (more on that to come). It makes sense — people perceive value before color, and mastering that in greyscale is much simpler and less distracting — but man, is it boring. Until now, I’ve been faithful to the method, figuring that painting one more grey oven mitt was just like Ralph Macchio waxing Mr. Miyagi’s car, but when I sat down to paint on Saturday and remembered I had run out of Portland Grey Medium, temptation got the better of me. I had recently been to a neighborhood estate sale, and had bought a big case of oils for $5 (to give you a better sense of the quality of these paints, they were mixed in with a bunch of Bob Ross acrylics), so figured what the hey, why not?

Good Lord but this was tough. There’s a reason, I’m learning, that people start out with less precise objects like apples and pears: Unless your apple is turquoise and shaped like a banana, it’s almost difficult to make an apple look unnatural — there’s so much acceptable variation. Not so with a machine-made, perfectly symmetrical brass ladybug sculpture with legs poking out every which way: You might not have ever seen one before, but you know what it’s supposed to look like. I drew and wiped off three times before I measured my way to a shape that was even remotely reminiscent of my model.

In his natural habitat.

As I’ve noted, I’ve been reading Carole Marine’s fabulous “Daily Painting,” and one thing she mentions is that she mixes almost all of her paint from three colors: Cadmium Red Light, Cadmium Yellow Light, and Ultramarine Blue. This seemed like an easier way to go than trying to get a sense of the dozen or so paints in my new box, and I didn’t have any other instructions to follow. Instead of simply adding black to a color to make it darker, she typically “greys” the colors she wants to recede, adding different combinations of the three basic colors to make them less saturated. So in this case, since my brass was primarily yellowish, I used mostly Cadmium Yellow Light with a speck of the other two colors for the brightest yellow, and then darkened them further with more red and blue as necessary. My darkest tones are really more of a dark olive green. But — I’m a rookie and this is a rookie painting, so why would you listen to me? Go experiment!

My biggest issue, once again, was light. Not only did the light on my model change throughout my session — making it look entirely different — but I had a bright florescent clamp light pointed directly on my canvas the whole time I was painting. To me, the colors I was using looked vibrant and alive, until I took away the light and…

Well, you see. (Or maybe you can’t — it’s over to the right….a little higher….)

I’m finding as I’m painting on my own that I’m breaking every rule we’re being taught at the school. Fat over lean? Bah! Carefully painting patches of color rather than shapes? Well, that one I should do — but I haven’t been. Shapes all the way. It’s been one thing to follow the correct procedure when I’m painting oven mitts and boxes, but a whole lot more difficult when painting something as complicated as this bug turned out to be. Besides, Carole Marine says she paints her backgrounds last, choosing her order based on the saturation of the colors, so perhaps there are other “correct” procedures as well…. So much to learn!

Things I did well:

I think I did a decent job capturing the way light fell on each object
My bug has decent (though not perfect) proportions and looks three- dimensional (though I do see that the line down the center is off and the right front leg is too wide)
Put a bit more thought into the composition so everything isn’t simply centered
My little pinch pot has a decent texture and shape and was painted fairly quickly

Things I could improve

Too dark!
Background was once again an afterthought — basically thrown together from my leftover paint. Should start thinking about using different brushstrokes and hues to make backgrounds more interesting

Still life #2 – Progress and questions

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It was true that my first still life was a bit schizophrenic in its lighting and had some weird boob pimples, but it really wasn’t terrible. I’d certainly done a worse job on plenty of other things I’d attempted. And I’d enjoyed painting something that my copier couldn’t do a better job with. So once again, I decided to give myself a challenge.

IMG_0761

One good thing about being old is that I have TONS of stuff. Not expensive stuff, but small, interesting, highly-paintable things I’ve collected throughout the years — especially natural objects that I found in the woods or on the beach (though this shell was clearly bought somewhere — who finds shells like this?). I thought each of these two objects would be a challenging way to try texture, and would together provide an interesting contrast while sharing a beachy theme that made them cohesive (though I’m not worried about composition at this point).

My painting was done at a different angle, since I don’t have a standing easel.

IMG_0768

Now I wish I’d worried about composition. Blech. But there are some things here that I actually kind of like. I did a bang-up job with the top of my shell, and that was HARD. And I love the left side of my driftwood — I added a lot of interesting, blocky shading there that really shows the depth. But I can see the exact place where I started to get bored and lazy: pretty much in the exact center of the log. Everything to the right of that point is complete Amateurville Horror.

I’m struggling a bit — and this will be a question for Jim in my next class — with how much I’m supposed to draw. Of course I mapped out my largest shapes: the exterior of the driftwood and shell. And I did draw ovals for the largest indentations in the driftwood, and stripes for the spirals of the shell. But on the right side of the driftwood I mapped out next to nothing, in large part because the light when I did my initial drawing made most of the indentations look shallow and it didn’t seem worth it. As the sun came up, they looked…entirely different, but it seemed too late to map anything out, I was bored and lazy, and I winged it. And it shows.

I also had no idea what to do with the background, which was an old wooden table, as you see in the photo above. Should I attempt to replicate any of the grain, which in real life is so prominent? In the end, I just wanted to get it done — and, since I’d made the rookie mistake of not putting out enough paint, and what I had left of my mixed stuff was getting really thick and gummy — I just painted it pretty monochromatically. It was an afterthought — and again, it shows.

What I did well:
Left side of the driftwood, which — to me — seems to have a spark of that unfussy, effortless(looking) blocky style that I love in modern painting
The shell, while flawed, looks like…a shiny shell

What I could’ve improved:
The composition — yawners
Right side of the driftwood is lacking value and looks flat and unconvincing
In real life, the shell is poking out slightly from the driftwood. That doesn’t come through in my painting — instead it just looks squat. I’m not sure what went wrong here — maybe the placement or value of the shadows? Again, that changed throughout my session, throwing me off.
Background looks like an afterthought and entire subject appears to be floating in space.

And she’s off! Rogue painting #2

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Now that I knew how to shade, I figured the world was my oyster (and hey, the world was just a ball — and now I could paint that! ). So despite Jim’s admonitions for having gotten ahead of myself with my last rogue painting, I thought I’d dive in and try a still life. After all, I now had all the tools (including this handy-dandy Proportional Divider – how do I love thee!). Also, I’d been reading the highly motivational “Daily Painting,” by Carole Marine, and was inspired to try to fit painting into my life, well, daily.

Luckily, it was a Saturday, and Olive had a friend over, which meant she was entertained and I was free to have a marathon paint session. (Carole Marine talks about finishing small still lifes [lives?] within 1-3 hours, but I’m a very slow painter at this point.) As you may be realizing, I have a tendency to want to rush ahead (and that’s a GOOD thing), so I didn’t want to paint no stupid apple. Instead, I chose something a bit more challenging, but with very little color, so I wouldn’t be distracted (and wouldn’t be wanting what I just…couldn’t… have):

bust
Was he the reason my hydrangeas wouldn’t grow?

Until a couple of years ago, we lived in a house with a garden, and I was always digging in there and finding the coolest things: a marble foo dog; ancient farming equipment; two super-creepy iron sculptures which have nothing to do with this post but which I just have to show anyway; and the aforementioned slightly less cool…high school art project?…that I decided to use as my model.

Until this point, all of my paintings had been copied from another painting — working with a grid and very systematically plotting each point. I wasn’t even changing the scale or the positioning: The original paintings were the exact size we’d be painting them — we just created our paintings in the same corner of the canvas where they’d appeared on their clipboards, and taped off any overhang. When I’d sat down to paint a still life, I hadn’t thought about how big a leap it would be from our class assignments. After all, I knew how to shade now, and I already knew how to tone my canvas, and how to draw out my subject matter (and how to hold my paintbrush!). How hard could it be?

Turns out, very. Working without the grid, I found myself relying very heavily on my proportional divider. This is a tool that looks like an off-center X — on one side is a small pincer that you hold in front of your object to determine the length of a line or the width of a segment; on the other, a larger version of the same that opens or closes to show how that width would scale up or down, depending on your settings. It allows you to more easily scale up an item and still keep everything proportional, and is a godsend for those of us whose brains don’t work that way. But it’s slow to measure every little thing (as I’m always wont to do) and not always accurate, as a tiny miscalculation of the width on the small side can be a huge shift in width on the large side.

The other thing I found difficult was the lighting in my “studio.” Since I live in a small condo, my “studio” is really just a section of my living room. In attempting to make my painting more “daily,” I’ve carved out a period really — insanely — early in the morning, before anyone else is up and before I need to start work. This means I’m usually painting when it’s dark outside.

I wish I had a dedicated space in which to paint, but I can’t see it happening until, say, my daughter moves off to college (and unfortunately she’s not the next Doogie Houser). I’m loving learning to paint, but I’m not committed enough to, say, install florescent lighting in my beautiful public space.

Instead, I’ve been trying to make do, and my efforts have either been too minimal (where I can’t see my canvas or subject very well, and end up with little halos around everything) or too much (where I have a florescent bulb perched on a bookcase over my shoulder, making everything shadowy). I can’t seem to get it right.

This first still-life shows my struggle. Since it was a Saturday, I was able to start in the afternoon, and the body shows that. But look at that weird dark face! By the time I got to that area, the sun had gone down, I had turned on my florescent, and the entire thing was in shadow, with my florescent spotlight dramatically illuminating the eye sockets and upturned nose. That would be fine it was consistent throughout the entire composition, but it’s completely out of place.

Likewise, I need to train myself to get up and take a break when I start to just. want. to. be. DONE. I’d reached that point before putting in any of the details in the stomach region, and it shows. Instead of the swirls of plaster, I’d basically just thrown in a mix of lighter and darker brush strokes, which looks cloudy rather than solid and scratchy.

Things I did well:

Top arm/shoulder shading and top boob
Crack in plaster around neck (though the larger crack/hole is a bit much)
Shadows under the body
Proportions are reasonably accurate

Things I could improve:

Bottom boob looks like she has a skin disease
Lighting on face
Texture does not look rough enough (especially on stomach)
Composition: Just plopped there, centered and floating in space.

 

 

Finally getting real! Shading and blurring

~ jcaritas ~ 1 Comment

At this point, I was already beginning to get a bit bored of our subject matter. It was bad enough that we were being forced to go back to the time before God invented color, but did we need to go back to when the world was flat as well? Especially because the assignment during the next class was to paint Dopey’s cousin, Pointy Dopey:

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Sigh.

Luckily for us, however, before long we would finally be given the keys to the castle: shading!

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Will I sound silly if I tell you just how excited I was for this assignment?

First Jim gave us a demonstration. Apparently there was more to it than simply smearing your paint together.

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Careful, don’t cut yourself!

To soften an edge (for example, the edge of, say, a box) you first create your adjoining areas of color. (At this point, Jim began a story of his sister going to a sock hop — he must be older than I thought! — and his mother creating a dress for her out of two adjoining areas of fabric.)

Then you use a smaller brush to paint lines connecting the two areas. These could be one of the two colors or an intermediary color. (In the story — you guessed it — the lines were the thread.)

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Finally, you take a large, clean, flat brush and brush over the two lines, wiping off your brush after each stroke. (I’m not sure how this fit into the story — it might’ve broken down a bit at that point.)

Then you go back and add sharpness where needed — and back and forth, back and forth until you’re satisfied.

The difficult part of this assignment, though, was not the blurring (although that was harder than I expected once I tried it) — it was those dang angles! It seemed like every time I’d fiddle with the background shading, I’d shave off a bit of an angle here and there until the entire thing began to look quite Seussian. I’d been very careful in the drawing stage to use my brush as an “angle machine,” so it was pretty frustrating to see all that work go down the poop chute — plus I now needed to create them anew sans grid!

The finished product:

boxes-fin
Could you please move those boxes out of my wa—What!? They’re paint?

Why do we paint like we do?

~ jcaritas ~ 6 Comments

In the few weeks I’ve been painting, I’ve realized how little I know about even its most basic tenets. I didn’t know — and now do — how to tone a canvas, how to clean and preserve my brushes, even how to hold a paintbrush. Now I was learning what I thought I knew as a four-year-old: how to put down paint.

After completing our drawings of Dopey and the Oven Mitt, it was time to fill them in. Prior to my rogue gun-jumping first painting, I would’ve thought that this process was easy-peasy — just like Paint by Numbers, right? Not, apparently, so fast.

As I’m learning, one of the keys to painting accurately is separating what you see from what you think you know. You think you know that the ocean is blue; if you don’t consciously work to erase that preconception, you’ll ignore the evidence before you and choose colors much less varied and interesting than what nature has presented. Likewise, you think your fingers are long and tapered, but from many angles they’re foreshortened and squat: Paint them as you think they are, and you’ll look like a cartoon.

It’s difficult work, erasing these preconceived notions. To do it, we need to rely on tricks that divorce our lines — which have no particular meaning — from the objects we’re painting, which are filled with it.

This process starts with our very first strokes. Rather than simply filling in our shape with paint, like we’ve all been taught to do throughout our lives, we instead paint in patches, silver-dollar-sized regions that might contain two or more different areas of color or value.

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According to Jim, ideally you’d start with your darkest value, then medium, then light.

As I mentioned in my last post, we’re using the “fat over lean” process of painting — creating our paintings by laying down thin layers of paint that we then let dry before continuing to add to and revise. In order to keep the ability to revise the edges in future iterations, and to minimize the possibility that our surface will crack, we want to avoid the ridges that might come from having excess paint on our brushes when we come up to an edge. To do this we first touch down our brush well away from an edge and then paint toward it. Only when the paint has significantly thinned do we then paint along the edge.

Another way to make sure we’re not getting bamboozled by the “object-ness” of what we’re painting is to use a large hand mirror placed against our foreheads and reflecting on our painting and the subject we’re painting from, causing us to see them upside-down and backwards. This helps to break the connection between the shapes and lines that we’ve painted and the object that they represent, so that we can better see flaws in our angles, proportions, and values without the brain jumping in and trying to make our item look more vase-like, or hand-like, or in our case, oven-mitt-like.

So how did this all translate to Dopey and the Oven Mitt?

Remember, here was what I was painting:

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And here’s the final product:

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Wait — is that a perfect copy? Is she really that good?

No! Psych — they’re the same! I didn’t have access to the original, so I just showed my finished painting instead.

But now, here’s the original:

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Still pretty close, right?

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Lookin’ good!

So it’s not like spreading peanut butter? Laying down your paint

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I’m a big fan of expressive painters like Carole Marine and Patti Mollica, and if you’re one of those people who can sit down for an hour or two, pile on the paint with a palette knife, and come away with something like this, you can just go f–

…find a quiet place to paint. This doesn’t apply to you.

OpposingForces650
Keep spreading that peanut butter, Patti!

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Much improved!

But what if you’re a new painter, and it’s the visceral, immediate brushwork of Patti that makes your heart sing, rather than the smooth perfection of Leonardo? Shouldn’t you load up your brush, pour yourself an Old Fashioned (yum!) and go to town?

Yeah, I tried that:

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Detail of an early work by a New Master

Ick.

Now, what I did here is apparently a perfectly legitimate way to paint — it’s called alla prima, and it just means I did everything in one swell foop, creating the entire painting while everything was still good and wet. That would be all well and good if I liked it and didn’t want to go back.

But I don’t.

It’s ugly.

The trouble with alla prima for newbies like me is that it revs up the pressure. If you paint a big thick wet layer, it’s necessary to complete it in one sitting (or at least close-together sittings) for the obvious reason that it would be very difficult to revise all those ridges in the next go-round, and the less obvious — but more important — reason that painting a thin layer over a thicker layer will cause the surface to crack, as the top layer dries and the paint below remains wet and mobile at its core.

As a new painter, I’m still at the kids table. Don’t rush me when I’m trying to eat peas with a fork — that shit’s hard!

Instead, I want to be able to lay down a thin layer in the time I have allotted (usually the two hours of class), put the project down until the next class (or whenever), then pick it back up and refine, repeating as often as I like. (And if I don’t finish my layer, no worries!)  I could even slap down a big, thick layer of expressive brushwork, alla patti, provided it’s on top. To avoid cracking, the rule you want to follow is “fat over lean”– always start with your leanest, thinnest layers (beginning with your toned canvas), and end with your thickest, most luscious.

But what about the amazing freedom that comes with painting fast, loose, and wet?

Wise woman, that Aunt Lydia.

In an upcoming post, I’ll return to “Dopey and the Oven Mitt,” to demonstrate how we created our layer (in this case, singular). Plus, the big reveal!