I made a vase! Reinventing my composition in Photoshop

March 12, 2026 ~ jcaritas ~ Leave a comment

Three weeks ago, my dog died. I’d lost other pets before, but Buddy was my shadow – my “heart” animal – and I wasn’t there to comfort him at the end. I’d written a long post about my grief and anguish, but I didn’t post it, and now I don’t want to.

Instead, let’s talk about painting.

One of the struggles I’ve had – even when I took my first painting classes in my first go-round with this blog – is that I cannot seem to get my lighting right. I recently made strides with the lamp that lights my canvas and palette – investing in a fabulous dual-head “Duo Pro” to reduce the glare I was getting – but my still-life set-up is still pretty grim. I keep hearing that virtually anything will do – just buy a cheap clamp light! – but the shadows that I’m getting are way too…shadowy… and every scene I set up appears as a nighttime scene.

Which it is. Because the university where I work brought us back to the office four days a week (blech), and in Minnesota, that means that most days I’m never in my home during daylight (again, blech). It also meant that this particular still life was set up from what I could find in my studio (aka “the living room”) at 5 a.m. while trying not to wake my family.

In other words, me no likey.

The original set-up

But hey, I’ve got Photoshop! As much as I would love to be someone who consistently paints from life and not photos, it’s just not logistically workable for me – I don’t have room to keep a still life set up, I’ve got a lighting problem, I’m not always going to be able to paint something in a single sitting. So in this case, I thought I’d take my lousy photo of my lousy still life, and see if I could make something less lousy to paint.

One thing I’ve found helpful when choosing a composition is to zoom way, way out on a photo and see if it still makes sense at a tiny size: Does my eye go to the right place? Does it still look harmonious? Can I even tell what I’m looking at? Looking at my photos of this set-up, I realized there were simply too many competing values, and it was the leaf (as the most detailed and high-contrast item) rather than the butterfly (my intended focal point) that caught my eye.

I started by working in Photoshop to crop out the leaf, mute the pot, lighten the butterfly shadow and bump up the saturation of his wing… everything I could do to ensure that the butterfly was the uncontested focal point.

But that didn’t seem like enough — everything was still too mid-value and blah. So I continued to pick, until I’d basically recreated the whole thing in digital paint, completely reinventing the pot in the process:

A much cleaner composition!

This is why I’m moving away from digital — as much as I enjoyed “painting” this, it still looks pretty darn digital. But it does give me something to paint that simply wasn’t available to me in real life. (I wish I did own this pot, though — it’s pretty cool!)

The finished product

This still isn’t great — it’s a bit…lifeless (even disregarding the dead insect that it’s built around). And unfortunately, I didn’t pay enough attention to my eye line, and the perspective is off. But I think I managed to take a sow’s ear and make it… a slightly prettier sow’s ear.

Onward!

Paintings 7 & 8: Getting my ducks in a row

February 25, 2026 ~ jcaritas ~ Leave a comment

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.”

Here’s my original digital:

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:

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!”

February 23, 2026February 22, 2026 ~ jcaritas ~ Leave a comment

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!”:

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!

Painting 4: Revenge of the pomegranates

February 22, 2026 ~ jcaritas ~ Leave a comment

Why painting 4 you ask? What became of 2 and 3? While I’ve sworn to document even my dismalest of efforts, I’m also not going to finish a painting that’s completely irredeemable (I’m lazy, remember. I’m also cheap — I’d rather save the paint and reuse the canvas).

Since my bottle painting was such a raging success, I jumped right into another still life, this one even harder (cause that’s how I roll). Although I was painting from life and not a photo, this was the subject:

Pretty, right? Also very, very difficult. Now, over the years—since learning to draw from imagination at the tender age of 48—I’ve gotten pretty good at being able to picture something in my mind and draw it from any angle. But I need to really understand the form first, and I could not, for the life of me, understand the form of that purple candleholder at the left front. It has these sort of wedge shaped pieces radiating out like spokes, but the wedges are slightly rounded, and the top of the wedges are more triangular than the bottoms, which follow a gentle curve. Looking at it from a distance in my still life box, the random dark glaze plays all sorts of tricks of the eye so the whole thing just wasn’t making sense any more, and my paint kept getting gloppier and more muddled as I edited and edited.

After two “wipers,” I finished a pass of this one:

Now, I say “a pass,” because even though I’m attempting to finish each painting in one sitting (à la alla prima), I was at a point where I could not add any more paint without it simply converging into the mud. So I thought I’d go back to the traditional method and wait for my paint to dry to the touch before adding more detail, finishing the insides of the cups, and perhaps editing.

A few days later, however, I was not keen to pick this one back up again, nor was I ready to start over with it before first learning more about what I’m doing wrong. I’ll save this one for the future.

Next!

More like “alla primate”?

February 19, 2026February 18, 2026 ~ jcaritas ~ Leave a comment

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.

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!

I’m back!

February 18, 2026 ~ jcaritas ~ Leave a comment

Five years ago (yikes!) I wrote my final post for this blog, having succeeded in my goal of painting like the Old Masters.

Haha. No.

In fact, as you can see from the cringeworthy pancake image displayed at the top of that post, my trajectory had gone in a very different direction — digital. Since my goal over the past five-plus years had been to write and illustrate a children’s book, keeping things on the computer seemed to make sense: I could compose, edit, resize and reposition, experiment, all without the drudgery of thumbnailing or the need to start over to make changes. How easy, convenient, wonderfully freeing!

But even though I loved the process, I never quite loved the results. While I became better at capturing the emotion and positioning of my characters, I couldn’t help feeling that there was an “uncanny valley” quality to my brushstrokes. I was attempting to simulate oil painting…

…but no one would confuse the two, no matter how many pressure-sensitive brushes and canvas-simulating overlays I used. Meanwhile, my dream of being in bookstores felt further away than ever. I’d taken class after class in both writing and illustrating – even diving into an intensive semester at Hamline’s MFA in Writing for Children – but, frankly, no one wants to buy what I’m selling.

So. I’m taking a step back. Rather than continuing to create work that lives only in my computer, reliant on outside gatekeepers to see the light of day, I’ve decided to go back to my original passion: oil painting. I’ll be once again delving into still lives (lifes?), but more than that, I want to see if I can transfer the skills I built from five years of creating narrative art into original paintings… that I can then sell on Etsy for oodles of money. And once again, I’ll be documenting everything: the bad, the ugly, and hopefully eventually the good(ish).

Join me!

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…

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

April 5, 2019August 31, 2020 ~ 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…

Why do we paint like we do?

March 9, 2019August 31, 2020 ~ 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.

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:

withgrid

And here’s the final product:

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:

church_by_river_wm

Still pretty close, right?

083116_AboveTheFireplace_9 — *Lookin’ good!*

From short to joyful – preparing my palette

February 24, 2019February 6, 2026 ~ jcaritas ~ 1 Comment

Used to be, whenever I’d think of an artist, busy in her studio, I’d pictured her as follows. She’d have brushes, probably several. She’d stand at an easel. She’d be wearing a beret (just kidding). And she’d have one of those white plastic palettes with all the little wells to keep her paints nice and clean.

Wait — no?

palette

As I learned in my second class – no. Though it varies by brand, most oil paint starts out “short,” a nasty word (He was short with me because I came up short in painting) when what we want is for it to be “joyful.” For this, we need medium.

Painting Medium

2 parts Walnut Alkyd Medium
2 parts Gamsol (Gamsol is an Odorless Mineral Solvent — basically turpentine without the stink and braincell killers)

Mix!

It should look like this:

Painting Medium — No, I’m not taking a drug test — that’s my painting medium!

All oil paint has oil in it (it’s true!) — typically linseed oil, from the seed of the Lin (actually, I have no idea what kind of oil linseed is). Gamblin paints, though, don’t have very much, making them stiff (or short) to use straight from the tube. In order to make them flow, and have the glossy, buttery, luscious consistency we’re looking for (what Jim calls “joyful”), we need to add some extra oil and solvent: our medium.

Note: You could use linseed oil instead of walnut oil in your medium — it actually dries faster than walnut oil (a lovely thing when you have to cart paintings back and forth to class) — but it will become more yellow than walnut over time. (And by time I mean — say it with me — 200 years…).

According to Jim, many artists have learned to do what I used to do — dip the brush first into medium, and then into paint (though I seem to recall instead dipping straight into — horrors! — turpentine). The problem with this method is that any yellowing you’ll see over time will be inconsistent, because some of your brushstrokes will have more oil than others. That’s a lot harder to compensate for with lighting. Instead, you’ll need to mash your medium directly into your paint, and for that, those cute little wells just ain’t going to cut it.

In class we use tempered glass as our palette, with a backing of little swatches of all of our greys to remind us what to put where. That’s awesome while I’m there, but being a little, um, short on cash I just hate wasting all of that unused paint, only to have to remix it all again the next time I sit down. Instead, I just bought this Masterson Artist Palette Seal, which will allow me to close up my box of paints until the next session. Handy dandy! You use it with palette paper, so when you’re done with a project you just scoop up the paper and trash it. Nice!

If you’re following this method, and painting without color, you’ll have five paints: Titanium White, Portland Light Grey, Portland Medium Grey, Portland Dark Grey, and Ivory (?) Black.

When you’re ready to paint, squeeze out an inch or so of each in a row from black to white, with a space in the middle of Portland Medium and Portland Dark to create a blend of the two.

Dip the back of your brush into your painting medium, and drip about 4 drops onto each blob of paint (the amount of paint in my photo would probably just take a drop per pile!). Taking your palette knife, cut them in and continue to mash up each pile of paint, scraping up regularly to keep your piles small and neat (I’m not there yet with this skill.). You’ll probably find you need more medium — it should be around the consistency of shaving cream (if shaving cream feels joyful. Maybe you get more joy from… sour cream? Me, I like shaving my legs.)

mashingpaint

You’re ready to paint!

In my next post, I’ll talk about holding the brush. Who knew this was something I could do wrong?