still life

Garlic, Jalapenos, and a Cherry Tomato

Today I spent the afternoon doing watercolor exercises. Positive and negative space. Lost and found edges. Shadows. This is the best result, though the shadow side of the tomato sucks.

Watercolor Workshop, Day 2

Another day just painting! What a pleasure to be able to do it!

Today we did two different things. Actually, three. For warm-up, we returned to the quick three minute sketches, which eventually morphed into a still life with three objects. Mine were a piece of dried corn, a plastic mushroom, and a plastic artichoke. I was not particularly nimble this morning, but here is one I produced.

From there, we moved on to landscapes, but I will hold off for a moment on those. We did an exercise which I found fascinating: take one object and paint it 6 different ways. I chose a really lovely fake pear – golden and red, reminiscent of autumn. Take a look . . . they are in a gallery format, so click on one image to be able to scroll through them larger than they are here.

This was a lot of fun to do – nothing I ever have considered as an exercise. And then . . . we moved on to landscapes from photographs Brenda took, laminated, and brought to class.

The idea was to take a photo and modify it. This one is in the wine country of Northern California.

This one is, I think, in Carmel, but I don’t recall. All the speckles are from the fact that it is a ghost image from a wet painting. Truthfully, I was surprised it was a success at all. All day I felt restless and unfocused.

Finally, this one. I think it is the best of everything I did today. The mantra for the day was draw, frame, paint.

The Grapes of Wrath

Today was a day of wrath! I was soooo frustrated!

And a day of learning. I did four watercolors without lines. The first two were sketched in with pencil; the last two were done freehand, relying on imagination and the precepts of sumi-e, where lines are not drawn.

In each painting, something works, and in each painting there are places of failure. What I failed at was separating various areas from the neighboring shape or shadow. Some areas appear rather painterly. I still have a long way to go – but at least, at last, there are no lines.

Paper is Canson’s watercolor paper, and colors include quinacridone yellow, cobalt teal, carbazole violet, ultramarine blue, burnt sienna, Hooker’s green, alizarin crimson, Payne’s grey, and a few others.

Portrait of the Pears

The other day I went shopping deliberately for fruit to shoot. Food photography can be fun, but it does require more of a set up than I use when I am shooting pictures as I work in the kitchen. I bought pears, tangerines, and apples from Whole Foods, checking the produce out for perfect fruit, and because I really think they have the best fruits in the autumn and winter months. I used flash with the MagMod, backlighting from my eastern-facing studio window, a Lastolite scrim, along with silver reflectors and white foam core. Not everything was used in every shot, but I did enjoy playing around. Camera was the Nikon Df and the Nikon 24-85mm f2.8-4 lens.

The purpose of this study was to work with equipment and to work with software. Just practicing a studio set up and then working with the light – which was done in the morning given the eastern window – was fun. Shooting outdoors is not the same as shooting indoors. Doing studio work helps me focus on thinking about light, shadow, texture, composition, color, ad infinitum. It is a good way to focus more than just the camera – it creates a consciousness of the environment, one which I can control to a certain degree.

Besides the learning curve of studio work – and the fun – I really enjoy still lives of plants, food, fruit, and vegetables. For me, it brings the beauty of the natural world and an appreciation of its diversity to the forefront – something easy to forget in the face of just the busy-ness of everyday life.