Susan, Painting

Wednesday, April 8, 2020

I'm Calling This One Finished

It is such a rare thing for me to finish a painting. Some of what you see in this blog, I've been working on for 2 years. Finishing this should be cause for celebration but it's a measly 4" x 4"!

Tuesday, April 7, 2020

Bits, Here And There

Mostly just cleaned up a few spots: picked out a little more detail on the trees, evened out the blue shadow on the sidewalk, etc.

A Clean Background

Today I'm trying to make the background as uniform as possible in preparation for redrawing the plate's contour, which is still a bit wonky.

Morning Cheer

Bright colors this morning; I'm working on the irises and extending the height of the vase.

And Another Attempt At A Luminous Sky

Forgot to post this one yesterday!

I'm going to paint over those small violet clouds near the horizon line; something else would be more interesting.

Monday, April 6, 2020

Maybe A Step In The Right Direction?

I lightened the shadow areas and made them somewhat uniform in color, and I think it looks better. I studied the Charing Cross Bridge paintings of Monet over the weekend, looking for ways to work some interest into the blue shadows. He used a little white, a little turquoise, but mostly just changed the values on the bridge supports. I'll mess around with it some more, but overall, I think this is an improvement.

Saturday, April 4, 2020

Cleanup On The Right Sides

Both of these paintings needed refinement on the right sides. I still can't match the vivid blue-purple on the tower of wine bottles, so this will have to do.

And I cleaned up the floor shadows on this one:

Stop Before You Ruin It, and Face Coverings

My intentions were good this morning: I set out to make the rim of the plate accurate, but things went wrong very quickly. Rule #1: DUST OFF THE PANEL BEFORE YOU START TO PAINT. I will never learn! The brush kept picking up extremely fine cat hairs and they in turn kept picking up wet paint and dragging it into areas where it didn't belong. Finally I had to stop. But at least a little progress was made.

My cat friend, who has very soft, very fine hair/fur, relaxing in his closet cave:

He is wondering why I feel compelled to take yet another photo of him and disturb his nap when I already have 3000+ pictures of him.

Meanwhile: I found an excellent tutorial on making face masks yesterday— or as they want us to refer to them, "face coverings," on YouTube by a woman named Leah Day. I'll link to it here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNX0cRrYj6U

I went through some of my sewing fabric stash last night and figure I can make some of these and donate them to hospitals. They have a pocket for easy placement/removal of filtering material, like paper towels or vacuum cleaner bag filters. Need to look into this more carefully, but what a great idea.

Friday, April 3, 2020

Hacking Around

I don't feel like I did anything useful on these four this morning, but at least I wasn't lying on the couch eating bonbons.

The first one: Maybe slightly better than it was? Still trying to get a handle on the color.

Next: Still kind of "meh." I'm going to look at a lot of photos of clouds tonight and try to find something that communicates the mood.

Moving along: Trying to get a better sense of what I want the sky to look like, sort of more ephemeral. Added more color, let it dry a bit and then smooshed it around.

Finally, picking out some details in the bar window.

Thursday, April 2, 2020

Up And At It Before 10 A.M.

For once, I was ready to go early today. And I'd wanted to get back to the dessert series, which I've been ignoring lately in favor of more fun stuff. The red color of the Strawberry Shortcake painting beckoned, so I squeezed out some color and went at it:

Then moved on to this; forgetting that I had been planning to stick to finishing just a few of the desserts, I caught a glimpse of the close-up photo of the crackly-surface detail and hatched a plan on how to proceed; First, a midtone layer of squiggly, diagonal strokes in a combination of Yellow Ochre Pale and two yellows; then some Brilliant Yellow Pale (more squiggles) and highlights in white. Every stroke had to be rounded and organic, too.

It looks more realistic. At the end, I placed a few spots of that odd dark color— don't know what the ingredient is— in just a few places here and there. Next time I work on this I'll have to tone down the table color, which looks too bright and very artificial. And every piece in the series needs some refinement on the plates.

Wednesday, April 1, 2020

Buckle Up, Buttercup!

Hauled myself back into the studio and worked on the decoration-laden left side. Those weird looking things are fake poinsettias and sparkly silver painted tree branches. They might be too distracting; I may have to knock them back a bit. Astonishing how much there is left to do on this one.

A Wasted Day

At least so far, it's wasted. I can't seem to get into gear with the painting today, and I blame the weather. It's ANOTHER dank, dismal, dreary, damp, overcast, miserable day. And the news isn't too good, either.

Moved one of the sunflowers forward, and it makes a big difference in the mood of the piece. Some of the white daffodils have petals that are unusually colored due to being in the shadows; painting those is fun. But I'm going to go do something else now and give up for a while.

This Needs Something In The Foreground

Also: not happy with those parallel purple clouds near the horizon.