More Thought Required

This painting is So Difficult. I continue to engage in mental and artist gymnastics in hopes of making it good enough to sign.

This is where I last left you, in the saga of Can I Actually Finish This?

I found a painting by Bierstadt that had light and clouds and mountains in the distance; briefly I deluded myself by thinking I could copy his technique. Then I saw a poster with rays of light coming through redwood trees, advertising Kings Canyon National Park, and briefly deluded myself into thinking rays of sunlight would look good here.

Using either of those ideas would be the art version of “duplicitous language”. It is inspirational to look at other people’s brilliant art, but copying would look contrived, pieced together, and derivative (meaning obviously stolen). There must be a way to be influenced by others without actually copying.

Next I spent time looking through the 30,000+ photos on my laptop, hoping that if I found the original photos that a solution would come.

I FOUND THE PHOTOS! These were taken up North Fork Drive in Three Rivers back in 2010, I think, but now I can’t remember the exact month or the year. (Gimme a break here—33, 224 photos!)

These aren’t really very much help. Look at the overhead canopy of leaves, the somewhat disconnected branches, the skinny trunks. It is the light and shadow that make this a nice photo, but I cannot duplicate what is here convincingly.

I kept studying the painting, wondering what was wrong with the trees. I’ve thickened the trunks and begun adding bark, so what’s wrong here? Maybe it is that one curving from the left over the road that looks phony-baloney. You can get away with weird stuff in photos, but if you copy it in your art, you will look ignorant.

Better, but not believable yet.
I added more bark texture while contemplating the next move.

It was time to study some real trees, so I took photos of different oak trees while out walking.

This will require more thought, more experimentation.

Drawing in Pencil for the Joy of It

A few months ago I started this pencil drawing, simply for the joy of drawing (and to prove to my drawing students that I can draw). I worked from photos that I took in Mineral King last fall. The light, Audra’s hat, the lack of dealing with a face or an actual complete horse all caught my interest, along with the dynamics between the woman and the horse.

This horse was the last one to get loaded for transport down the hill. Audra was so patient, just waiting for this recalcitrant horse to follow her into the trailer. “Recalcitrant” because he spent most of the summer outside the corral with a couple of mules. The others just watched while staying in the boundaries. Then, sure enough, this guy was not interested in joining the herd to head down for the winter.

Because the hat seemed to be the most important part, I started with it. If I can’t get the most important part to look right, there’s no need to waste time on the rest of the picture.

I had a little bit of difficulty with some of the shapes, so I made corrections and showed those to my students to demonstrate how to repair problems (and to stay humble). But I didn’t photograph the corrections—they were for my drawing students to learn from. (Do you want lessons? I have a waiting list, and you are welcome to get on it!)

Drawing lessons were suspended in December, because that’s the way we roll. I was occupied with many things, some work-related (painting, blogging, participating in a little bazaar, resupplying my vendors, filling calendar orders, sending Christmas cards to my students, sending out 2 newsletters—are you on that subscription list? —planning a solo show for Autumn 2024, ordering supplies, doing some year-end bookkeeping) and some non-work-related (you don’t need a list of this stuff).

As you have recently read here, I was a little flummoxed by how to proceed on several paintings, so I used the excuse that it was too cold to paint in the workshop and went into the studio to finish this drawing. (I love to draw in pencil—did you know that?)

Because I wasn’t showing my drawing students along the way, I didn’t photograph or scan any of the rest of the steps.

Here it is almost complete. “Almost”?? Yeppers, because when I scan it, the white paper scans as gray, and the pencil has a brownish cast.

This is unacceptable, so I use Photoshop Junior (actually Photoshop Elements) to erase the margins.

The drawing is simply titled “Audra”, not “A Girl and Her Horse” (she’s a grown woman and it ain’t her horse), not “Big Hat, No Cattle”(no cattle in Mineral King because it is National Park, not National Forest) or “Wranglers Are For Women Too”. . . wait, that one is pretty cute. Maybe it should be called “Wranglers Aren’t Just For Cowboys”.

Nah, the hat is more important.

Six Reasons I Loved Painting This Rose

The rose painting went to Kaweah Arts for the final hurrah before they close (reopening in March). This meant that I didn’t give it a clever name, just slapped it with “Rose”.

I loved painting this because:

  1. There were specific things to paint rather than vague landscape textures.
  2. It didn’t matter if I matched the color or the shapes precisely.
  3. It was small enough to finish quickly.
  4. The colors were different than in a landscape, my normal subject.
  5. It restored a bit of confidence in my ability to paint when I had so many incomplete pieces without answers as to how to make them look right.
  6. It is just pretty, really truly pretty.

Figuring Out a Painting Challenge

This painting has been in a bit of a time-out. I was a little bit stuck in the messy middle. There are too many instructors in my head, telling me things like “loosen up” and “stop drawing with your paintbrush”.

After studying it a bit, I remembered who is the boss. The Central California artist is known for drawing details, having begun her art business with pencils, drawing cabins and homes and eventually landscapes in minute detail.

Now that she paints in oil, if she leaves out those details, she doesn’t like her paintings and her friends and family ask her if she is finished because it just doesn’t look right.

Allll-righty then.

The trees are too smooth, the foreground is messy-looking, and oy vey, those upper leaves.
Bark texture! Better rocks!
Notice anything peculiar about the painting here? (I have no idea how this happened.)
More sky holes, more bark, better contrasts, branches growing more believably, more details in the distance.

There is still work to be done in the bark, branches, and upper leaves but now I believe this eventually will be worth signing. I don’t remember where I took the photos, but I know it was in Tulare County, most likely right here in Three Rivers.

A Nameless Rose Painting in Seven Steps

Step one: Slap some paint in the approximately correct colors in the approximately correct shapes and sizes on a 6×6 canvas: Outline, background, interior parts.

Step two: Detail the background but not too carefully because the rose is the star here. Just hint around at leafy shapes, using darks and darkers to suggest lots of greens.

Step three: Start on the rose, putting in the darkest areas of shadow that helps to shape the petals. (Pay no attention to the painting behind it on the easel, because I am not . . . I’m doing some productive procrastination here. )

Step four: work from the outermost petals inward. (Why? Because I am the boss of my painting and this makes sense to me.) You can see that I rotated the 6″ canvas so that I could visually follow the tip of my brush. This is called “drawing”; it’s how I paint details. The arrows show you the petals I worked on (so does the glare of wet paint) working from the outermost petals inward. (Why? Because I am the boss of my painting.)

Step five: Paint more petals, continuing from the outside toward the center.

Step six: work on the center with a tiny brush.

Step seven: touch up the lighter parts for more of a glow, and sign it.

There are more steps: let it dry, scan it, spray varnish so the shiny parts (with extra walnut oil to make the paint obey me) won’t stand out, give it a title.

Rose, By Any Other Name, No Thorns, Floral Perfection, Gordon’s Rose, any other ideas for this painting??

Variety on the Easels

Remember this?

I worked on all manner of small things. Here is the progression. The final one is too small for you to see my signature, indicating completion.

Next, I added a bit more color to my yarn painting. Ooo-eee, the colors are SO WRONG on the screen! Guess you’ll have to wait until I am finished and scan the painting to understand what is here

For dessert at the end of the painting session, I worked on the background of the rose.

At the end of the day, I made a list. Farewell Gap – sign and paint edges; Take Me Home – make those oak trees more believable, keep painting, ain’t no fat lady singing on that mess yet; Rose – paint the rose, sign it, paint the edges, give it a name; Orange Groves – the list is too long; Yarn – some blue? enough green? enough red?

The indecision is helped by a list, but not always.

Progress On My Favorite Subject

For the past few years, my favorite subject to paint is orange groves with hills and mountains.I’ve had a large (for me) painting in progress in a time-out for awhile. In that bonus week between Christmas and New Year’s Day, I worked on it.

First, I photographed it, studied it on my laptop screen, and circled the parts that were not up to snuff (weird cliché, whose meaning I do not know).

I started with the mushy rows in the red oval. It’s all wet and shiny, so these photos may not appear to be an improvement.

The orange oval was next, and I kept expanding the area around it.

The upper right corner was next. I ignored the pink, yellow, and light green ovaled areas, because I am the boss.

Now let’s look at the painting as a whole.

The usual excuses for photography that doesn’t do justice to the verbal explanations: low light, shiny paint, photographed with inferior phone instead of camera, and of course, there are many areas remaining to be detailed. I can’t tell you that it will look better when it is scanned, because it is too big to scan. But I can tell you that it looks way better in person!

Victory Tomatoes

My drawing of tomatoes is completed. Carrie Lewis asked for a paragraph of 100 words or less to accompany the drawing. Here is what I submitted.

Gardening feels like a war. We planted many tomatoes in an enclosed area, protected underneath from gophers, on all sides from deer, and over the top from birds*. We faithfully watered and fertilized all summer. Finally, in mid-October, we began getting tiny cherry tomatoes, many no more than 1/2” in diameter. Every tomato felt like a victory, so I took photos of them as proof that we had actually grown some food.

This was not for a competition. It is just a submission to Carrie’s magazine (digital rather than print) called CP Magic, which is all about colored pencil. Colored pencil is not my main medium, as you know, but Carrie is a friend, and I wanted to participate simply because sometimes it is fun to try different things.

*After I wrote this, I realized that we had left the tomatoes exposed to the birds. I meant to put mesh on top but just never got to it.

Happy Birthday, Trail Guy! (all those years are also a victory)

Suddenly Felt Like Drawing

If you receive this in your email and want to see the photos, click on the title.

My friend Carrie Lewis is fully immersed in colored pencil. At the end of December, she put out a call to artists for their best colored pencil work from 2023. I realized that I had done none all year, but suddenly, I had an overwhelming desire to work in colored pencil. It might have been related to working on multiple paintings that felt too hard for me, wanting to do something easier.

After looking through my photos for something that I could easily complete in the one week remaining in 2023, I chose this photo of our little tomatoes. (Small garden, small crop, even smaller fruit).

I chose Strathmore 500 series Bristol vellum paper. (Won’t mean a thing to most of my readers, but it helps me remember in case Carrie wants to know). In looking at my extensive collection of colored pencils, I decided to keep things simple, so I chose Blackwing Colors, a set of 12. Yeppers, only 12 colors. (For a short time, they offered a set of 24, but as a never-early-adopter of anything, I missed it.)

First I drew the tomatoes. In keeping with the desire for simplicity, I didn’t draw all of the tomatoes in the photo, so it was ready for color very quickly.

To make the darker and shaded reds, I used purple and brown beneath the red. To brighten the red in some places, I used orange and pink beneath the red. I used many layers of red in both instances, keeping a very sharp point (on all the pencils).

It didn’t take long to for the red pencil to get used up. Of course, if the last 3 inches hadn’t been broken inside, I could have kept using it. I don’t remember dropping it, but I could have. New pencils are always a bit of a thrill. (Don’t tell me to get a life—this is my life and it’s a fine one!)

Better add the shadows so the ‘maters aren’t just floating. I used purple and brown, but I may try that silver pencil (or is it gray?) over the top to smooth it out. Later.

That was decent start. The daylight was running out and my feet were cold, but I did one more little thing before calling it a day: I smoothed and sharpened all the edges of the tomatoes.

What’s left: finish the background, correct the color on the stems, fill in tomato color more to get rid of the white specks, sign, and scan.

Hopeful Beginning and Messy Middle

If you receive this in your email and want to see the photos, click on the title.

When I begin a new painting, there is a sense of “oh boy, this is going to be great!”

When I am in the middle of a painting that doesn’t seem to be improving, I encourage myself that when I can add the details, it will improve. It’s just the Messy Middle.

Here is a look at a hopeful beginning: this is a rose grown by my brother-in-law that just slayed me with its beauty. I took a photo thinking it might be helpful to one of my drawing students, but then I was captivated, captured, mesmerized, gone-zo. (See? hopeful!)

While I worked on it, the painting of the road hovered and lurked in the background, grousing, “What about me? When is it my turn again? HEY, Central California Artist, aren’t you supposed to be getting me ready for a show? Hunh, hunh?”

It was sideways on the easel so that I could visually follow the tip of my brush for more accuracy. I flipped the photo back vertical so you won’t hurt your neck.

Layer by layer, leaf by leaf, branch by branch, I think it is getting better.