#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: