Thankfully though I am doing art - less than I probably should, but vastly more than I was during those 10 years. The stresses of the last couple of months are wearing off too, so more is likely to be forthcoming. After this post I have one more planned before the end of the month (possibly 2, but the other will be quite personal and have no art in it, so you likely don't care). Which brings me back to this post, and why I'm commenting on how time has flown: It's an art class post.
The last post I wrote on the subject was after my last class waaay back in August. It doesn't seem that long ago, yet it was almost 3 months. I started another class about 10 weeks ago and just finished it. I didn't attend all 10 sessions (I think I missed 3), but I painted a reasonable amount in those sessions I did attend, and at home when I missed one of those 3. As a result I have 5 new paintings of vastly differing quality. They are all on canvas board, painted in Acrylic, but the sizes vary. Incidentally, all the photographs but one are from angles other than that at which I was painting as I took them as an after thought rather than during the process.
So this is the one I'm least happy with. I'm not the worlds fastest painter, so I decided to leave out some of the objects you'll see in the photo for time reasons. Even so, it took me two sessions (not counting setup and break down, that's about two hours a time), and looks really sloppy to me. Here's the photo of the scene it's based on, from close to the same angle from which it was painted (I think I was looking down on it more).
So you can see I got the proportions way off the mark, and everything's a bit too bright in the painting. For all that though it's not a complete failure - One thing I didn't mention before is that all of these look better in real life than the photographs really convey, I'm just not very good at photographing them as yet. So I'm quite pleased with the orange ball (actually an egg end on). I'd painted the A being far to orange, which made it difficult to get the egg as bright as I would have liked, so I dulled it down at the last minute, to a poor result, but it does mean the egg stands out quite nicely, whereas it would have been lost before. The cloth isn't bad either, especially compared to some of the later ones.
This second piece took three weeks, and is probably the best of those I did, even though I don't like it all that much. All the pieces this time around were still life, which is fine, but it would have been nice to mix it up a bit (mind you, nothing was stopping me from doing just that if I'd wanted to work on something else instead, so it's entirely my own fault). The image of the painting itself is a little washed out, the real colours are a little better. Here's the photo of the scene.
So I'm not happy with most of the shapes. The paint brushes are wobbly, the gear is squiff, the flower too blocky on the lower left and so on. I quite like the can though, which is why I chose this particular scene (we had a choice of two). At one point the flower pot was a much ruddier brown. Paula (who runs the class) talked me into trying to make it closer to the actual, brighter, colour and I'm glad she did. Here's a shot taken after the first session, where you can see the layout pencils and the less saturated brown of the flowerpot.
My mother wants to have this one, I really don't know why.
This one was painted the evening before halloween, hence the blood that was not in the original. Actually, the photo below is probably the closest to the angle I saw the actual mask from, so you can see I made a bit of a mess of the perspective. You can see that I've left out the things from the table itself - choosing to focus on the mask.
A better thing to do would be to have made the entire background blue, but I thought it would be a challenge to capture the silvered material. Did an okay job I guess, and the whole thing took only 2 hours. It's the one I like the most of the 5, even though it's not very accurate (working from life is a lot harder than working from photos, and I have a hard enough time doing that).
This and the next are quick value studies, and for this one I didn't lay out using pencils to begin with but went straight for the paint (similar to the way I do most of my speedpaints, but with, y'know, paint?). The downside of this is that the composition is pretty weak, with far too much black space. I also left out a small tower from on top of the cylindrical box. Sadly this is the only one for which I don't have a photo of the original scene. Despite the flaws, I quite like it - I think the pig turned out pretty well. as did the shadows. The whole thing took only 40 minutes, aided by my not needing to worry about colour I suspect.
And here's the last one. Another value study, but I wanted to have the tangerine be orange. I did lay this out in pencil first, but mostly just with simple block forms so I could get on with the painting. This backfired a little as the weights came out a little weak looking.
The proportions on the A are better than they were in the first picture, but it's still a little stubby. This was mostly straight lines and circles, which are tricky to do with paint it seems (unlike digital stuff I can't just hold control and click the endpoint for a straight line). I may need to make myself one of those painters straight-edges out of a bit of dowel and a sponge to help with the problem, although I was moving quick on this one and probably wouldn't have wanted to slow down anyway if I'd had one. It took about 70 minutes I think.
And that's it for this post. Hopefully I'll get another post up this week (month), and I'll certainly get one done for next. You know, looking at those photos again, I wouldn't mind basing some digital work on a couple of them, they might turn out quite well. Or I could try them again with real paint later, a reasonable gauge of progress perhaps.
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