Author: cathmary1030

Still Life from #PAINTCOACH Patreon

| cathmary1030

I recently discovered @paintcoach on YouTube, and signed up for his Patreon page after viewing about a dozen of his videos.

One of the first paintings I did was a still life. (I still need to learn how to photograph my work; the glare is from my desk lamp — my “studio” is the same dining room table where I worked my job during the Covid lockdown.)

I like the cup the most — except for the messed-up lip (way too light!). I think I did a better job mixing colors for the lime, but the lemon is completely messed up. I kept fiddling with it, and made it worse.

Bottom line, I’m satisfied with my drawing (though why on earth did I choose Red Oxide as my color?). The downside of drawing, though, is my tendency to paint within the lines, which is part of why my value transitions are so darned harsh.

Color mixing is also difficult when I’m using white freezer paper (an old roll hanging around from years ago) as my palette paper vs. painting on a toned canvas. Just when I thought the color mix looked right (on the “palette”), it looked awful on the canvas. Ugh.

Brushwork is also a challenge.

A Warm-Up Portrait in Charcoal

| cathmary1030

It’s been some time since I’ve posted to this blog, but I’ve been doing a fair amount of sketching by copying from illustrations in childhood favorite books, and from some of the example drawings in art instruction books by Barrington Barber. Something best kept in a sketchbook and not posted to social media.

Of course, like every other beginning artist who does some copying, I eventually got bored! So, now I’m back to charcoal (from graphite) and starting to work on more portraits. With the portrait below, I used charcoal pencils, willow sticks, compressed sticks, and white “charcoal”. I’m about to start taking the learn-at-your-own-pace online course Charcoal Like Mad taught by Kara Bullock.

That ugly outline of a rectangle crossing the eyebrow and nose on the image is actually from the gummy tag identifying the color of this Canson Mi-Teintes paper (cinnamon). Ugh! But the paper has sat in my closet for about 2 years now, and the closet is the warmest room in the house in summer, coldest in winter. Time to use the stuff up.

In the meantime, this is just a warm-up to get back in the flow, and playing with charcoal.

My work is based on a Pixabay image by Anastasia Gepp.