So I’m done with the jack o’lantern. The overall point was to make the lit-up eyes, nose and mouth “pop” by desaturating the orange. But it feels too desaturated to me, not to mention too yellow. Sigh!
Sure enough, yes, the colors are completely off. Turns out the burnt sienna I used to mark out the value map was really closer to the color I wanted for the big pumpkin! It’s also closer to the color in the photo, as well as the color Chris (the PaintCoach) used.
Halloween is just a few days away, so I’m putting aside painting the Asaro Head frontal view (my next lesson) to paint this jack o’lantern while it’s still appropriately seasonal.
I’m following along so I’m painting on a 9×12 canvas, but I’m also making small changes. I toned the white canvas with Raw Sienna, and used Burnt Sienna to draw out the shapes. The background is a chromatic black made of Burnt Sienna and Indanthrene Blue (PB60, aka Anthraquinone Blue), a new blue shade I just purchased from Blick by M. Graham (the first time I’ve bought this brand of acrylic paint). I’m tired of using Ultramarine Blue, especially since right now I only have the fluid version.
This is my first-ever “portrait”. I did not draw out the head using pencil or charcoal or marker; I just drew “roughly” the so-called Loomis head. This was also an exercise in seeing values.
I will be doing more practice on these heads.
Below is an exercise from PaintCoach’s Patreon page in which you paint from a reference photo of an “Asaro Head“. The idea is to get familiar with the planes of the head, while also serving as a value exercise.
I am not yet finished.
I was inspired by landscape painting books I was reading about value studies, and notans, so I painted this 6×6 study. The idea being that the diagonal line of “posts” makes an otherwise horizontal painting more dynamic.
Joke’s on me. I posted the wrong “final” version earlier. This one, with the lights, is the final of “Winter Cabin”. For better or worse. Onward!
This reference photo came from another online lesson at PaintCoach’s Patreon site. I’ve also included a work-in-progress photo, and a photo of my final work.
The most glaring mistakes are that I didn’t get the relationships between the blocks right, especially the yellow pyramid, and I don’t have a shadow for the yellow pyramid! (I could add one, but I want to move on.)
Then there is the issue of color. I didn’t want the super-dark background, but the red sphere is too brown, as is the olive-green square. And in the photo the blue cylinder looks more square in the photo of my painting than it does in real life. Sigh.
Will need to do this exercise again sometime.
I have completed the Winter Cabin landscape.
As I indicated in an earlier post, I’m working on “Winter Cabin” in a follow-along from a PaintCoach post on Patreon.
BetterLateThanNeverArt 