Fresh and Green

The other painting

The painting above, Fresh and Green, is one of the other paintings that got me into the Indiana artist club. I recently finished a large studio painting based off of this work. This painting has a lot of design work involved and isn't particularly true to the exact scene that was in front of me. It was more about the patterns I was seeing and trying to organize it in a way that made sense to me. There was so much happening in the lower half of the scene that it had to be edited down and re-arranged to be an attractive showing of what was there. I'm a fan of visual rhythm. If I see shapes that repeat it doesn't matter what the subject material is. It could have been cars, boats, dogs, etc.., as long as it is has a flow. Anyway I need to get back to work. I am doing line and marker drawings of people using a a couple of websites. http://www.artsyposes.com/index, http://lovecastle.org/draw/. Check them out.

A rolling rhythm

What I've been up to

Since my last post

- Finished the plein air week with Wyatt
-Won Outstanding pastel at the Hoosier Salon
-Accepted into the Indiana Artist Club
-Paintings accepted into the Minnetresta: Art about the land show
-just got whipped by two paintings today

The last one is all I have been thinking about since putting down the brush today. I need to come up with a game plan if I'm going to start painting the figure and portraits. They both started so  promising. The drawing and composition was good enough, but after putting the brush down with color it was a slow motion train wreck. In a strange way it feels good getting kicked around by the painting process. It makes me think harder about what I'm doing. I will add figuring out the figure to my giant list of things to learn. 

The picture above is one of the paintings that got me into the Indiana artist club. "A rolling rhythm" I should start posting about the week long plein air adventure next, whether I do or not will be discovered shortly.

Great things and bad problems

The great things that have been going on more than make up for the little bit of problems that have accrued. My computer was in bad shape last week and I finally got it back to normal. The thing that bothered me most was it being during a week when most people would be home with time to play around on the internet. Regardless of that I'm back now and I've been producing like a wild man. This is my first of today. I'm fairly certain I've done more still life with these little birds in the past two weeks than some artist do in an entire year. I've been trying to get my palette down to as few as colors as possible and this one is at four colors. I'm not sure if I can go one less without it looking like a value study. Although tomorrow I will do my best to do that. One of the things I've been working on is making colors appear that are not on the palette. If you think there is blue in this painting you would be wrong. Anyway this painting is called "The illusions of winning arguments". I'm currently in the process with another artist to start a still life group in the area so many more still life will be coming during these cold months.