This week the sunflowers went from this :
… to this finished product. Accurate yet still pretty loose. I’m pretty pleased.
Those are tiny changes. Tiny. Thistle values and a tiny green stripe in the upper right.
This is the original.
The daisy went from this:
… to this hideous mess:
This was the original.
Once again, both things are done simultaneously. I do like the sunflowers, though.
5 responses to “Weekly Paint Progress: 11/5”
The sunflowers are really good. I do think that copying a painting that is a little awkward is likely to not work so well – one’s brain wants to Fix Things and yet if they are fixed, it works even less well.
The sunflowers look great!
KC – well, I think I’m still ramping up on the glazing. I was going to do a trickier thing from the glazing book and instead I will scale it back to one of the intro lessons.AH – I am really pleased with the sunflowers. Things I learned: 1) pay attention to depth and values 2) paint the general idea, not line for line 3) straight lines bad, curvy lines good 4) don’t mix any colors, just stick with what’s in the tube you have and 5) transparent colors are better than opaque.
Glazing does seem very complicated, and getting used to the medium before wrangling with a picture that’s also complex in other ways sounds like a very smart thing to do!
That is fascinating re: not mixing any colors – that’d be counterintuitive to me – does mixing them make things muddy, or result in not enough contrast, or….? Also, are the transparent colors glaze, or is there something in the middle between opaque and glazing?
(the rest of the things you learned are also “OH!” things, but make a lot of sense!)
KC – there is some complicated thing that transparent oil colors do, involving the light reflected from the white page then bouncing back and refracting through the different layers that makes it better than if you were to mix the colors. And of course, any transparent door you mix with an opaque becomes an opaque color. As for the tubes, it just makes it so you always get the same color day to day if you don’t mix it.