Showing posts with label composition. Show all posts
Showing posts with label composition. Show all posts

4/18/12

First Class of a New Session

Watercolor Demo
This was a quick little watercolor sketch done in class this morning.  It's about 6.5 X 5.  I'm working on a summer cottage theme, using a porch from one cottage, a screen door from another etc.  The painting is more or less a sketch to see how my colors will balance.

In the top right corner is a thumbnail sketch that I was working from.  My students really fight the thumbnail sketch idea.  I keep telling them that once they have the composition and darks and lights planned out, the painting will just fall off their brushes.  The thumbnail should be no more than two inches and take no more than two minutes.  Easy, huh?  Of course, sometimes I have to do a million thumbnails before I can get to the painting.

It has been cold, rainy, snowy  -  yuck.  But the trees are beginning to bloom, the grass is very green, and the birds are singing.  We'll be okay.

We've been painting the quirky floor in our living room.  The whole house was completely disrupted by the stuff from that room being shoved into every available space all over the house.  Isn't it amazing how much stuff you can have in one room?!  I really got to liking my favorite chair in the kitchen.  I was beginning to feel like we were on an episode of the Hoarders.  We had a little corner of the dining room table to eat on, we could sit on the couch if we squeezed between stacks of stuff,  and if I sat in my comfy chair displaced to the kitchen, I had no place to put my feet.  Yesterday morning I was beginning to feel a little dazed and displaced myself.  In fact, when my husband left for work, instead of his usual "Love ya. See you tonight", he said, "Don't operate any heavy equipment."   The house is back together now, and so am I.

Blogger has changed its format, and the photo editing site I have used for years is going away tomorrow.  I'm cool with all that.  I can handle change. It'll be fine.  I don't care.

3/6/11

Composition

What Goes Where

I was playing around a little bit with composition.  I just grabbed a photograph out of my photo reference  (reference photo?) box and simplified and rearranged some of the objects.  We need to remember that photos are only a starting point and no more.  If I'm working from a photo I usually work out the composition and a value sketch, and don't look at the photo for reference as I paint.

The pencil sketches are some things we were working on in class.  I was trying to stress the fact that objects take up space, and the placement they are given on the page, or painting surface, has to reflect the volume of the object.  Drawing objects as transparent helps us to see how much space they really need.

There is no serious painting going on here. As I mentioned in a previous post, I'm just kind of puttering around, reading some art books, going over old lesson plans, and Friday I did make a text block for my next journal.

Now it is time to get serious with spring and summer class promotion.  We have had some sunshine here now and then.  That helps.  The Bay is frozen solid.  That doesn't help.