#33 Golden Delicious 2/13/19

I'm behind schedule.....picked up the quilt from the quilt-lady, she got it done in a week, and it's gorgeous!  So I spent the last two days getting the binding made and sewn to the edges.  Wrapping the binding to the back side of the quilt is a hand-sewing job, the quilt is queen sized so the perimeter is quite large!  It will be a car-ride-project, perfect when you sit for long periods....makes the time go by quick.  So, point, I am remiss in my daily painting.  I did a quick technique today, selecting the trashiest brush in the collection.  It's a very stiff bristle #4 round.  It not only put down the paint, but took it off at the same time, weird.  But I decided I keep going with it.  At the end, I get out a thinner, softer brush to do the stem and the highlights....then dinked around in the middle of the apple.  Overall, even though it's rough-looking, I like it.  I would eat this apple.

 

 

 

#32 BatCat, part 3, 2/10/19

Decided since I had two Bat Cat paintings, one large and one small, that there needed to be a third medium sized.  This is 5x7 inches.  One day they might be grouped together.  There he sits by the back sliding glass door, beckoning for someone to open it for him, even though it is late at night.  Dead-Eye is out there somewhere waiting for him to come out and play, that is, if you call just staring at one another playing.  We don't know who Dead-Eye belongs to, he doesn't have a collar.  But he's well-fed.  And, as per his name, he's missing an eye.  Perhaps one day I'll get a photo of him and paint his sad little face.  Actually he looks more angry than sad.

As for this painting, the floor is lacking something, it's too flat (ha, that sounds crazy if taken literally).

#31 Drink Scotch Whisky All Night Long 2/9/19

Saturday night and the feeling was right, Dave agreed to have a "Paint and Scotch" night with me.  I showed him some daily paintings on pinterest, with Scotch as the subject.  Dave loves good scotch, as well as a reason to share it.  He may have been humoring me, but I think he did GREAT.  His part of the prep was to select the scotch and pour some in his best glass.  My part was to photograph, crop and print.  I looked at what he poured and said, "Holy mackerel, that's too much!  None of the pinterest pictures employed THAT MUCH whisky!"  So he fixed it by drinking part of it.  He's so clever!  The ice cubes were a challenge for both of us.  But Dave caught on to the importance of painting the shadows, and his first painting shows great promise!  He's going to use his painting as wall-paper on his phone!

Dave's Number 1

Deanna's Number 31

#30 No 3-D 2/8/19

Coming up on a trip to Michigan soon.....the brother from California is coming into town, the other 3 brothers and parents live in Michigan, so Dave and I are headed up, a family reunion of sorts.  Dave thinks it's a crazy idea to take time off in February and spend it in Michigan.  Alas, blood is thicker than mercury.  So I have nieces and nephews afoot up there, and I'm going to make them paint (I mean, ask them nicely of course).  And I want a decent project for the assorted ages, I think they range from 9 to 16 right now.  Tiny painting, something personal, their initial in a fancy script, surrounded by lovely oily colors.  This is my prototype.  I hate it.  But it's a good thing I figured this out early.  I was thinking it over on my way to work the next morning, "Why do I dislike the D painting so much?"  There was nothing about the thing that I enjoyed.  Did I choose a bad font?  Are the jester costume colors too much?  Well, one thing I enjoyed was trying out my idea to lay this speckled cleaning rag over it, to see if it would create subdued polka dots (it did).  Suddenly the reason hit: what I enjoy with the paints is seeing something 3-dimensional emerge from the 2-dimensional surface.  The D was flat, thus without spark.  It will be a wiper.

The kids will be painting apples, by the way.

#29 Pear w/ Eyeliner 2/7/19

Back to a fast and furious painting technique, this time a pear.  Used the brown paint to "draw" the subject.  The pear ended up looking "accentuated", like women's eyes look when they put on their Cleopatra eyeliner.  While I would feel grossly inappropriate and cheap with Cleopatra eyeliner applied on my face, my Pear handles it well.  I will play a bit more with this technique.  My brushstrokes otherwise were an attempt at just put something down and live with it, but I ended up fussing over the interior of the pear.  I will play with that a bit more too.

#28 Bok Choy, 2/6/19

Since my "tomato tango" went so quick, I thought I'd try for a second on the same day.  Something a little harder: the Bok Choy photo that's been on my mind.  I love the shape of bok choy, and I wanted to use another of my tiny 4x6 canvases which the bok choy fit.  I felt ready to tackle it!  And then, screech, I fell into the familiar fussing over edges.  When I look at it today, I shouldn't have centered it on the canvas. I should have done a bit more up-close and off-center.  And that dark velvet background.  Not sure how that came to be.  I put the leaf veins in with the rubber-tipped paint remover.  At the end, I mushed up some of the edges, because the point was to not stress the edges, so I had to at least give the illusion that the edges were "whatever".  But I was successful in not paper-toweling the brush-strokes out of the painting.

#27 Tomato Tango 2/6/19

Had to take a paint hiatus.  Quilt duty called, my deadline for finishing my son Joe's quilt top was Monday and I made it by the skin of my teeth.  It turned out beautiful.  I dropped it off at the quilt-lady's house (she's got a long-arm quilting machine, and can turn around a quilt in a week).  If you had known me several years ago, dropping a quilt top off to be quilted by someone else AND quilted by machine, well it was just out of the question.  But life changes.  I am willing to make concessions.  And Carol, the quilt lady, does beautiful work.  It should be ready in time for my road trip to Michigan....a perfect time to sit and stitch the binding.

But while I haven't allowed myself to paint during the quilt-push, I did read some more of Carol's (the daily painter lady) book.  This chapter was tough to take.  She described the quintessential new painter.  And she described me: stingy, fussy, oblivious to a soft edge, refusing to clean the brush in between colors, etc.  I sort of wanted to cry.  But I'm post-menopausal, so the crying didn't happen.  Today was my day to get back on the horse.  I painted these tomatoes in like 10 minutes.  Take that Carol Marine!  I tried Carol's method: draw it with brown and then wipe it dry; do the subject first, not the background; find the intense color, put that down first, then the shadowy part, then the reflected parts, then the casted shadows, then the background, and at the end put in the bling (the highlights and stems).  Boom, done.  Messy looking, but quick....and it has much more of the "painterly" quality that Carol describes.  The brush-strokes are visible and I left them alone.  No paper-towels today.