I'm Just Playing

During our critiques and especially after, when I make the rounds and discuss your work one on one with you, I often hear the comment that you are "just playing". I know the idea is that you are experimenting, taking chances, but there is also a bit of  the suggestion that this is not your real work and should not be judged. 

I hope I can always encourage you to take chances and be inventive, even if it means in part that you risk being taken seriously. Who is the main judge, anyway?

I also hear "If I did that again, I'd do that part differently". Do you hear the opportunity in there? Imagine if you really did do it over again every time you said you would!

For homework, please find a painting among those from the last couple of weeks and identify a passage that would benefit from some analysis and paint it again.

Feel free to be playful!

Trees and Freedom

 When a visual artist identifies where they need to be specific and where they can generalize, then the freedom to invent and have fun with the subject is revealed. Most often, these moments involve developing an understanding of how much descriptive information the hypothetical viewer really needs.

If your painting is green in the lower area and blue in the upper, chances are it's a landscape. With that important piece of information gained  it doesn't take much to tell what the dancing forms below the sky actually are. 

Here's an example; 

And another;

What portion of the  trees  needs to be present? Are some parts more important than others?

Oh, what do you say, how about just one more?

For homework, select one photo to work from and paint a refined image that includes only the essential information.

   

 The Sky

How much do the skies differ in your landscapes? Do you work on some paintings with a snarl on your face and others with a grin? Do you have a standard cloud pattern that you use on all your work?

For homework, make a painting with two different skies. You may need to make it one that has nothing but sky above the horizon, so you can just set the second sky on top of the first for the photo. Then send both images to your monitor. 

Full saturation

  The darkest darks in this image are approaching opacity. Any more pigment in the mix and the paper would be throughly masked. But don't back away yet! Some of the most beautiful passages remain to be laid down; the red barn, the warm grey fence and the cool grey window wall. There is still room to use  color and value to contrast the shadows and the sunlit areas.

Too often we stop short of  the real limit, thinking the paint will lose its sacred transparency.  The demo this afternoon was designed to encourage you to deliberately broaden the range of what is acceptable . If you stay out of the water bucket your paint will get darker and thicker by definition.

You can experiment with how to use the fact that watercolor dries lighter than it appears. Make a wash  of a powerful dark to cover the snow. Now add some super dark, made from pthalo blue and transparent pyrol  orange, and use your homemade black to make the tufts of grass and saplings.

Here are a couple more to try. Make the darks  as dark as you can , then make an even darker dark after that one dries. You should find just enough to make a layer that that is thick and dark enough to  make profound depth  but still fluid enough for the strokes to flow into each other.