ink – Page 40 – Ink, Yarn & Beer

Negative Painting: Pink Daisies Gone Mad

Today has been a day of frustrations. Nothing seems to be going right. Everyone has those days, yeah, I know, but I rather other people have them, not me! But, they do serve a purpose in that they do make you realize … something.

That said, let’s get on to the negative painting scene. It is not easy. I think to create a painting like this, practice and experience play an important part. Practice is what I keep doing. And then I reach a point where I am just irritated beyond measure, and need to break loose. I’ll come back to practice, but by nature, I am a gaudy color lover, and having a monochrome study makes me feel trapped. I wonder if others feel the same way. So, pink daisies, a la the hydrangea, and I am ready to go nuts. Here they are – the first round.

And then the second one from this morning . . .

Some success. And then I did the third layer . . . and had to just mess with it as I was ready to scream. Part of it was just frustration in that I didn’t really like this process at all. Maybe it’s not for me. In the end, just playing with some colors on my palette, some which I just recently got. It was a total color mess – so lines were added. It’s sort of cheery, but it also reminds me of what I cannot do.

The good news, no mud. It’s kind of fun. But I also know what I want to accomplish, and doing this stuff is not going to get me there. The colors are fun, and good practice, but I also know that my impatience and scatterbrained-ness don’t help me, either. Ongoing practice will improve my skills, I hope. So, I keep playing.

A part of me wonders if / when I reach my desired “look” if I will become extremely boring to myself.

Lines of Bodie

Today I ventured out on my own, influenced by practice sketches by Peter Sheeler and his videos. This is from a photo I took in 2016 up at Bodie, California, when it was moving toward noon on a hot, hot day in August.

I rather like the composition, particularly the lines of poles marching over the hill in the distance. If you ever have been to Bodie, you know it’s a long drive down a long and bumpy washboard road. The telephone poles and lines emphasize the town’s isolation. As far as painting the subject matter, I started out with a line drawing, painted, and then came in again with the ink pen. It was so, so, so hard to not try to draw and paint every line and rock. Simplification was a big challenge for me.

As I painted, I worked hard to recall what I have learned doing the practice studies. Keeping things simple also meant keeping the palette simple, and the brush choice as well. I started out with sky in Cobalt Blue after wetting it down with a big round brush. Then I kept myself isolated to a dagger brush – first time to use one, too. The remainder of the palette included Quin Gold, Burnt Sienna, Ultramarine Blue, Sap and Hooker’s Green, and by accident, a tad of Indrathene Blue. The paper is 5×7 Arches Hot Press and taped down with a 3M painter’s tape with specialized edge-sealing qualities, which really worked to keep the tape from pulling up as it got wet.

Overall, I like the lack of mud and the contrasts I developed between light and dark. Pen and ink come to save the day again!

Holiday Cards: Winter Stream

I used six of Peter Sheeler’s videos to create cards for my sister-in-law’s Christmas present, along with using them for practice. Doing all of these has proven to be more thought-provoking than I realized. Copying by watching a video is really informative.

In many ways, this was perhaps the most deceptively simple in appearance, but in reality the most complex. The reason for this is the stream. Water is never easy to express (at least for me). There are ripples, reflections, shifting colors to reflect the sky and scenery above. Besides all this, there is the snow. It also reflects along the banks of the stream, which you can see in Peter’s video, but which never made it into mine – this is on the center left of the stream.

Mine below has some good areas – certainly there is white! – but bits of it are a tad overworked. The scan is not as subtle as the painting, either, but I am not really sure how to deal with that. I decrease some areas of saturation in the image using Lightroom . . . and I am not sure if I am going to include this card in the set because of the smudges and such.

Holiday Cards: Fence & Flowers

One thing I have always loved is the countryside. Open spaces. Wild flowers. Weeds. Where I live, you can find them, but they are the dry places of the West. I have a longing for the plains and grasses, green trees and rain. Peter Sheeler’s video catches a glimpse of this.

Here is my version below. Part of me wants to paint the flowers, but thought it best to stop here. I like the feeling that you have just climbed a hill, and there this scene is at the top, and you look way beyond . . .

What is a “Personal Style”?

In painting, it is really possible to look at a picture and say, “Oh, that is by so-and-so.” If you are familiar with a painter, you become familiar with his / her style. You can tell by the light, by the brushwork, by the colors, by the subject. It’s like your face in the mirror – you know it instinctively. This knowledge of what someone’s style “looks like” makes me question myself: What is my style?

The fact is, I don’t have a style, unless I were to call it messy and scribbly. This occurs when I don’t think about a composition or what I want to do, but just do. I cannot say this produces much which I like. Once I am involved in working on a piece, I do seem to be able to deal with compositional elements, and can say when to finish, and say, oops! shouldn’t have done that!

So, when does one’s own style emerge? Is it a conscious choice? Is it something which develops slowly?

This question came to me last night when I was putzing around, following another Peter Sheeler video and practicing his exercises. There is an ethical question here: is it acceptable to do this? I think it is, as he is posting his videos online for people to learn from – and I have been learning, most certainly! The lack of ethics would be to pass them off as my own.

The lesson from last night was using wet-in-wet to paint trees. Mine are not as successful, mostly because my paper is not the same as he uses. The lesson was good, though, as the focus was on the trees and the bloom of the colors on a wet surface. The rest of the lesson was good as I watched him put in shadows which, left to my own imagination, would not have shown up. The lesson there is to think about where the sun is coming from, imagine it, see it in the mind’s eye, and then paint it. That’s a valuable lesson.

Thus: Peter Sheeler’s video on wet-in-wet.

And my own painting.

I found it interesting to see myself adding the spatters and the shingles on the roof, which weren’t in Peter’s original drawing. Is this the beginning of my own style?