Why does plein air painting has to be done so early in the morning? Of all the plein air groups I've heard of, none of them starts in the afternoon. I'm sure lots of plein air painters has regular day jobs, so how come they don't want to sleep in on the weekends?? Is the lighting in the morning really that much better? Surely painting outside anytime of day would be just as good.... Zzzzz....
My dad said I should practice painting landscape from photo first before I panic when going out to paint real things. Good thing I always took photos of lots of landscape before.
There was going to be a series of pears, but I ate them all before it was done. :-D
Does anyone know if the Bay area have any Plein Air group? I saw them PA Austin and PA Sonoma even has their own website, and was wondering if we have something like that around the Bay area.
Still practicing almost everyday. I'm also looking at lots of artworks online. The strange thing is, the more paintings I look at, the more often I saw paintings in the real world. I now see lots of possible painting places all around me. Don't know if it's good or bad for me 'cause I already daydream a lot to begin with.
My 94 years old Grandma in Taiwan fell down at home again last week and hurt her left eye. Everyone at home was helping her, taking turns staying overnight in the hospital. I couldn't do much being this far away, so I think I'll send her my flower painting, as a get well card. :-P Mom says Grandma's doing fine, she's excited about all the attention and was being very chatty, and interested in why her hospital roommates all have a left eye patch, same as her. My cousin typed 'Grandma eyeball rupture' on Skype. I found the Chinese-English message both scary and funny.
Last week my buddy Simon mentioned this awesome lady Carol and her blog. It was simply too awesome. I love paintings with big bold strokes and I'd love to learn how to paint with such a care-free attitude. For some reason I imagine people who paint with big strokes are like 'Oh sure. Call me sometime or whatever, I won't wait by the phone though.' And people who fuss over little painting details are like 'Why didn't you call me?? I was waiting for you all night!!' Strange association I know, but to me painting style says lot about the painters' personality. I prefer the first one.
Since Nathan's workshop last Saturday, I've been doing these little paintings one a day. That's what Nathan was doing for many years, and that's what I'll try to do if I want my painting skill to be remotely close to his. He said he did one of these little paintings everyday, to solve a compositional problem or a color problem. Well, after week of doing this, I felt like I CREATED a compositional or a color problem everyday, sometimes both. I guess I'll just have to keep doing it. Also, I've been looking at some nice photos on line for painting subject, if my paintings looks like your photo, don't get angry at me not mentioning your name, it'll be too much for me to keep up.... I know that painting from real life is much better than painting from photos, but unless I live on a cross-country train, most of the time my view in the evening is pretty limited. Plus we can learn composition from good photos.
I went to Nathan Fowke's composition workshop last Saturday. It was a full day 7 hour workshop, and it was worth the drive from SF to LA. He lectured in the morning about the four principles of good composition : Focal Point, Balance, Rhythm, and Grouping Shapes. And in the afternoon he did some demos and we're off to do our own paintings of a costumed model, with his supervision.
I needed to do a birthday card for this 100 year old family friend, so I thought I try doing it Mark Hammer style. Man, I need a lot more practice to do what Mark can do.
At this rate, I'm going to have a big selection of sleepy dudes in my blog. But they are the only ones that doesn't get suspicious of me peeking at them.
Saw a sleepy guy on the train, he looked so cute trying to get comfortable with his floppy hoody, I couldn't resist.
The emotional cycle of this study is as follows:
I saw this pot of pink flower when waiting for Caltrain one morning, it was gorgeous. Sketched it over two mornings, luckily the sun was in a similar position. I'm trying to practice sketching with more depth and spacial relationship of the object and its surrounding in mind.
Husband wants to go boggie boarding badly that morning, cause it was our last day in Kona, so I stayed on shore and sketched this woman building a sand castle. It was very important to wear sunglasses when sketching people, so they don't know you are studying them, so they won't come up to you later asking to see the drawing and find out that you draw them fatter than they really are.
This was a good day. That summer afternoon around 2pm we had a power outage. People took out board games and card games and boss bought ice creams and we had a blast. I drew this after the group games are finished and waiting for my train to go home. This dirigible just rescued a beached beluga and taking him to a good spot.
Had a piano obsession lately. Old and abandoned pianos are creepy. But I gave them balloons and propellers, hopefully fly them to a happier place.
At the end of last summer a few of us co-workers ambitiously went out sketching a few times. This is a unfinished truck. I used to sketch thing very neatly and cleanly, and usually end up with acceptable but rather boring results. I guess that's why I stopped sketching for a few year cause I was merely copying. I think this whole traditional media's looseness and un-controllable-ness is good for me. Maybe I'll find a balance some day.
Also from a group sketch, on top of our office building. I added the boats later cause I think it's fun.
Man, this blogger thing make your second uploaded image appears top, and I have to manually copy and paste it down here, how dumb. Anyway, I went to a SketchCrawl back in last summer, and this is the statue on top of Coit tower (It's the only human-like object that didn't move!)
Also from SketchCrawl. People in Chinatown napping on park benches.
Second attempt. We were trying to find a nice beach that husband can boogie board on, but ended up with this one cause it's accessible and the parkings weren't full. I now know the difference between beaches, there are ones that are all sandy, ones that has rocks, and ones looks nice from afar but you don't wanna be close to. We also saw many sea turtles napping here.
First attempt at painting sea and rocks. I usually don't like watercolor's watery look, but it seems unavoidable when painting water!
Yeah, definitely need to use more than one brush, and I learned that I should keep my mixing board clean between paintings, otherwise everything is muddy, and artist not happy. I was frustrated about this one cause of my muddy paint, but I kinda like it a bit more now, dunno why.
This is our rent-a-condo in Kona, it has this mint-chocolate theme, I was trying to get that light on the wall transition. Also, I started to make uses of all my brushes (up until now I was using one big one, but that got muddy quickly, and so did my paintings.) Small brushes are useful for details, but I try not to get caught up in fixing small things, cause I tend to overwork stuff.
Husband was relieved that I finally started to use colors other than green. From this not-very-successful painting I learned the importance of composition. I started painting these nice leaves, until I realized that I positioned them too low :-(. Normally it's easy to fix in Photoshop, but I don't have that luxury now. So after a few attempts to fix things, leaves were not as nice as when I first painted them. Lesson learned: when compositions of reality did not come as nicely as they should, and I need to re-position them in my painting, sketch out the outline first.
I was stranded by the torrential downpour in the volcano village, luckily there are lots of greeneries to see outside our window. (This is the third painting and husband was already frowning and wonder if I brought enough green paint. I did not bother explaining to the non-artist that there are many other ways to make greens, humph.)
I tried to get some wet leaves look, but real brushes and paint is really hard to control, I kept thinking I could achieve that easily in Photoshop, but then telling myself again painting it exactly as is was not the point. So I kind of resigned, and hoping my technique will only improve through quantity of painting.
This is the first painting I did in Hawaii, I'm afraid texture-wise you'll find quite different than the rest of the paintings, because watercolor paint drys bloody fast!! So this first painting still have that chunky oil paint look, which I like. Man, I don't want to squeeze out fresh paint everytime, but how else am I gonna get this rich color look, as suppose to the washed-out watery look?
