Whoa! No. 4 is hard!!

I may have bitten off more than I can chew, uh paint that is. This is the underpainting. I am going to let it dry a bit before I play with it some more. I think the values still need adjusting. I am not good at drawing, as you can probably tell, so I painted in the major forms first then played with the values and brush strokes. I need to let it sit before I decide what to do next.

Black and White Reference Photo for No. 4

Getting ready for no. 4

This is the reference picture for number 4. It is a digital photograph I took in the Banyan Grove at the South Coast Botanic Gardens in Los Angeles county. I love the serpentine forms of the roots of this tree.

I enhanced the photo's colors and contrast in Photo Shop Elements. I also printed a black and white version to bring out the values.


Only 116 to go.

Blue Bottle and Oranges....at last!

Here is my 3rd oil painting. Only 117 to go! Depicting the glass bottle was interesting. Still haven't got it ......but I am learning.



I found another excellent teacher on-line......Brian Simons at http://www.briansimons.com/. I love his style and he has a wonderful eBook available. I have downloaded it and read through it twice. This picture is not his teaching yet. But the next one will be. He spends most of the book attacking the mythologies of painting. He believes, and demonstrates, that anyone can paint. Then he explains his 7 steps to making a painting. They are truly simple and he explains them very clearly. Now....to put them into practice.

Getting ready for number 3

Blue Bottle and Oranges

Here is the photo of the setup for number 3. Challenge here is the glass bottle and its reflections. I plant to treat the oranges like I did the lemons......not using the complement, blue, too much for the form shading but using darker values of orange??????

Getting ready for number 2

Here is a photo of the setup for my second painting.......Lemons on a Blue Plate.







First I did a study in gray to get the forms and the highlights worked out. I was concerned about the plate.....how to make it look like ceramic. I would do the finished picture on a new canvas. This is not an underpainting just another painting entirely.

Then I played around with the colors to get the values for the lemons and the plate and color for the background. I decided the lemons would be three different hues of yellow shaded with darker and more neutral values of yellow. Instead of using the complement, violet, to shade I decided to use it as the background. I wanted the lemons to really shine and I hoped the compement as the background would enhance the yellow. The plate was a mix of ultramarine blue and pthalo blue. The challenge was to make the plate look like glass with light highlights and reflections from the lemons. I did mix yellow with violet, lower right corner, and decided it dulled the yellow much more than I wanted. I couldn't make the yellow reflections in the plate look yellow. They always looked green. Need to learn more about that!

Here is the finished picture. My monitor makes the background look more blue than it really is.

Time to DO IT! First picture.

Enough exercising already! Time to make a picture.

Pears and Mango 8/8/2008

Well, it's a start. I like the pears. And the mango. I like the blue/white cloth. The background needs work. Only 119 picutres to go.

Got to learn about form!

Here are my exercises in painting the 4 basic forms; sphere, cone, cylinder and, oops, forgot the cube. Oh well, you get the idea.

The first three use just black and white to make shades of gray. These exercises are from Johnnie Liliedahl's Illuminations series DVDs, which are excellent. There are so many poor painting dvds out there but hers are very clear and complete. Her web site is www.lilipubs.com

The colored forms exercise and the color circle, from an earlier blog Color Exercises, are in the book "The Oil Painting Course You've Always Wanted" by Kathleen Staiger. This book is very basic and assumes you know nothing about oil painting. It is the best book I have found for a rank beginner like me. I am using these and the DVDs from Hall Groat II to learn the basics.

Color Exercises

Starting with with basics....here is the requisite color wheel (7-26-2008) followed by a "clean the palette painting (also 7-26-2008).

Let's try this again

I started watercolor paining a few months ago but stopped because I didn't like my pictures. I know, silly reason. Now I am starting oil painting. I like it much better because I am letting myself paint bad pictures and make mistakes. I am teaching myself so I have been painting exercises from various books, DVDs and web sites. I want to do realistic paintings.......still lifes and landscapes, plein air eventually. I have read that I need to do at least 120 bad paintings before I will do a good painting. I have done 2 paintings......118 to go.