Getting my confidence back

I didn't spend as much time as I wanted on this today. Because weather suddenly turned great about 3PM and I needed to mow lawn and do some yard work very quickly then rode on my motorcycle to take some animal photos in North Bend/Snoqualmie. No I think I got good photos to paint from after, or even before finishing this pieces. You'll see it soon in this blog.

Acutally when I started working on this piece again before the weekend after about a month of absence, I was not sure how I could finish this piece. As usually I do in the situation like this, I went back to the basics, values especially shadows, on the ridge and now in the foreground. I felt my confidence came back and started enjoying painting this piece again. I'll keep working on the foreground this week since I finished the homework for the Saturday class already.

Putting thicker layers in mid section

As I wrote yesterday, I worked on the mid section of this piece. Although the dried grass is a little too light value-wise, I'm satisfied with the outcome of the sagebrush behind it. As I work toward the foreground,  I'll put more colors on the lower part of the grass to make the lightest part smaller and narrower. Then I might be able to pull viewer's eyes to the imaginary passage in the foreground naturally.

Final version of "Egg"

You might now be able to see the difference between this final version and the one in the class on Saturday. I made the shadow parts a little more darker because I needed to put some values on the lighted part of the egg. The highlight is just at the middle and the rest should have some values. I spend about an hour yesterday to finish it.

Enhancing the Ridge

Although the colors are still not finalized (likely I would change a couple of more times), the ridge is coming to life as you can see in the photo. I need to work on the mid range next. This holiday weekend, I got stuck and can't go out for painting (due to my day job). So it's a good time to make big progress on this piece.

Worked on an egg

We finally started working on values with this egg drawing on Saturday. But the traditional process of rendering was quite different from what I was used to. We never used "blending" to make the 9 value scale on the right. But used layers of lines. The more layers you put on, the more values you get. We used vine charcoal with very fine tip. I spent about 90 min to make the scale. Then I could spend only about an hour for actual egg drawing. Finishing the egg is our homework assignment by the next class in two weeks (no class over Memorial Day weekend).

Curving out trees

Wow! It's almost a month since I updated about this painting last time. Saturday drawing class is an excuse but not good one. I could have spend more time on this at weekday nights.

Anyhow, after putting more layers on the sky (I did this weeks ago), I wanted to work on the ridge, to make it better. Instead of trying making better colors of the ridge, I put shadows of the trees on the valleys and curved out those trees by putting more layers on the reddish soil on the right hand side. Now those trees are more trees than just smudges of greenish paint. I need to do the same on the left hand side as well.

Still Keep "Blocking-in"

This is today's outcome at Gage. We spent more than two hours to work on one subject. The instructor Susan encouraged us to go slow, but more accurate. This photo shows "block-in" process very well. I think you can recognize (I hope) the subject was a cast of Roman soldier with a helmet. First defined the "box" with right height vs. width ratio. Then defined the positions of key points based on relationship with other points or edges. By measuring distance between those points and vertical or horizontal lines that go over those points with a skewer, which is in my left hand at the end of the stretched arm, I kept refining positions of lines. Susan discouraged me not to go into the details of face features at this stage, but to keep focus on accuracy of big shapes and their relations each other.

I'm getting there gradually.