Category: Paintings

Paintings 7 & 8: Getting my ducks in a row

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Fresh off the success of my “pigeon with a hat” painting, I thought I’d try something completely different: a duck in a hat! Maybe this will be my niche?

I’d originally anticipated painting a standard “barnyard” duck, but while looking for photos to study I came across this blue-billed marvel called a “ruddy duck.”

Copyright Sinclair Miller, Maryland Zoo in Baltimore

Here’s my original digital:

Good-lookin’ fella!

Apparently, my dapper gentleman is also a randy duck – the blue coloration only comes out when he’s hoping to mate (as does, of course, the stylin’ hat).

Since my pigeon was way off in her background-to-head ratio, I learned from my mistakes and blew up this feller larger in his frame than I’d originally drawn him. Then, rather than grid or freehand draw him like I did last time, I just printed out a black-and-white version of my digital drawing and used my graphite transfer paper to trace the lines of the black-and-white picture. But once again, I was foiled by my cheapness! Not wanting to waste too much printer ink, I used the “draft” setting, which created an image so washed-out and pixelated that I couldn’t follow the value changes, leading to mass confusion and a first painting that was yes, another “wiper.” 

But we Irish-Lithuanians are made of strong stuff, and I set back in to try again. This time, I produced this:

Eek — need to up my photography game!

While it’s not terrible, and the beak turned out better than I’d expected in this second version, I made a giant mess of the hat — that little rim was tough! My background color, too, was not ideal: The orange—while a lovely color unto itself—is too saturated and draws attention away from the bill. Furthermore, Gemini had just told me that I should be painting with a 60/30 ratio of Gamsol to Walnut Alkyd, and my 50/50 mixture was too “fat.” So altogether, it seemed worth it to do one more pass, and begin to develop better processes and habits.

So, I went in for try 3, and produced this guy:

Mistakes, for sure — but altogether a very dapper gentleman!

“Well, I never!”

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In my years of aspiring to be a children’s book illustrator, my “specialty” was emotive animals, like this terrified ant about to get scooped up by a hungry anteater:

So with my new dream of being an Etsy artist (no fine art aspirations for me!) I thought I’d see if I could create some original drawings that I would then attempt to recreate in actual paint.

What a pleasure to go back to digital after struggling with this new medium! And rather than worry about my finished product looking too “computer-y,” I could use my tools to figure out composition, expression, and color, and then give it the human touch in oils. This would also have the benefit of being reproducible, because I could grid it to create a template. I can almost smell the money!

So, my first step was creating a picture of a pigeon in a hat. It’s rough, but I like her haughty expression and the rich purples and greens. I’m calling it “Well, I never!”:

Well, I never!

One thing I’d learned way back at the start of this blog was how to transfer an image onto canvas using a grid. In fact, I wrote a whole post about it. So I used Photoshop’s ruler with some guides, and marked the image on my screen into 6 1-inch squares, and then did the same on my canvas.

This method did indeed allow me to get (most of) the positioning correct, but it was time-consuming, and—frankly—pretty frickin boring, even for a tiny image. Moreover, I was once again tripped up by the actual painting, because in attempting to add detail in paint, everything got muddled again:

Clearly, I need professional advice! So I hopped over to one of my favorite cheap resources, Domestika, and watched the section on Portrait Painting with Oil that was part of this specialization series.

And I realized something — probably something obvious to anyone who’s been painting more than a week. I’d always heard that  with alla prima, you were blending paint right on the canvas. But in the video, the artist mixed her paints for each section ahead of time. Sure, there was some blending on the canvas, and some in-between tones that she mixed up on the fly. But she wasn’t just getting close enough and then attempting to correct it on the canvas like I was. Instead, she was being planful — putting down all of her darkest tones (one stroke at a time), and then moving down the line until she’d finished every stroke of the subject’s skin. 

Worth a try! So, I started again — this time following the advice of my bestie Gemini and using Saral graphite transfer paper to first draw my pigeon on paper before transferring it to canvas:

Unfortunately, I did two things very wrong here. One — I attempted to avoid drudgery by free-drawing rather than gridding, which led to her having way too small a head and too big a background, and just being a bit “off” in her expression and physicality. Then, I thought it made sense for me to understand where all of my value changes were, so I added those lines right into my drawing, just like a paint-by-numbers. Yikes! Line overload! I ended up losing my way in them and having to once again edit on the canvas — though thankfully not as much as before.


But, but! I still think this represents a big leap forward for me. I’m sure I’ll cringe when I look back at this in a few months, but right now I’m feeling pretty proud!

More like “alla primate”?

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In 1964, a Swedish tabloid unveiled the work of an “unknown French artist” by the name of Pierre Brassau. Critics rushed to praise him, with one prominent reviewer stating that “Pierre is an artist who performs with the delicacy of a ballet dancer.” The rub? “Pierre” was actually “Peter,” a seventeen-year-old, paint-eating, tantrum-throwing chimpanzee, gifted a set of paintbrushes to test whether critics could tell the difference between modern art and monkey art (yes, yes, I know chimps aren’t monkeys).

While Pierre’s work is more abstract than mine (…is attempting to be), our process is similar: alla prima, or wet-on-wet, a method by which a painting is completed in a single session rather than constructed from thin layers over a period time. Back in the early days of this blog, I was taking classes to learn to paint with this second (slooooowwww) method – as the Old Masters did – while also having a messy, dirty, passionate affair with the first. And when I decided to go back to painting, the first thing I did was dig up my old copy of Daily Painting, by the queen of effortless (-seeming) alla prima, Carol Marine.

Carol Marine

Oh, Carol. She’s like one of those fabulous French women who throw on mom jeans and a t-shirt and look like an it-girl, while me in the same clothes is more like Cousin-It-girl. Somehow the unstructured messiness of it all looks dynamic, passionate, effortlessly cool in her pieces, while in mine it looks like, well, monkey art:

Looking at it now, I’m going to take back some of my charming self-deprecation to admit that there are actually aspects of this piece that I like. (Since writing this post, I’ve created a second painting that’s much worse than this one. You’ll see that one soon.) My bottle does indeed look like transparent glass. After wiping off my first attempt (and cursing myself for once again starting off with something too hard), I sketched out only those lines and value changes that were necessary to understand the form of the bottle, instead of once again getting lost in all those persnickety little details that the alla prima method struggles with. And taking Carol’s advice, I started my painting with the most saturated, pure patch of color – in this case, the chartreuse-y light on the right of the bottle – and once applied, left it the hell alone. So by that measure, I done good.

But what the heck is up with those proportions? Well, here rears the ugly head of my most prominent vice: laziness. In preparation for this still life, I’d made a still life box to control my light source – just a cardboard box with holes punched in the top and side for lights as seen on many a YouTube video.

Lazy moment #1 occurred when I realized my light-holes were too small and – rather than recut them – thought I’d use two rechargeable mini book lights instead of something more professional and permanent. And somewhere in the middle of painting, one of those lights died, and (lazy moment #2), I didn’t bother to replace the battery, thinking I could still see well enough.

But I couldn’t. That piece of driftwood in the back became a fuzzy hunk of grey, and (lazy moment #3), I thought I’d just paint it from imagination (instead of grabbing a new battery from the friggin next room) — which led me to envision it from the side rather than from the same top-down perspective I’d used for the bottle. Which led me to attempt to alter the top of the bottle to make it more side-on. And etc., etc. You give a mouse a cookie and all that.

And that’s the issue with alla prima, and why I fear it may not be for me. I’m much more of a “pantser” than a “planner,” and I love my control-Z. My process for artwork has always been to figure things out as I go along, and that just doesn’t work for a style that demands I get things right the first time.

But at least I’ve learned not to eat my paint. Onward!

Taking it slow

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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!

…And one step back.

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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!

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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

Moving forward? My first still life with controlled light

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Once I’d finally gotten my light situation under control, I was ready to see if it actually made a difference in my painting ability. Maybe I actually had a hidden genius inside of me, ready to pop out when the conditions were right!

Jim had sent me a link for building a shadow box, and although that particular one seemed like a bit more effort and money than I wanted to spend, I did find an easy tutorial online that involved simply cutting panels out of the top and side of a cardboard box and covering them with tissue paper. Easy, cheap, works. I’d never quite understood the reason for an actual shadowbox — couldn’t I just put things on the table if I was painting with a tabletop easel? — but I’ve read in several places that it was helpful for controlling ambient light and generating interesting shadows, so I decided to give it a go.

This is, admittedly, an odd composition. It looked much better to me before I put it into the shadowbox — after that, with the shadows that were generated from the harsher light, it started to look a bit…random. The backdrop beneath and behind the objects was a piece of patterned paper — I ignored the pattern when it curved behind because I worried about the amount of noise in such a small painting (it’s 6×6), but it still looks unnatural to have the driftwood stick poking into the back of the box.

Aside from this, though, I actually like this painting. My values look good, and my brushwork doesn’t look fussy like it did in my last painting (stones). I’m not sure I got the light quite right — I was having trouble making sense of this complexity of this crinkled old leaf and winged it — but I’m not sure it’s noticeable to the untrained eye (at least it’s not to my untrained eye). Overall, I think, a step forward!

Things I did well:
Brushstrokes are fairly loose and unfussy
Good contrast and values

Things I could’ve done better:
Weird composition without a meaningful focal point
Intersection of driftwood stick and driftwood chunk is odd — is it floating? Is it resting?
Bug could be brighter — in real life it’s almost metallic-looking (I wasn’t quite sure how to make that happen. Glazing?)