beginner

Golden Apples… After Carol Marine

| cathmary1030

I own Carol Marine’s book Daily Painting: Paint Small and Often To Become a More Creative, Productive, and Successful Artist and admire her style. (She has paintings for sale on the Daily PaintWorks website. ) Anyway, now I can’t remember where I found the original image for this copy: either her book or the website.

My main focus in trying to copy here was my brushwork. I wanted my brush strokes to follow the form of the apple, or the length of the cloth, or the direction of the shadow, etc. I painted this on a 6×6 birch panel which I gessoed before drawing the image. I used burnt sienna, Mars black, cad-free yellow medium, and Titanium White. The 2 brushes I used were fairly small; hence too many brush strokes!

52 Mini Paintings Challenge: Week #10

| cathmary1030

This is the week 10 painting for Jed Dorsey’s Mini Painting Challenge at Acrylic University. The name is “Golden Vineyard”. I’m not sure where Dorsey got the photo, but he did his painting on a black canvas. I looked at the reference photo, and it seemed more golden to me, so I went with a yellow ochre background.

This is on a 6×6 canvas panel, a brand I haven’t used before (Yes! All Media cotton). I bought it at my local Jerry’s Artarama, and found it to be extraordinarily smooth, more similar to Ampersand’s Gessobord than the typical cotton panel. I’m undecided about it, as I certainly didn’t like Gessobord when I tried it last year. We’ll see.. I have 5 more panels to use.

Zinnias.. after Ali Kay

| cathmary1030

This painting came about because I had signed up for something on Ali Kay Studio’s website. I got a free paint-these-zinnias packet as a result, which included a reference photo, drawing template, supply list, and a photo of how Ali Kay did her own painting based off the reference.

I traced the template on to canvas, covered the pencil marks and did the value mapping in Payne’s gray (too dark, I think), and followed her process for underpainting (based on some of her YouTube videos). From what I can determine, she paints the complementary color — so the yellow flowers have a purple underpainting, and so on. On the whole, I think I went to dark on the Payne’s gray — not sure what color she uses — and in the past I’ve ignored pencil or charcoal marks (so I’ll continue to stick with that in the future).

I like Ali Kay’s style for portraits of kids and animals — not sure I’m sold for florals, so I went my own way and did my own thing. For better or worse. I am most satisfied with the flower pot, and using my brushstrokes to convey the cylindrical shape.