Cat 71

Cat 71, Lizzy
12" x 12", acrylic on canvas

    (I found this post set up as a draft in six years ago and had never posted it. 
At that point Lizzy had been going downhill with age related health problems, and she finally lost the battle in May of 2023. She was my companion for 17 years and is still missed.)

April of 2020: working from a photo taken in 2012. I was attracted to the twist in the body and the strong lighting from a window.
Staying with less intense colors and focusing on softer edges and simplified forms.
There was a lot of straight white going on in the photo- which ended up flattening the image into nearly geometric planes. Adding a light tint of color to the white helped regain some volume. The curtain in the background had to be subdued as well- it nearly took over the painting at first.

I stopped posting partially due to the distraction of life events at the time and to break the cycle of thinking I had to produce and post something, regardless of the quality. It had become less fun and more of a self-imposed task.

Since then, I have gone through a long "dry" spell.
I progressed in skill compared with the earliest posts but in repeating myself endlessly had reached the point where I was losing interest and no longer moving forward.
I went through the collection of old paintings and sorted them into three categories:
Keep, Rework, or Gesso over to reuse. I spend more time now looking and thinking.

Looking through these older works with fresh eyes from the distance of time has been satisfying.
I can now see what is problematic and what might be changed. For most the problem was the compositional structure, and no amount of color or value adjustment or fancy brushwork was going to salvage the attempt. 

Tollgate Farm Calf

 

Tollgate Farm Calf
12" x 12", acrylic and color pencil on board

From a small painting done in 2021:
I had taken a photo of a field at Tollgate Farm in North Bend and noticed this pale colored calf in the background, twisting to reach an itch.

I really liked that twist.

At some point I became disenchanted with this painting and sanded over the entire surface. There's not much left. Kind of a shame really.  Maybe I will work with the ghost image left and see where it goes.

 

Tollgate Farm Cow
9" x 12", acrylic on board

This was done on top of an older, unsuccessful painting so it had quite a lot of texture already built up.
I've been meaning to try working with cows. I like their bony structures and heavy masses.

This was difficult to photograph with the surface reflection and the green pigment. I can't seem to get the colors to show accurately- they aren't as saturated as this implies, and leans more yellow than it really looks.

Indiana Farmhouse

 

Indiana Farmhouse
12" x 16", acrylic on board

My friend Nancy shared photos she took around her area and I was drawn to this shot- as was she. We both ended up painting it, and this is what I ended up with. It was done over an extremely bad painting on Masonite board from 10 years ago and I had since sanded the surface down.
I liked the simplicity of the composition and value masses. I also wanted to push myself to using more visual texture. This was a good start.

Shaddy

Shaddy
16" x 20", acrylic on canvas
sold

The challenge of this painting was:

1. working from a shot where a section of the horse was obscured by a persons head.

2. while I drew countless horse pictures as a kid, I hadn't tried painting one.

3. a white(!) horse. How do you paint a white animal? 

 It turns out the fun thing about white/light colors is how other colors are reflected on it, if you look closely enough.

As in the last painting, I had to invent a background. The photo background had possibilities, but too many unfortunate tangents and distracting forms.
 I would have preferred more time to work this out- I would like to see a different textural element defining the ground- as it is, it's too similar to the texture of the body of the horse. The warm/cool patterns got a little too busy!  I would tone down the warm yellow reflection on the horses barrel, which would help push the body back in space.

 These foreshortened angles are still head-scratchers for me.

Cody

Cody
16" x 20", acrylic on canvas
sold

From a small cell phone shot. I did a preliminary study of this in a square format which I liked, but decided to use a landscape orientation canvas and include more body to offset the subject from being dead centered on the canvas. Although that would have been appropriate for a portrait.

 I had to ditch the Prussian Blue and Yellow Iron Oxide used at the start as they were just too saturated. The dog was beginning to glow in the dark. I switched over to the earth tones- Raw and Burnt Sienna, Ultramarine Blue and Naples Yellow. The background in the reference photo was an unusable interior scene.
Hitting a point of feeling "stuck", and with the panic deadline setting in, I tried something new- I submitted the painting on the dailypaintworks.com critique challenge, hoping for someone else's opinion besides my own. I received extremely helpful feedback, which helped me make some better decisions, and challenged me to come up with an unexpected background!

I learned a lot from working on this one.

Rambling on color

 

"Color, A course in mastering the art of mixing colors", by Betty Edwards

Here we are getting the typical fall weather- a succession of strong storms moving in from the Pacific with lots, and lots of rain. Sometimes a steady light drizzle, sometimes a heavy downpour.
This is amuse-yourself-inside kind of weather.

I am reading a book on color theory by Betty Edwards, which expands on her experiences with painting. I am trying some of the color mixing exercises which included creating a circular gray scale for isolating and evaluating different value and intensity levels by laying it over an area of color and matching the relative values through the little punched holes in the wheel. This was more difficult to create than I expected- I adjusted the value segments several times, and still don't have an even distribution.
The color wheels were much easier to do, although I didn't have the suggested paint color to use on the green and the violet sections. I was familiar with lightening a color by adding white, but had not tried darkening down colors by adding black, having been cautioned that would deaden or flatten the color. I'd always just added another dark hue to the mix.

I discovered a whole new range of colors by adding a tiny amount of black to a pure color, or to a simple mix. The paint does not always react the way you expect, due to the chemistry.

I also discovered I am not paying attention to the difference between the lightness of a color vs the intensity of a color.

According to Betty, my brain might be getting in the way of seeing what is really there, a phenomenon she calls "color consistency", where you revert to your early training of coloring the sky and water blue, and the foliage green, and the sun yellow.
Sometimes a problem can be fixed by simply adjusting the value or intensity of a color to work better with the others around it.