Still Life

Dying Sunflowers — Painting #100

| cathmary1030

Wow! I’ve actually made 100 paintings. This one was my first from life rather than a photo. And, man, these sunflowers are in bad shape! I bought them specifically to paint them, but I’ve been drawing rather than painting for the last week or so. (I did take some photos of them right when I bought them, though, so I can try again.)

I decide to use my new Green Earth paint for the stems and leaves (mixed with my go-to Chromium Oxide Green. I used Diarylide Yellow for the petals, and a mix of Burnt Umber Light w/ Carbon Black for the faces of the flowers.

Glass of Wine

| cathmary1030

When professional artists and art teachers (in books and online — probably also in real life) say, yes, you’re going to do a lot of bad paintings, and just keep going…. well, this is one of those bad paintings, lol.

What I do like is that I got the yellow-white of the wine pretty good. The shadow, ugh, not so much.

Avocado: Value Comparison

| cathmary1030

Just for the heck of it, I wanted to compare the values of my avocado painting to the values of the reference photo. As you can see, I did NOT get them right!

But the cool thing is that, with acrylics, you can paint over your mistakes, so that is on my to-do list. I will be tweaking the values of my painting, mostly making certain areas lighter, in particular the avocado slice on the right, and then the skin of the avocado on the left (with the pit) and lightening the shadow the pit is creating on the avocado meat.

And I need to blend/smooth out some of the value changes.

Avocado: From “Adventures in Acrylic”

| cathmary1030

Next-up in Marla Baggetta’s Adventures in Acrylic was painting an avocado. This was on a 6×6 Ampersand gessoboard. I watched her video then shut down my laptop, and just worked off the reference photo. Here are some in-progress photos.

I used a yellow ochre glaze, and then drew out the shapes with my Liquitex burnt umber paint marker. There are excessive striations with the yellow ochre because I was using the liquid/soft body version and then mixing it with water. (That’s a mistake!) The watering-down really only makes sense (to me) when using full-body paint.

Glazed Pear: Round 3

| cathmary1030

This is the last pear I did — I’m sick of pears for the moment! — and this was done on slippy-slidey gessoboard. (I’m almost done with my stash of that stuff and am in no hurry to buy more.) In this one, I did the final yellow glaze only on the pear itself, and before I added the highlight.

Funny thing, after all this pear painting, I was at the grocery store today, and for the first time I really noticed all the pears in the produce section; each type has its own shape. I think of this shape as somewhat close to a “classic” pear, but that’s really the Bosc pear. Some are short and squat more like gourds or squash.