daily painting

Another 5×5 Mini Landscape

| cathmary1030

Although I wasn’t too crazy about Mark D Nelson’s “Learn to Paint in Acrylics with 50 Small Paintings”, it DID get me painting. So, I picked up Volume 2, and decided to do my own version of one of his small landscape works.

Mine is painted on a 6×6 canvas, and riffs on Daniel’s effort (also shown).

“Small Landscape — Big Brush” from Patreon

| cathmary1030

This 6×8 painting is from a tutorial by Paint Coach on Patreon. The idea is that you use a decently large brush (say, 1/2″) so that you are focused on the basic shapes as opposed to detail.

The 6×8 canvas size felt too small to me for all the different landscape “objects” — trees near and far, a stream, a path, mountains, etc. Whew!

Worse, my photo doesn’t adequately capture the colors I see in my own painting; the path is both grayer and more purple than what is shown, even though I fiddled with tint/saturation/brightness, etc. in the Photos app.

Oh well, time to get painting the next thing.

Simple Landscape : Barn & Mountains (#PAINTCOACH Patreon)

| cathmary1030

This 6″ x 8″ landscape — from PaintCoach Patreon — was a challenge, as far as getting the right colors. I got exasperated, and left the barn unpainted for several weeks, before finally just finishing it in a “I’m winging it” effort. (I figure, because it’s acrylic, that I can go back later and repaint the side of barn so that it’s not so gray as it appears.) But for now I am moving on.

I never did finish the foreground area; it should not be just a solid yellowish green. But, again, maybe later!

Still Life — Another Study

| cathmary1030

The still life of fruit is yet another study from Patti Mollica’s book How to Paint Fast, Loose and Bold: Simple Techniques for Expressive Painting.

As far as my efforts in copying still life demonstrations from various painting teachers, this is one of my better ones in my opinion. I’m most pleased with the dark red (purple) cherry.

That said, all the stems I painted are sloppy — I need to practice painting thin lines. And the brushwork on the red apple is awful. The paint choices as well could be improved — the red is so transparent you can see through to the raw sienna underpainting, and my charcoal pencil outline. Sigh.

Glazed Apple in Acrylics

| cathmary1030

I wish I had taken a photo of this red apple before I applied a glaze of Naphthol Red (PR112) and Satin Glazing medium, but I didn’t. It was inspired by Patti Mollica’s How to Paint Fast, Loose and Bold: Simple Techniques for Expressive Painting (also mentioned in yesterday’s post).

This was painted on 5×5″ gesso board.

Studies from Patti Mollica’s Book

| cathmary1030

Because Patti Mollica works in acrylics, I bought her book How to Paint Fast Loose & Bold. Obviously, as a professional artist, she too focuses on values and shapes, and starting from big to small. Her book is valuable to me because I’m using acrylics.

In the book she demos one of her paintings (Stacked, 8×8), which I did on a 5×5 gesso panel, and a second time on an 8×8 canvas. She did an underpainting in burnt sienna (and generally uses Golden brand paints). I found burnt sienna (Blick heavy body) to be quite dark. For drawing the initial shapes, I used a charcoal pencil.

I’m pleased with my drawing — which you can see in my “in progress” photo — but clearly have work to do on brushwork and color mixing!

Below is the 5×5 version which I did first. The dark area in the lower right of the image is an artifact of my photography.