Tag: pears

Chatter Drawing

21-24 / 30

By -N- on

I am getting burnt out on these drawings! I decided to take a few days off and will pick up again tomorrow. Since I have committed to 30, I only 6 more to go by 4/17. I think I can handle that!

Day 21

Cannon Beach, Oregon. Figure is too big, some foot prints too dark and too big in the distance.

Day 22

Initially I had drawn this shack so that the beach and waves in the distance were parallel to the edge of the paper. After scanning it, I realized it looked better with a bit of an angle to it. Interestingly, a comment said it made no sense because the ocean is out there, straight ahead. Obviously, too realistic of a person, or someone who hasn’t taken a photo. Really, to me, a very interesting and odd comment and viewpoint!

Day 23

Here is a scene of looking down onto a beach. The distant cliffs look okay, but the descent to the shore in the midground is definitely confusing.

Day 24

During last Saturday’s zoom meeting, Ian talked about cross hatching. I use it a lot in ink drawing, but not in pencil since the idea for a lot of this 30-day challenge is to limit marks to horizontal and vertical. The idea is to create value studies, not finished drawings. Interesting lines do not make for good value studies of light, medium, dark. However, a simple use of lines, cross hatching, vertical, diagonal, horizontal, helps delineate shapes, such as curves. I based this drawing off a study of 3 pears by Cezanne.

Commentary

These studies are making more sense and getting easier to execute so that shapes have shape, even if not always understandable.

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Chatter Pastels

A Pair of Pears

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By far, this is the best of the 4 pastels I have done thus far.  It sort of came together.  Watching a YouTube video helped, too, to get an idea about how to proceed.

I used my fingers for most of the blending, and used a baby wipe in between to clean up dirty finger tips.  I also worked the primary background and foreground first, working around the pears before doing the pears themselves.  For the Saguaro painting, I had done the cactus first and then the sky – not really successful as the sky became a bit smudged with the greens.  Live and learn!  I used a torchon / stump for the areas closest to the pears and in the shadows to help isolate things.  I cleaned them off with rough sandpaper – 100 grit.

Another thing I did was consider color and complementary colors in the painting.  I simplified and did big areas before moving into smaller and more defined regions.

Of course, not all paintings will be this successful!  It’s fun to compile knowledge and start using it when creating a picture or painting.  The simplicity of this painting pleases me, but it was a more complex process than may appear because of the multiple layers of color put down.

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Chatter Drawing Watercolor

Pears & Ink

By -N- on

When you get home at 7 p.m., have dinner, and paint some swatches on a wall to choose a color, there is not a lot of time left in the day to do much of anything.  To slow down, I thought about what I had done the day before – watercolor and ink, not splashy and loose, but more controlled.  A still life, and my favorite fruit – pears!

Last night I did the colors.

This morning, I did the ink.

The ink I used is waterproof, but is a warm grey in tone.  It actually works for a more delicate and less contrasting line or dot.

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Chatter Drawing Watercolor

Watercolor Workshop, Day 2

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Another day just painting!  What a pleasure to be able to do it!

Today we did two different things.  Actually, three.  For warm-up, we returned to the quick three minute sketches, which eventually morphed into a still life with three objects.  Mine were a piece of dried corn, a plastic mushroom, and a plastic artichoke.  I was not particularly nimble this morning, but here is one I produced.

From there, we moved on to landscapes, but I will hold off for a moment on those.  We did an exercise which I found fascinating:  take one object and paint it 6 different ways.  I chose a really lovely fake pear – golden and red, reminiscent of autumn.  Take a look  . . . they are in a gallery format, so click on one image to be able to scroll through them larger than they are here.

This was a lot of fun to do – nothing I ever have considered as an exercise.  And then . . . we moved on to landscapes from photographs Brenda took, laminated, and brought to class.

The idea was to take a photo and modify it.  This one is in the wine country of Northern California.

This one is, I think, in Carmel, but I don’t recall.  All the speckles are from the fact that it is a ghost image from a wet painting.  Truthfully, I was surprised it was a success at all.  All day I felt restless and unfocused.

Finally, this one.  I think it is the best of everything I did today.  The mantra for the day was draw, frame, paint.

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Chatter Watercolor

The Grapes of Wrath

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Today was a day of wrath!  I was soooo frustrated!

And a day of learning.  I did four watercolors without lines.  The first two were sketched in with pencil; the last two were done freehand, relying on imagination and the precepts of sumi-e, where lines are not drawn.

In each painting, something works, and in each painting there are places of failure.  What I failed at was separating various areas from the neighboring shape or shadow.  Some areas appear rather painterly. I still have a long way to go – but at least, at last, there are no lines.

Paper is Canson’s watercolor paper, and colors include quinacridone yellow, cobalt teal, carbazole violet, ultramarine blue, burnt sienna, Hooker’s green, alizarin crimson, Payne’s grey, and a few others.

Grapes of Wrath (1)

Grapes of Wrath (2)

Grapes of Wrath (3)

Grapes of Wrath (4)

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