Three's company

It is cottage time and oddly enough, while preparing and packing, I managed to paint. The cherries are nearly black and I wanted to make them redder, but stuck to matching the colour - post Ian's workshop.

Daisy

What do they call this - a vignette? Maybe it would be better if the whole background were painted in....
After the structure painting, I had to do something real light....

Study

Found a little black and white value study from long ago and decided to give it a quick try.

Exercise # 1

Back to the Arthur Stern book to paint exact patches of colour - turned out a bit too green!

Kiawah Island

We painted black and white exercises, for shapes and values. Then we graduated to black/white and yellow ochre and included colour temperature. Sounds easy - wasn't!

Two Pears

More practice - I made a big puddle of dark colour today and worked outwards from that. This technique will be useful in my next plein air painting.

Dune Ride

There were dune buggy tracks on the wide beach. The canvas happened to have a deep green primer, which gives the painting a darker tint. I was focusing on the little valley - the sweet spot.

Pansies

Good critique from a friend - lacking midtones! And then the contrast between light and dark is quite sharp. So now the light background has been brought down in value. Did the same to one of the other attempts - just to see the effect.

Spring pansies looked so pretty on the table. That lead to a quick study, which lead to a series of paintings, looking for what was not working. I finally concluded that there are too many hard edges. So I painted looser, with lots of soft edges. It was okay but not worth posting. It has been one of those days.

Potato Art: Potatini

This potato theme is continuing - and as much as it amuses me, it is for my sons, and there is a story behind that.

Potato Art: Have We Met?

Today I painted potatoes. They are an interesting item to paint because of their odd shapes and sizes. The markings on one of them looked like the face of a baby seal or a groundhog or some such weasel. I got rather fanciful and the imagination started to enter other realms.

Lemons

This is an assignment exercise from a virtual course I am following. The idea was to paint with a very big brush, except for a few finishing touches, thereby avoiding too much detail - so it was fast!

Trial and Error

This is a copy of a Carol Marine painting. I just had to try her interesting angular style with those quick short confident strokes. Of course my strokes did not come close to hers. But the exercise taught me how important it is to see the subject properly, and have many subtle value and colour changes.