#64 3/21/19 Keyboard

Another entry in the technology series (there are two now, so I'm allowed to call it a series).  It took more time than I wanted and painting the words was traumatic.  I went about it the same way I did the numbers on the watch, ie painted all around where the word would eventually be, then at the end painted the words.  The most obscure detail: num-lock in "on".  You'll see it now.  Joe reviewed it midway and remarked that I was using a lot of purple.  That, my friends, is the "glow" from the monitor.

I used quite a bit of Payne's Gray, which happens to be a Hobby Lobby tube of paint.  While the price is right, the quality once again is perplexing.  I needed to squeeze out a bit more to finish, and nothing was moving, so I squeezed a bit harder, and whammo!  A giant clot of paint was expelled.  It looked like a slug.  Kind of gross.  And now I will have to Payne's-Gray-background-paint a bunch of canvases (or forfeit the slug).

#63 3/20/19 Yellow Bananas

These are the Michigan Bananas, not the more recent Chiquita Bananas, with the perspective from the back-side.  The canvas was painted lightly with some sort of dark orange....oil paint, not acrylic.  The book I'm in now (The Painting Course, etc) made a statement that casts doubt on the wisdom of putting down an acrylic paint prior to covering it with an oil paint, especially a "thick" layer of acrylic paint...that at an undisclosed time in the future the oil paint will fall off the acrylic paint.  But aren't all canvases treated with an acrylic gesso specifically so the oil paint has something to cling to?  Let me google that......yeah, there's a lot of conflicting information out there.  They all agree however on this: don't put acrylic paint on top of oil paint.  Wikipedia says that Gesso is made from "a mix of an animal glue binder (usually rabbit-skin glue), chalk, and white pigment."  My jar of Liquitex Super Heavy Gesso says "Acrylic Polymer Emulsion" on the label, so I'm thinking the local rabbits were safe while this product was made.  In the directions part of the label it says "for acrylic, oil, pastels and other paint media".  I think we're fine.  Plus, the label says it was made in France, oui, tres manifique!

#62 3/19/19 Two Plums and a Knife

I must confess that around 25% into this painting I was ready to throw it all away.  I looked at what I had so far (the plate) and thought it looked ridiculously juvenile.  I asked myself, "why this huge investment of time for silly looking paintings??  Do something else!"  But alas, I am tenacious if nothing else.  I finished the painting and ended up liking it in the end.  It was, however, a 2 hour ordeal.  Holy moly, it's only 4x6 inches.

#61 3/18/19 Green Bananas

I went grocery shopping last week, because of Paul coming in.  This painting kick completely changes how I shop the produce department.  Instead of "Do we need this?" and "Is this a good price?" it is now "Hmmm, nice color, nice shape, it will make an interesting painting, sold!"  I ended up with mushrooms, grapes, plums, pears, a red pepper, a purple onion, two avocados and bananas.  Previously, I likely would have only brought home a bag of salad and the avocados. Tonight I painted the bananas.  They were still green when I photographed them, and I was going to leave that fact out of the painting, but I decided to leave it in.  I also decided to leave the Chiquita sticker intact when I photographed them, although I took 4 of them off (for some reason the sticker person went crazy putting a sticker on nearly each banana in the bunch).

The canvas was previously painted with denim blue....some left-over smush from a palette a few weeks ago.  I've been reading, well skimming, the color chapter in the "Oil Painting Course You've Always Wanted" book.  The chapter is called "Getting the Colors You Want" and the author claims that once you learn her simple method, you will never be stumped for the right color.  I focused on the word "simple" and somewhere in the 20 pages of the chapter I shouted "SIMPLE????" and stopped reading.  The only thing I got from the chapter so far was that I forgot my Delaplaine class lesson on using complementary colors to change values.  So on these bananas, I used some violet to paint the shadowed parts.  Now, as I write this blog entry, and have the book open (so I could count how many pages in the chapter, wouldn't want anyone thinking it was only 3 pages), I am noting the 2 pages that describe why "yellow and violet are the exception to the rule" on the complementary color trick.  Instead it says you also should add French Ultramarine blue mixed with an appropriate amount of white to bring it to the same value.  Huh?  (That was likely the part of the chapter that made me shout "SIMPLE????")

#60 03-16&17-19 Wristwatch

My son Paul was home for the weekend - his birthday was the 15th, he is 28 years old!  And I worked the weekend (of course), so painting took a backseat.  I did the background quickly on Saturday, and the watch on Sunday, which worked out well since the background was so dang dark.  It dried enough overnight to not create a smudge trap when I put in the watch edges. Another different thing I did on this....where the hour numbers, brandname and minute marks were, I left them open....kind of reverse-writing.  I just knew that if I painted in the watchface background over the markings for these details I would lose their proper placement.  I forgot when I went over the #8, so that is the only number that is painted over top the background color.  Doing it this way made it look very imprecise, but I'm actually OK with that.  I didn't want it to look like a photograph, but a painting of an old watch.  The canvas on this is actually the wrapped canvas that I covered with the thick gesso.  This fact may also lend itself to making it look "older".  I "wrapped" the leather watchband down the sides of the canvas, so it is a tiny bit 3-D.  Do I like this end-product?  I'm on the fence.  Something isn't quite right and I haven't put my finger on it yet.  I think I'll be tinkering with this watch.

#59 3/15/19 Coffee Pot

Today I got paint all over my shirt.  It's long sleeve and kind of bulky.  I folded up the sleeves, but still, rotating this painting around to get at everything, I got so absorbed that I didn't notice where my arm was.  Before I started this one, the first in my "Technology" series, I watched some you-tube videos on painting metallic objects.  Walcott Fine Art walked me through, and low and behold he's OK with black paint!  Good thing I had some on hand!  Walcott also had a great tip: only use the teeniest tiniest bit of Phthalo Blue, wow, he was right!  I also found that I'm missing Burnt Umber from his list, as well as Quinacridone Magenta.

Dave is reaching the end of his probation period in his (relatively) new job working for the county.  His office is bare, leaving his workmates to speculate that he doesn't plan to stay.  He had joked that when his probation is over and they haven't walked him to the door, THEN he'll put some stuff on the walls.  I have, of course, offered to give him some "personalized" "original" artwork.  After I finished this one, I thought, "hey, the abstract stuff won't suit his office near as nicely as the coffee pot, if I can paint a few more "techno" gadgets, it will be sort of punny - the guy working in the techno department has techno gadget paintings on his wall."  We'll see if he's game.

#55, #56, #57, #58 - 3/14/19 Four Fat Apples

I have had these 4 squarish wrapped canvases, tiny, only 3 inch squares, for a few years.  They were going to be "paper painting" projects, I was going to stick cut-out bird pictures on them and maybe some other bits of paper and paint.  Today I finally used them.....in a blatant attempt to get closer to my daily painting goal of 25/month.  I thought, oh they're tiny and I can get 4 done quickly if they're a simple subject and hey I'll make them all part of a theme so they can be grouped together apples are perfect I've painted lots of them so I'll just whip them right out!  I had the day off and had already drank quite a bit of coffee.  So I spent the morning reading the paper, varnishing a few paintings that were ready, cleaning the wall behind the stove, picking through a box of stuff inherited from Bev, rearranging my desk, prepping a bunch of canvases by sticking them to cardboard and giving them an acrylic color, fixing a necklace, etc.  I was supposed to be cleaning toilets and vacuuming, ugh, so everything else around me beckoned with a much louder voice.

I also found two wood boxes while at my jewelry table. I had purchased them at a craft show, the guy made nice wood things but had these two cheaply constructed small open boxes that he stained and put felt in the bottom, said they were for whatnots that you unload from your pockets at the end of the day.  I saw them as potential painting surfaces that wouldn't need to be framed if I painted the bottoms of them, and the price was right 2/$5.  So today I gesso'd them, well really super gesso'd them!  Hobby Lobby had a $30 giant tube of super thick gesso marked down to $9.  At the time, I hadn't begun painting, but I had signed up for the oil class and thought it might be needed.  Jan wasn't a fan of the one project I did that I put this extra gesso under (it left lots of texture, and she once claimed she preferred to paint on smooth wood because the texture in canvas bothered her).  Since it was the only gesso I owned, I smeared it all over the boxes.  The cheap construction meant there was lots of pits and uneven joints and the super thick gesso filled the holes.  I like the texture.  So I wondered if I could super thick gesso a stretched canvas.  Why the heck not?  I sacrificed one, for the sake of curiosity.

But the apple grouping.  I free-handed them, and it shows.  My brain hasn't been trained to draw properly yet, via my tracings.  My brushwork - sloppy.  I primed the canvas with a reddish-gray muddy color, I don't know why....I was trying to make a golden brown and added too much red.  The book I'm reading now, "The Oil Painting Course You've Always Wanted" by Kathleen Lochen Staiger had some sage advice in the color mixing chapter that I read AFTER my morning of canvas prep: "If you make a mistake in a color mixture and get too much of one of the colors, start fresh.  It takes a lot of paint to make a difference in a wrong color."  She also has some sage advice on "saving paint" that starts out with the sentence "It's good to be frugal - within reason."  Sometimes I might be unreasonably frugal.  But she doesn't advise to keep an abstract project going for left-over paint, something I find very.....reasonable.

Joe reviewed my apples and said there was too much brown around them.  I said it was a style, outlining, which I had renamed "eyeliner".  He said no, there's a more proper name for the style: "cel shading".  How the heck does he retain this kind of information in his brain?

Proof of the day:

#54 3/12/19 Date Night

Dave and I met downtown Frederick for dinner after work.  The restaurant: Lazy Fish.  The menu: sushi.  The atmosphere: romantic.  Dave, who rarely drinks wine, ordered a Pinot Grigio.  I wanted to brag to my cousin Lori, who was vacationing in St. Martin, that she was missing a new restaurant event with wine and sushi....as if St. Martin's might come up short!  This is a portion of the photo I sent her.  I cropped out the wine glass because it was reflecting colors like crazy.  I left Dave's elbow.  It is the "mystery" in the painting, "what is that shadow on the left?"  I spent way too much time on this one, kept trying to get the colorfulness just right and kept turning it into a smudgy mess.  This is where I left it.  I will likely go back once it begins to dry a bit, and put down some more color on the glass.

 

#53 3/11/19 Rough-Housing Peppers

I tried something new on this one....I painted an acrylic background.  It was part of my exercise program.  I wanted a red background, but didn't want to wait several days for it to dry, so I got out my acrylic paints, put down a nice thick coat, figured it needed 15 minutes to dry thoroughly and decided to spend that 15 minutes on the rowing machine.  I actually rowed for 17.5 minutes.  A few days ago was my first day rowing, 15min then.  So I had to up it a bit.  I'm shooting for 30 minutes without suffering any back pain. Figure I better go about it slow.  So far, so good.  Joe is very into rowing for health benefits, and he got Dave interested in it....mostly Dave is interested in it because his doctor said he might sleep better if he got regular exercise.  He's been struggling with insomnia for a few years now.  Me?  I just found out I am "at risk" for osteoporosis, my bone density test was 0.824 g/cm^2.  Dr. Joe says I can fix that with Calcium, Magnesium, Vitamin D and weight-bearing exercise.  I think these peppers might contain some of the ingredients he mentioned.  The arrangement of them remind me of 3 little kids rough-housing with their Dad on the living room floor, always tons of fun!  The Dad-pepper came out a bit washed-out looking, too much white, but hey, he might be suffering from chronic insomnia.

#52 3-10-19 Green Apple

More eye-liner work going on tonight.  This canvas had a gray-eige background color, so it seems like there's a bit of drama in the painting, a bit of mystery.  I tried to make it fast and loose, using up paint left on the palette from last night's painting.  My new thing is to mix all the paint left on the brush from the subject and stir it into the shadow, with the thinking being that those colors would be reflected down on the surface, so some of those pigments there would make sense.  And vice versa, some of the surface pigment put on the subject, because that color would be reflected up.  I'm noticing too that I'm not missing the horizon line....I've purposely left it out, but perhaps I'll bring it back with the next painting, see if it feels right or wrong or maybe just inconsequential in these simple paintings.  I did miss the bright red signature tonight, and as such I squished out a bit of extra red paint in order to give two upcoming blank canvases a red background color  It actually looks more like salmon than red.  I am just too cheap to give it full red I guess.  But also I'd like it to be dry and ready to go this week sometime.

#51 3-9-19 Pear Make-Over

That "Letter D" painting has been sitting here, haunting me, saying "When are you going to get some gesso overtop of me, I need a make-over!"  So, being the lazy person that I am....oops, meant to say creative person.....sometimes it's a fine line....I decided to skip the gesso and just paint over top.  But that meant I couldn't do my "chalk carbon copy" process.  I was forced to freehand the subject, Lord have mercy.  So, only easy subjects were considered and given the rectangular canvas, I decided on a pear.  The underpainting was saturated color, so it was tricky to not let it come through the pear.  It seems titanium white has the most opaque pigment and is willing to obscure anything below it so I mixed that into most of it.  I let the underpainting colors come through a bit on the background, once again using the favored Lt. Graphite Hobby Lobby (Master's Touch) paint.  My scratched off signature initials are bright red, oh my!

Just like getting your long hair cut short, it's fun to see the weird stages of transformation:

#50 3-8-19 Italian Flag

An assemblage of ingredients from my Blue Apron box - a zucchini, a spring onion and little tomatoes - arranged green, white, red - like the Italian flag, like Italian food!  The canvas texture lent itself well to the pattern of micro-dots on the skin of the zucchini.  I used heavy eyeliner to draw this one on the canvas, then filled in the colors.  The canvas started with a mustard color, from a previous palette of left-overs all smushed together and paper-toweled to this canvas about a week ago.  I think that also helped with the zucchini skin coloration.

#49 030719 Dave's Boots

Since I liked the blue sneakers so much, Dave's boots laying in the kitchen caught my eye as "also paintable".  We've had quite a bit of snow this winter, and we both have our snow boots perpetually drying on a towel on the kitchen floor.  Again though, the laces were my challenge!  The leather was so many varying shades of brown...I pulled out Raw Sienna, Yellow Ochre, Burnt Sienna and (my most used and favorite for corners and edges) Raw Umber.  Sounds like maybe I'm missing Burnt Umber.  I'll have to keep an eye out for that one when it's on sale.  Not Hobby Lobby paints though.....I'm reserving that brand for crazy colors.  The brand most of my paints come from is Winsor and Newton Winton Oil Colour.  You know they're high quality pigments when color is spelled "colour"!  The week before my oil class started last fall at the Delaplaine, Michaels was having a buy two get one on these paints.  There were 8 colors requested on the supply list for the class, so I had to get a 9th (since it would be foolish not to) and I chose black as the missing ingredient.  When the class started the instructor said black didn't exist in real life, so "we don't use it".  I kept my mouth shut about having it in my cigar box of paints.  I have however used it successfully (I think anyway) in several paintings, including this one: directly under the boots, it's very dark and the black translates that well.

#48 3/5/19 Messy Olives

Since I spent WAY too much time on my painting yesterday, I was determined to spend very little time on a painting today.  I had another photo of the olive trio and decided to do them on one of my "pre-painted" boards. It was a yellow-ish color and the paint was mostly dry.  I used the palette left over from the event yesterday which was "Baby Pryor", so given the amount of excess blue on the palette it went toward the background.  But then I thought, rats, I was supposed to let some of the background yellow show through here and there.  I smudged the corners with a piece of scrap fabric.  The fabric was rather stiff, and when I folded it over to wipe the canvas again I found that I could scratch the surface paint off....so on a whim I scribbled around the edges.  Experimenting, that's what I'm supposed to do, right????

Since it was finished lickety-split, I decided to get busy on a chore: I varnished all the previous paintings that seemed "ready".  The Gamsol people also make Gamvar (at which point the name Gamsol made more sense), and the website said I could apply the varnish when you simply couldn't budge the paint....it might not be completely dry, but it was still ok to apply the varnish and all the layers would dry together over time.  Since I'm not a very thick painter (yet, I might experiment with that next), nearly every one of my paintings seemed ready for varnish.  When I had them all laying out on the floor drying, it looked like A LOT of paintings.  What the heck will I do with them all?

 

#47 03/04/19 Baby Pryor

Pryor is my nephew, he belongs to my brother Doug and his wife Wendy.  He's in high school now, but I found this picture of him while digging for pictures of Bev (for the fabulous power-point of pics that Dave put together for her 'celebration of life' ceremony yesterday).  Obviously this photo is from one of our family beach trips - always a great time.  Pryor was the chubbiest of babies!  When I saw all that baby-fat, I knew I had to paint it - even though painting human beings is daunting!  It came together pretty quickly, and then I showed it to Dave and Joe, who thought it was "pretty good" - but then Dave added, "Why is he crying?"  Crap, he is squinting into the sun, a happy little toddler expression.  So then I spent 2 hours trying in vain to get him to look happier.  Finally, I had to call it quits and go to bed.  When I looked at it the next day, really really looked at it, the only thing I found to add was a bit of shadow on his chin. Today, I feel like I should add another little fat fold under his eye.  Tomorrow, I might decide to cover it with gesso.  So, I'm going to stop looking at it.  Perhaps it is best to paint strangers.

#46 3/3/19 Faith's Shoes

Yesterday I hit pay-dirt!  It was the Waynesboro Hospital Health Fair.....and during this event the lab gives away a few screening tests for free (glucose and a lipid panel), so several hundred people will line up in the high school gym to have their blood drawn.  Since I used to draw blood at my favorite former job and I miss it, I like to volunteer for this duty during the Health Fair.  I drew blood from 42 people in less than 3 hours this year.  But the best part, this year Ellen's daughter Faith came along to be a helper....she's about 12 years old and super cute.  Plus she happened to have on these shoes, which she allowed me to photograph, even though I'm sure she thought it was a strange request.  I've seen several daily painters use these shoes in their paintings, and I wasn't sure how to get my hands on a pair that were worn-in.  And then Faith showed up!

The laces were my toughest part, I felt like I was getting sloppy with them.  And then Joe came in the room and looked at my work and says, "Wow, that one looks good, especially the laces."  Huh?