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Watercolor Aspirations

So…again I haven’t written in a while.  That doesn’t mean that  I haven’t had anything to write about.  It just means that I haven’t written in a while.  I’ve actually had tons of things I wanted to write about, but my old bane, inaction, has been at it again. Maybe if we tossed the couch and the TV, I might actually get something done.  I blame some of my inaction on an uninspiring work location.

I moved my laptop to the top of our book-case in an attempt to create an ad-hoc stand-up desk.  It works fairly well; however, I don’t have much room to work, and since I’m just standing there facing the wall, I feel rather anti-social.  It’s not an environment that is conducive to creative enterprises.  It’s conducive to checking email and Facebook, and that is all.  My brother and father are both building me stand up desks…eventually. They both have plans, and they will both build something amazingly beautiful, but it may be awhile.  Anyway, once I get my stand-up desk(s), I am going to experiment with a little rearranging, so I can position it in front of a window instead of a wall.  I stare at fabric-covered walls for 8 hours * 5 days a week, and I can’t take the wall-staring a minute longer on the weekends.

I did find a way to alleviate some of my cubicle discomfort.  I purchased a piece of original, amazing art from Ryan Hayes.  It’s a small piece of art that packs a big punch.  It’s funny; when I first considered taking watercolor classes, I was reluctant to do so because when I thought of watercolor, I thought of poorly painted, washed-out, sad little flowers.  That wasn’t what I was interested in painting. At all.  However, the more watercolor work I see, the more  I realize how false my prejudice was.  People create absolutely stunning work with watercolor.  It’s ironic, though, that the piece I bought is a painting of flowers.  But it has amazing movement in it.  Check it out here.  See what  I mean?  Anyway, I hung this painting up in my cubicle.  It breaks up the expanse of grey & tan and provides my eye with a much-needed visual retreat.  It also reminds me that I should be doing artwork of my own.

On that note, I signed up for another art class at the Figge.  This class will focus more on technique, I think.  I kind of jumped into watercolor painting without have any basics in it.  Hopefully this class will strengthen the foundation.  While looking up the colors that I need for this class, I ran across this website:  http://www.watercolorpainting.com/index.htm.  It has tons of good information and tutorials on the basics (how to hold your brush, how to do a wash, etc.).

My friend, Butterbrickled, is creating an animation involving pirates and ninjas.  It looks great so far, and he has enlisted my help to paint some floaty/Tiny Wings inspired backgrounds for it.  I’m happy that he has assigned me a task, as hopefully it will make me actually get my gear out and get to work.  I lack motivation something fierce.

I read a good article from LifeHacker today, though.  The article advised just DOING something, one thing that you’ve been putting off, to get yourself out of a rut.  It’s so easy to fall into a rut of inactivity, and so hard to get out.  But just by taking action – any action (cleaning off your desk, for example), you can start to lever yourself out.  I have  about 10 things hanging over my head that I know I need to do, but I keep putting off. So, my baby step today is to finally write a blog post.

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Watercolor Class #2

I took my second watercolor class on Saturday. It was again offered by the Figge, but this class was held at the Stone Building at VanderVeer park.  We met in the hot, old building for about an hour while the teacher (a former art teacher at Pleasant Valley) demonstrated various techniques (how to use salt, Frisket, saran wrap, etc.) to produce different effects.  Then she walked us through her hand-outs, which contained several tips on color combinations and composition.  Many of the tips came from “Painting Flowers in Watercolor” by Karen Simmons, a book the teacher highly recommends.  After the introduction, we gathered up our gear, braved crossing Central Park, and settled in for some plein air painting.

The class instructions did not tell us we would be painting outside, so I wasn’t very prepared, meaning I didn’t slather myself with sunscreen.  I tried to pick a shady spot, but the damn sun moved, and I ended up getting pretty burned on my shoulders.  Despite the sun, though, the first hour/hour and half working out there was super relaxing.  The flowers I really wanted to try painting (nice, symmetrical, small orange daisies) were in the full sun, so I settled on some slightly more complicated flowers (from the Gerbera family, I think?).  They were a almost flourescent shade of fucshia, especially around the edges.

I settled in on the detailed work, painting the inner parts of the flower in tiny detail, outlining the leaves and pulling the color down the petals.  I used the end of a paint brush to “bruise” the paper where the vein ran down the petal.  The effect was very subtle, but interesting. I can’t find any good light this morning, so I apologize for the shadows on the pictures.

While working on the flowers, the time flew by.  The teacher came over periodically and gave me some tips on color (needed to add more purple to get the color truer).  Some park visitors wandered by and said the painting looked good, which made me happy.

Then, I had to start on the background.

I HATE doing backgrounds.

Backgrounds suck and ruin all of my artwork.

I need to start blowing up my subject matter, so that it takes up all of the paper space.

I was fairly happy with the flowers; at least, I enjoyed working on them.  But, once I started on the leaves, I quickly got frustrated.  First, I used the wrong color and made the leaves too dark and dead.  Then I was at a loss about how to fill in all the white space, so I just started adding random leaves in everywhere.  And, I added a nice, washed-out sky.

So, the painting is definitely not hang-up worthy.  But, it was a good learning experience.  I learned that painting outside sucks. You get sunburned, you can’t easily get fresh water, your subject material has the gall to move with the wind, your eye can’t capture the changing colors as the sun passes over, etc.  I am definitely more of a paint by photo kind of gal.

The five other students in the class produced some nice work.  One especially chatty student (a retired woman who just recently started painting), painted a very Salvador Dali-ish canna leaf.  It was swirly and crazy and super cool.  Maybe that’s the key to producing something beautiful – you need to “interpret” it and not try to make a carbon copy of it.

It was a good class, and I’m glad I took it.  I don’t see myself doing a lot of paintings of flowers/plants (I enjoy painting houses much more), but  it’s nice to spend 3 hours with a random group of people who are content to sit outside and try to create a thing of beauty while getting to know each other.

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Better Late than Never

The time has come.  I am finally going to write about my art class.

First of all, I need to provide some history.  There are two important facts you need to know.  Firstly, in high school I really enjoyed art.  I took 4 years of it, and it was one of my favorite classes.  I even got in trouble by the principal once for trying to skip a school assembly to hang out in the art room.  My two favorite things to make were pottery and pencil drawings.  I loved drawing people and houses.  I melded these two loves in this picture:

This house can be found in Monticello, by Riverside park.  I got the idea of the eye looking through the house from my Psych textbook which contained a photograph of a sidewalk with a puddle on it that reflected the sky and trees.  I liked the idea of a picture within a picture.  I cannot draw solely from my mind’s eye, so I scoured magazines and found a picture of a convict glaring through jail bars.  His eyes had the menace I was looking for, so there it is.  As you can see, I struggled with the background.  At my teacher’s instruction, I added the full moon to make the background more interesting.  Of course, if the moon was really behind the house, the shadows of the house would be all wrong, but whatever.  I still liked the drawing.  My uncle actually tried to buy it off me, so it must be cool to other people besides me.  By the way, the poor background here was a portend of things to come…

The second thing you need to know is that while I loved art in high school, I have produced maybe 2 pieces of artwork in the past 14 years.  This is the case for a few reasons.  I’m essentially a lazy person, and it’s easier to read or watch TV or check my email than to pull out all of my art supplies and try to uncover a patch of house in which to be creative.  Also, I was a non-traditional student, so on and off for the past 14 years (since high school), I have been working full-time whilst also getting my AA, BA, and then MBA.  I finally finished school last summer.  I enjoyed my free time for a few months, and then I saw that the Figge was offering this Architectural Rendering in Watercolor class, taught by Tom Hempel, a local artist whose work I have always admired.  If you’ve gone to any art shows in the QC, you’ve seen his striking, colorful paintings of houses and local landmarks.  My time to jump back into artistic waters had arrived.

Tom taught his 4 step process to produce an architectural painting in watercolor.  To begin, we drew very quick (15 to 20 minute) sketches of our houses, then used a T-square to straighten out the horizontal and vertical lines.  Then we filled in the basic color of the house.  After the first 2 hour class, this was my masterpiece.  Oh wait, first of all, I have to show you the photo I was drawing from.  Please keep in mind that the tree background on the printed photo is much darker than it appears here:

Okay, now that you’ve seen that, here is my starting point:

Actually, I think this was my painting after Week 2.  I forgot to take a picture after Week 1.  It pretty much looked like this, sans the shadows and the color in the windows.

After week 2, we started adding in the details.  This included drawing the shadows to represent the wood siding, using an exacto knife to painstakingly scrape paint and a very thin layer of paper off of the painting to get the areas that should be white to actually be white.  FYI – If you want an area of your painting to be white – DON’T PAINT IT!!!  It’s much easier than scraping layers off the paper.

I worked on the painting over the weekend (Tim and I set aside “creative time,” where he worked on his short story, and I painted).  Well, first I had to do some more art supply shopping.  The $2.99 brushes I picked up from Major Art and Hobby majorly sucked.  They were losing bristles the first night I used them. Based on recommendations from a friend, I bought some short-handled sable brushes from Micheals.  They made a world of difference – the paint went on much more smoothly and more controlled.  Here was the painting after the weekend:

The next step was to add the grass, steps, flowers, and background.  As you can see from the photograph, the background is very dark.  It’s essentially trees.  To start me out, Tom had me paint a few patches of blue, and then paint the whole background light green, as a base.  It actually looked pretty cool at this stage.  Tom said it looked like the cover of a storybook.  I wish I would’ve taken pictures, but somehow I forgot.  Anyway, during the last night of class, I put on layers and layers of dark, greenish/bluish/purplish paint to try to achieve the dark-looking background of the photo.   I kept a few places light, to convey light striking some of the foliage.

The background kept getting darker and darker and wetter and wetter.  This was my first foray into watercolor painting, so I was/am still learning how to manage water and the paper and the brushes.  I didn’t know before we started that you are supposed to stretch and tape/staple your paper to the drawing board.  This is a very important first step.  You can’t really tell from the photos I’ve posted, but my paper (140 lb cold press (made out of cotton)) was ultra wavy and crazy.  I eventually had to use duct tape to keep it attached to the board.  As a consequence, my dark, wet paint kept sliding off the peaks and settling in the valleys.  It made for a strange effect.

While I was trying to figure out what to do about the encroaching darkness, I worked on my grass, sidewalk, and flowers.  Tom recommended using acrylics to do the flowers, to make them really pop (I’m using that sardonically, but you can’t tell).  I got a couple of tubes of Folk Art paint and set to.  I’m really happy with how the flowers turned out.  Tom gave me lots of tips regarding the colors, shading and shadows, and it really helped.  I worked on the painting a little bit last weekend after the final class, and here is the semi-final version:

Overall, I am quite happy with how it turned out.  I LOVE the greenery, the door, the windows, and the foundation bricks.  The grass could use some highlighting/lowlighting – something to make it less uniform.  The background needs the same thing in a big way, but I’m at a loss.  I need to lighten up sections.  I might take Tim’s advice and have a go at it with the exacto knife.  I’m afraid of making it worse, though.  I have to ponder on it a little more.

But, overall, since this is my first watercolor painting ever, I am very happy with it.  I have tons of brushes, paints and paper now and all the reason in the world to keep at this, I just have to make myself do it.  I really enjoyed the class, and it’s  just super nice to get back into an artistic mind frame again.  The class shifted my perspective, and I started seeing all the variation of color and shadow that make up things I looked at cursorarily daily.   I started to notice how the tan weeds growing up through the snowbanks were actually a dark lavender at the base, how the clouds in the sky actually had brown and purple in them, how grass isn’t just green – it’s red and orange and blue, as well as green.  The class really made me see things differently.  Even if I never paint another watercolor, at least I’ve learned that.  Plus, I got to meet some really neat people in the class, one of whom sent me this class picture.  That’s Tom, our teacher, in the middle:

What am I going to do for my next project?  I need to paint a picture for Tim – one of Lucent, I think.  I need to paint “Serenity” for a friend.  I want to paint this photo:

One of my fellow students, who has a BFA and is an art teacher, asked me what I was going to do next, and I described this picture to her.  She said, “Wow, you’re ambitious!”  Am I biting off more than I can chew?  Painting people is probably harder than painting houses.  I guess we’ll see.  I would also like to do another architectural painting, to reinforce the concepts.  Should I re-paint our house, in which case I could actually measure out the house, so it’s to scale?  I had a problems with parts of the house not matching up correctly (don’t look at the stair railing too closely).  Plus, I could paint a beautiful cloudy sky behind the house instead of Fangorn forest.  Or, I could try my hand at a brand new house…  So many choices.

Well, if you have any ideas on how to fix the background, let me know. Otherwise thanks for reading, and if you ever get a chance to take Tom’s class, go for it!