Lesson 30-Glazing

Glazing is painting light washes of color on dry paper, letting the first wash dry and painting successive washes on top of each other but each layer must have dried completely before you add the next one. I photographed my painting from the first layer to almost the last layer, take a look at it below. Your assignment this week is to either use my drawing or your own drawing and try out some glazing. Let me know how it goes.

Lesson 31 - Still Life and the Color of Tomatoes

In the top left photo above are tomatoes from our garden.  I decided they would be our lesson this week after I laid them on a dish towel to dry, next to a red cup and noticed I had created a lesson about painting red.  In the middle picture, top row, is a picture I took of the tomatoes and printed out. I then used "magic corners" which are two L shaped pieced of a manila folder and moved them around the photo until I found a composition that I liked. Top right is my drawing, its not exactly a copy of what I saw, but close enough to paint. I added a basil plant  because the green basil leaves are the complement of the red color of the tomatoes and  complementary colors placed side by side appear more vibrant.  Then because I had to add a touch of whimsey (that's just my personality), I filled out the chalk board sign with the word dinner.

 In the bottom left picture, I used cobalt blue and  painted the dark and medium tones I saw as well as the shadows and let them dry.  When the blue was dry I began with a warm yellow (New Gamboge)  then added some yellow orange (Winsor Orange), then layered on some red orange (Scarlet Lake) some pure orange (Pyrole Orange) and then finished the tomatoes with a lipstick red shade called Permanent Red. I worked around the picture while the tomatoes were drying adding layers of colors to the background, the hanging towel, the dish towel (which I changed to white with green stripes to bring some green into the middle of the painting to balance out the  basil plant being the only green.  Since some of the tomatoes were red orange, I mixed in a little thalo blue with the red orange and used that for shadows on the red orange tomatoes and the terra cotta pot.  For the more pure red tomatoes, I used ultramarine blue mixed with the red and a bit of permanent magenta to add depth to the darker parts of the tomatoes. I used a watery mix of thalo blue for the shadows and dulled it down even further for the table by mixing it with a bit of yellow and red. 

Your assignment for this week is to either use my tomato photo or set up your own still life but make sure it has a dominant color. Then paint using the dominant color and its neighbors on the color wheel for instance, green, yellow green, blue green etc.  Let me know how it goes and ask me questions if you need to. Its been very quiet out there in my online classroom. :-))))

Lesson 32 A Shop Window

Shop windows make interesting paintings. I have painted several.  This eye glass shop in Paris caught my eye and I took a photo of it.  Since we haven't painted a shop window yet, I thought this week would be a good week to show you how.   Here is the sketch I did of the window, somehow the vertical lines of the sides of the shop seem to bow out, so you will need to straighten those up to make your painting look good. I think the angle I took the photo of the drawing at caused the strange bow out effect. Here is the drawing below.

In the grid of painting step below you can see how I added the grey first in different values. I mixed together thalo blue, lemon yellow and permanent rose to get a blue grey color and then I layered it on to create 3-4 values of grey.  Once the grays were dry, I began painting light areas of paint in layers until I got enough color on the drawing. Your assignment this week is to try a shop window.  Use my drawing or one of your own photos.  Important tip- usually after I paint all the items in the shop window, I let them dry then paint a layer of watery blue on top with a few slivers of left not blue, to make the window items look like they are behind glass.  You can also use a wash of burnt sienna for this window like effect. However, in the painting I did tonight, I wanted to keep the layers of paint bright, so I just added bits of watery blue to the window instead of covering it all with the blue wash. 

Lesson 33- Face Not Portrait Painting

Several lessons ago, we practiced drawing faces. Remember my attempt to draw Winston Churchill?  If you follow the concepts in the drawing lesson it isn't difficult to draw a generic face.  It is a bit more challenging to draw a likeness or portrait because it involves a lot of precise measuring to place the features correctly and then you have to also observe the shapes of the features and draw them accurately. It's not an impossible skill to learn it just takes a lot of practice.  However, generic faces are easy to draw and paint and I've taught a class called Faces Not Portraits a few times and seen excellent results. Here is my drawing.  I referred to some photos to get the general look of each person.

Start painting your face with the biggest areas to small areas and add the details last. If you use photos as reference pay attention to which areas have the dark, medium and light values and paint these either by adding more paint to get it darker or sometimes for your very darkest dark add some blue.  I did use a little black paint for the eyes and the black hair.  For caucasian skin I used a warm yellow mixed with a permanent rose and a little cobalt blue in the shadowed areas. Adjust this mixture for yellow skin tones by adding less p. rose and more yellow.  For darker skin, you could use orange and purple or burnt sienna or burnt umber with a bit of dark red.  Play around with color mixtures for different skin tones and let me know how it works for you. Your assignment this week is to paint a face or two or three. You can do it, its not rocket science and it doesn't have to be perfect.