Art 105 - Painting

I want to get better at incorporating my handmade paper into paintings.  So, back in January I began my very first college art class.  Things that I've learned: 

 *  The aspect of my past work that I always felt fell short was shading and shadow.  My painting work is not very dimensional.  I now believe that is because I don't mix colors on a palette I just work straight out of the tube/bottle.

*  Even though my work is almost always extremely colorful I work intuitively.  Learning more about the color wheel, tinting and shading is helpful with that whole dimensional problem.

*  Having said that, I don't really like the mixing colors part of the whole thing. 

*  In this class I'm learning by doing the assignments rather than by what is taught during class time.  Expectations were too high, perhaps?  No, don't think that is it.

*  In summary, painting a decent painting is really, really, really hard.

Here are my first attempts:

Second try at a studio still life.  The first try is too embarrassing for public consumption.  We could only use burnt sienna plus black and white.  Oh no, what have I gotten myself into?



Painting from a photo.  I re-painted the foreground three times trying to make it look like flowers instead of snow.  Guess we'll just go with snow.  This assignment required that we use only black, white, magenta and yellow.  Try making a good blue or green with only those colors.  Impossible!

Here is the original photo on a beautiful, sunny August day on Washington Island, WI.  My painting looks like an overcast day on the prairies just below the mountains of Colorado.  Close enough, I say. 

I'll show you  more as I move though the semester.

Lorrie