Practices

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.

BTW, that glass soap bottle I bought from IKEA sucks. It's the prettiest one I found, but the soap that comes out the spout are dark green and yellow, and has a metallic smell. Eww. I decided to stop using it after a year. Good glass to paint from though.

Grandma Eyeball Rupture

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.
Man, I don't know how to paint flowers. I need more practice, and I blame my hubby not getting me real flowers so I have to paint from photo. :-) Hopefully my 'loose interpretations' of flowers will be okay for Grandma, 'cause she can't see that well right now anyway....

Monkey see, monkey do.

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.

And I'm still doing my small painting everyday, some days better than others. I like the upper right corner one. That one makes me look like the 'I won't wait by the phone' type. :-)

Practices

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 did the sketch of Fred while mine plus three other computers that were on a some circuit had a power outage. The problem with partial outage is that no one else will play with you while you're bored, waiting for power to come back.