Starting With Value, Or More Pears

This fall, I'm taking a color workshop from Barb Smucker.  It's a lot of fun, and very useful.  Barb is an excellent teacher, and the class has such varied participants that it's hard not to learn and get excited about art.  I'm going to try and restate some of the things we're learning, to help give me the language to talk about art.  Bear with me!

We started by talking about value, which reprents the light to dark range in art. Many, many artists recommend doing a value study when planning a painting.  This is a monochromatic small study to lay out where the lights and darks will be.  By extension, this leads into "notan," which is a Japanese design principle that applies to how the lights and darks are massed, or the composition.  If I understand this correctly, and I may not--you can do a value study without notan.  When you have reached a well-designed composition in your value study, then you have notan.  Here's a description from Mitchell Albala on notan and another example from Diana Mize for Empty Easel.

By extension, you can use an color for a notan study, and once you've laid out the lightest and darkest values, you can start to add in mid-tone values.  For watercolor, for the darkest value, I'll use a lot of paint and minimal water.  For light, I'll preserve the white of the paper.  And for a mid-tone in a monochromatic painting, I'll use more water with my paint.   Here are some thumbnail sketches for value studies for a still life using raw umber with three values--dark, light, and middle tone.  This study has three different interpretations--a mid/dark center of interest against light.  A light/mid center of interest against dark, and finally a dark/light against mid.  You can see, that how I choose to lay out the painting affects the mood and energy of the painting.

Then I need to extrapolate to color.  This is where it gets tricky.  I think I'll save another post for talking about the next step.  In the meantime, though, here are two of my paintings that I tried to translate from the value study (which, hopefully has some notan).  Both are limited palattes with prussian blue and indian yellow.  The high key light background painting at the top of the page includes quinacridone orange  (at this point, we'd eaten some of the pears, and we were down to one!).  The dark background (below) painting includes quinacridone gold and raw umber.

Post by Amy Bryce Watercolors.

From the Kitchen Table to the Window Sill

About the time I started writing this blog, I posted about a series of still lifes I was painting  from objects I set out on my kitchen table.  Every once in a while, I'd loop back around and do another still life.

Then I just got away from still lifes.  I've been working on getting my paintings looser after several years of getting tighter.  And, as part of that, I've been trying a lot of imagined or abstract paintings.

But, yesterday my neighbor gave me a bag of tomatoes, and I set some out on the window sill. They are an intense orange red against the white and blue gray of the window balanced against the green outside.  They shout (almost scream) end of summer.  I had to try painting them.  The painting is alla prima, in just a couple of hours, and measures about 11.5 inches square. 

And, just in case you're wondering...did you know there is a whole class of paintings called "Widow Sill Paintings?"  And, there's a whole movement called "Paintings In A Day?"  I've hit two milestones!

Eggs Alla Prima

The title sounds like a breakfast dish, doesn't it? 

In return for a favor, I received six local chicken eggs.  They're lovely pale blues, greens, and browns.  I took some pictures--here's one:

 

It's hard to see the variations in the egg colors--it's overwhelmed by the wood grain in the table.

When, I went back around to paint them (different arrangement), I set the eggs on a white surface.  But, I made a poor choice for the background.  I wanted delicate, and I ended up with overwhelming--like the wood grain.  I also painted them alla prima (not drawn first), and I'm not sure that it worked well for something as symmetrical as eggs.


I'll try and paint them again, of course! 

Here's the finished version of the painting:

Asian Pear

Last week, the sun came out for a few days.  It was lovely.  I was able to work on my kitchen table series, which you can see here and here.   I just bought three Asian pears, which were a beautiful orange gold and called out to me.   This painting is a very limited palatte:  aliziron crimson, ultramarine blue, hansa yellow medium, and quinacradone gold.  It's in a very loose style.  Some day, I aspire to be as good as Charles Reid.

The sun's back out again today, after several days of snow and gray.  I think I'll paint.

Pears x3

I still paint on my kitchen table.  And, I continue to build my still life series from things I find around my house.  Frequently, I just pull things out of my fruit bowl, since we all love fruit--bosc pears, especially.

This series of paintings was done in natural light.  I find the mood of the painting is determined by the condition of the light, and it was a gray day, so the light is very indistinct from overhead.    (Frankly, it's been a cold, gray, depressing spring.) 

It's the same pear done in three color sets.  The linking color is phthalo blue gs (Daniel Smith).  The paintings are all approximately 6x8 inches, and they reflect my thoughts on this spring.

The Kitchen Table Series

Last January, I started trying to produce one painting a month.  After a year of not painting, one painting a month seemed like a noble goal.  Logically, I recognize that to become a better painter, I should be painting just about every day.  There are a few other things that I think I should do, but that is a separate post.

As 2012 comes to a close, and I look back over the art I produced, I can see some themes emerged without any planning on my part.  (I mentioned things I should do to improve as a painter?  Planning would be nice.)  Most of my work I did sitting at my kitchen table, alla prima, very quickly.  I'm calling these paintings the "Kitchen Table Series."  Typically, they are small still lifes.  Here's a recent example, called "Pear, Orange, & Vase."  There are several common themes among these paintings.

--I'm always sitting in the same position at my table, so the light is always coming from my left.

--I do the paintings alla prima.

--I use whatever I have on hand.

--They are typically very fast.  One to two hours.

This is a theme I plan to carry over into 2013, to build into a series.