Painting

I waited until I had enough work to show what I'd been doing in painting class- each painting takes several classes (the last one took three weeks!) to do. Overall I really like what I'm learning-I've never worked with oil paints before and I really like the medium. It's very forgiving and you can get such great color. It's also great that it takes awhile to dry- you can take your sweet time to get stuff right.

I need to keep a mirror in my tacklebox, I keep roaming about in public like this:

Nice warpaint, eh? Yesterday I was in public with red paint on my nose!

The first real thing I did was a b&w study of a bell pepper using a palette knife (instead of a paintbrush) but it turned out rather hideous so I won't post it here.

Then we moved on to a color study done with a palette knife, I improved:

(It's oranges on a green plate with a red cloth. My dad loves the colors)

Then we moved on to a color study and learned how to use brushes and solvent:
That one hung up on the display wall and someone even asked me if I was a painting major...no, but thanks! Made me feel good!


Then the latest still life:

It looks better in person. I was pleased with it, though I'm not crazy about Owl's head. When you put a face in an artwork, you eye goes right to it (your brain is wired that way) and the best stuff in my painting is down below Owl's face so it takes your eye away from that. I was pleased with the reflective tea pot on the right, that was hard!

Here is what other people did in class on this assignment, I took pics of the ones I liked:

Dreamy oranges:

Nice contrast, really nice reflections, though the tea kettle's a bit wonky and the orange is flat:

Nice composition, wish there was more contrast to make it more visually interesting:

Very nice drapery:

This one cracked me up- it's done well but it looks like the teapot at the bottom is talking to the above objects! It's so funny how inanimate objects take on personality.

I was really impressed by this one, done very well:

What now? Painting creepy baby dolls in an attempt to learn how to mix skin tones (it's proving to be hard!)...so stay tuned!