This is not a new painting (does not count as one of the 52 for this year), but I was cleaning out the closet & ran across an old binder full of watercolor portraits that I completed while I was a senior in college.
During that year, I had one of the best artistic experiences of my life. I painted once a week w/ a group of senior citizens. They were a blast. It was great to listen to music with them, converse about everything from squirrel soup to modern painting techniques and to (I know this is a platitude but nonetheless true) learn from the people that I was supposed to be teaching.
The above is watercolor & colored pencil on coldpress watercolor paper.
One week one of the ladies brought a book in to teach me a lesson about the myriad of uses for black in painting & color mixing. I had forbidden them to use black (a teaching method used to encourage learning color mixing & discourage letting black take over a piece). She made some good points...That week I started using black in my paintings (albeit sparingly). The broader lesson learned was that, being a person who likes rules & lists & organization, sometimes I need to challenge myself to break the rules in order to push my art forward.
-And you'all thought young people were the biggest proponents for breaking rules!
Step 1: Set up your still life objects & make sure you've got some dramatic lighting going on. I cannot stress enough how important lighting is to the mood & form of a piece.
Step 2: Make a little viewfinder with a piece of paper by cutting a hole at the same proportion as your canvas.
Step 4: Choose a composition & get the drawing down. (My husband was kind enough to point out to me that I'm a mouth breather when I concentrate. The above picture is evidence of this horrid habit. Does anyones else suffer from this affliction? I have tried to stop but sometimes when I'm in the moment I don't even know I'm doing it...)
Step 5: How detailed the drawing gets is up to the artist. I like to just block in simple shapes & then do the rest w/ paint.
Step 6: Paint away! I start w/ my largest brush & end w/ my smallest, meaning block in big shapes first, work to keep the entire canvas at the same level of completion and don't get into details until the very end.
This is the last of the "Rainy Countryside" pieces. Now these are finally finished, I would like to do a few more urban landscapes similar to this one completed awhile back. Watch out Columbus -esp. back alleyways & dingy looking streets- I'll be stalking you for some reference photos this week!
