beginner

Cloud Challenge #1 – Acrylic University

| cathmary1030

The other day I was on Instagram, and something came up in my feed about Acrylic University, an art site I wasn’t aware of until that moment. I checked it out and signed up for an 8-week “Cloud Challenge” class taught by Dianna Shyne. This painting was done today in that class.

  1. I had fun!
  2. Clouds are more difficult to paint than they seem.
  3. I really do not like phthalo blue as a color — it’s much too intense, and much too much of a greenish blue.
  4. The “black” in this painting is a chromatic black — ultramarine blue, phthalo blue, Anthraquinone Red (marketed as alizarin crimson) and the merest touch of cad yellow hue.

Overall, I like the colors, but this looks more like a stained-glass abstract than puffy clouds. 

Snowman!

| cathmary1030

This snowman (painted on an 8×8 canvas) was inspired in part by snowmen done in pastel by Karen Margulis. It’s been warmer than normal here for December, but we might actually have a freeze tomorrow. No sign of snow, though. (Sigh.) So I thought painting a snowman would put me in a winter mood.

I’m not sure if you can tell, but the (viewer’s) right side of the snowman is a gray-white, while the (viewer’s) left side of the snowman is a sky blue-white mix.

The other colors are Pyrrole Red (straight from the tube), Yellow Ochre (mixed with the red for the carrot stick nose), Sap Green and Mars Black (straight from the tube) and the lavender background is a dash of Dioxazine Purple with Titanium White.

Portrait Drawing Practice: Day 1

| cathmary1030

I’m putting aside the paints for the moment to focus on drawing faces (before I try painting them again!). I’ve just signed up for Sktchy’s 30 Faces in 30 Days (which starts in January 2024). I’m also going through the Portrait module of Draw Awesome again for additional practice. Phil Davies of Draw Awesome has some free resources, including “Faces for Artists” which is a curated collection of Unsplash images. One of those Unsplash images is below.

To draw this portrait in graphite, I used a method which Davies calls “modified tracing” where you make small marks to denote the width of the eyes (but not the height), the width of the nose, the width of the mouth, and the width & height of the face. The rest is freehand. I am using 9×12 Kraft paper by Stonehenge.

I have done initial shading, and will need to circle back to shade the hair darker, as well as adding white highlights where appropriate.

Photo by Jassir Jonis on Unsplash