Tag: black and white

The Settling Ponds

With the weather shifting from awful to delightful, and wanting to get oot and aboot, photography is always the excuse. As well, I have not been doing much in that arena. When I saw the Lens Artists Challenge #381- minimalist, black and white, I figured one way to get me moving was to edit some of the photos I took when a friend and I went to the settling ponds at a local water treatment plant. It is a dog-free bird sanctuary, and we saw egrets, herons, grebes, and a lot of others. It’s not a well-known place and the only person we saw was a man leaving with a spotting scope. My kind of place.

Now, whether or not these can be considered “minimalist” is up to you, but converted them to black and white, cropped them, sometimes severely to get a closer look, and how they hold up may be a bit dicey. Additionally, I pushed contrast, black and white, as well as dropping some of the highlights for a bit more detail.

Taken with a Canon G7X Mark II camera.

Black + White = Grey

Yesterday was the beginning of new portrait class session with my favorite teacher. Having done 2 sessions with her, mostly with media within my comfort zone, I decided that I am going to conquer my general dislike for acrylic paints and portraits by painting them. So, armed with a black and white photo from Pixabay, I found an interesting man’s face as subject matter, zoomed into one eye, the nose, and the mouth.

For the surface, I am using Canson’s paper for acrylic and oil paints. It has a smooth, linen-like texture and responds well. The bit of tooth is pleasant under the brush. My colors are heavy-body acrylic paints from Golden and Liquitex and are simply ivory black and titanium white.

I consider this study to be a WIP – work in progress. The mouth is too small and needs to be re-worked. The guy’s nose looks like it was broken a few times in the photo and I have tried to capture its asymmetry. The paint under the eye of the skin is heavier and more opaque than a lot of the rest of the painting. It was applied first but then I realized that working in thinner washes of black and white might make for better shadow and light rendition. This is such a learning process! I am also using smaller brushes than I might otherwise – I want the details to be details, not big blobs of paint for this man’s face.

Overall, I am really pleased with how this is coming along. A couple of fellow students in my general painting class do such wonderful portraits and people that I decided to push myself. Acrylics will be my primary focus for awhile. I want to master them, learn how to work with them, and like them rather than cringe when faced with a tube of plastic paint.

Heavy-body acrylic paint by Liquitex and Golden, limited palette, Canson’s acrylic / oil painting paper, 9×12.