Buildings & Boats

If you follow along here at all, you know two things about me.  One is a lack of real depth perception.  The next is my ongoing struggle with perspective.  I have learned that my poor drawing – sloppy drawing, really – due to impatience – ruins a lot of my attempts at perspective in paintings.

I have decided to work on perspective, particularly architectural perspective.  That means buildings!  As a country girl at heart (no cowboy hats, though), I like the idea of buildings in a non-city setting.  No skyscrapers for me.  Instead, a boat house, a farm house, a barn perhaps.  A building along the waterfront, even suburbia.  Why?  I want a few trees and some water.

This is the first in a bunch I intend to do to really work on perspective.  Looking at things dead on is easy, but looking at something with angles is different.  Also, looking down on something from above, or upward from a low vantage point.

Here, gouache.  This took hours.  About an hour drawing and probably three hours painting it.  It works to a degree.  All this for a 5×7 painting!!

The thing is more than anything is to just get out there and do it, no matter how icky it turns out!!

Another Tale of 3 Paintings: Tanglewood

Yesterday was Painting Disaster Day. I suppose it had to happen after a couple of good rounds. It was also nearly 100F, and even with the air conditioning on, I was hot and cranky, and that doesn’t make for good focus. Anyway!
I took this photo last month, and rather like its moodiness. The dead leaves and bright new leaves create interesting colors while the trunks create interesting lines. The first attempt to reproduce this painting in some form or another began with pastels, then gouache, and finally watercolor.
This pastel painting is rather clumsy, but I have found in doing these kinds of series that usually the first one, in whatever medium I am using, is always the starting point. I learn more about the picture as I paint it. 9×12 on Mi Teintes paper.This is the second in the series – a small 6×8. What I did differently here than my usual gouache is I used Arches hot pressed paper and worked to keep my gouache paints thin (cream consistency) and moist while I painted. The smooth paper and smoother paints made painting a lot easier. It turned out pretty good!
Finally the watercolor. This is on the reverse side of another painting, on 16×20 Arches cold press watercolor paper. As both pastels and gouache allow for opaque overpainting of other colors, by this time I had a pretty good idea where light and dark were and could plan ahead. I used frisket on the tree trunks and in areas where the leaves are hit by the sun. Keeping these areas masked off let me apply broad washes across the paper without losing the shites.

Altogether, I am pleased with this series. I think I may redo the pastel painting as I have some new pastels to try out! Meanwhile, I am looking for some buildings for my next triad (or “try-at”) of paintings.

Perspectives

As the watercolors were still out, I decided to play around with perspective, specifically architectural perspective.  I think I get atmospheric perspective now – cooler colors, less detail, etc.

I did this one above some time ago in 2019.  I focused on the roof of the hut, but also wanted to try a bit of the atmospheric element of perspective.   It worked out okay.  Broad strokes, too, were worked on as I tend to do fiddly little dabs with a brush.

Here I did a few buildings linked together from somewhere in Maine.  I tried to use one part of the painting to connect the other parts.  By this I mean I looked at the roof slope of the building on the right in the picture, and tried to match in my painting.  From there I tried to create perspective and proportion in direct relationship to it – walls, windows, etc.  The road, too, was important as I wanted to show it narrowing the further away from me it became.  One thing I found intrinsically challenging was the roof line on the right – the slope of the roof moving onto the side of the building.  From one angle to another angle, yet no roof on the right showing.  That was a real eye-opener when I realized what was going on.

Finally, architectural perspective mixed with the natural landscape.  What a bit of building this is!  Boat launch / beach moving up a hill with a roadway that hairpins right and left, as well as castle or fortress walls descending into the hillside.  I rather liked this one – and it was fun to do some pen with watercolor drawing.

Altogether, I can see some progress, as well as areas for improvement.  Lately, I am so unconcerned about the final results of what I paint.  Rather, if there is an area that works or I see improvement, I am thrilled!  Wabi-sabi.  And if the whole picture works, man, that makes my day!

Death of a Bird

A couple of weeks ago I saw a fat rat run through the patio. We found droppings along a wall. The exterminator came and put down some sticky traps. A week later . . . a rustling sound under a tray. It sounded like feathers. A pause. Another rustle.

I am a coward, I admit. My husband deals with vermin. I orchestrate the traps or whatever. He came out, and I went in. He wouldn’t let me look, nor would I.

It was a bird, on the ground, caught in the sticky trap.

My husband snapped its neck, and I am crying as I write this. It’s evil to kill a bird. Not too evil to kill rats. I really don’t even like the idea of sticky traps for rats as it is an awful death.

Never again will a sticky trap be placed anywhere by anyone near me. Please think twice an three times before you put them out.