Posts made in January, 2009

"Night" Oil painting on 8 x 16" panel. Copyright Lesley Spanos 2009, all rights reserved.

Painting is a journey. Sometimes a really bad one where everything goes wrong, and you end up hauling your dead grandmother around on the top of your car like Chevy Chase in a National Lampoon Family Vacation movie. The only positive thing I can say about this particular art journey is that no grandmothers died in the process.

What’s ironic here is that Karin’s message to the artist’s this week was about how we’re often our own worst critics.  We think that perfectly good paintings suck, while other paintings we hate are sometimes our most popular images. I usually feel I’m pretty good at knowing when a painting sucks, and this one REALLY did. At least, I’m pretty sure it did.

Here are a few shots taken along the way:

The underpainting was done loosely with acrylics and a big brush. Then I did the drawing in pen, and started the house and sky in oils. I liked the underpainting so much I almost didn’t want to draw on it.

At this point, I LOVED this painting! Absolutely loved it. Even my husband gave it an enthusiastic, “WOW! That is SO cool!” as he walked in the door from work. I was sure it would be one of my best, ever.

Here some color has been scrubbed on to the house. I’m keeping it as thin as possible so the underpainting shows throught. Still loving it. Maybe I’ll make those swirls in the foreground into a twisted tree!

Hmmm…. I’m not loving what is happening to the shadows on the house. So I pack on a little more paint… and make it worse as I lose the underpainting under the thick pigment…

Okay, that’s a little better. I saved it from a small disaster and I’m not ready to throw it across the room just yet.

Oh, no! Why did I do that? I covered up the rest of the underpainting with the street, and lost the vitality that was happening there! I’m also not loving that tall shrub on the left. It’s so… dark. And green. The worse it gets, the more paint I have to slap on to correct it, and that makes it worse still.

Maybe the streetlight will help brighten that dark hole of a space where the bush is…

Um…

Yeah, I guess it did brighten that area, but I don’t like it. I now have three light sources competing for attention, and my eye doesn’t know where to look first. The painting has become very busy, a jumbled mess of elements.

I give up! This one is toast! Bye, bye, ugliness. I’m going to do another one, this time in daylight, like the reference. That way I can just “copy” the reference photo without making any big changes, and breeze right through it.

I won’t bore you with the gory details, but I got this far, and decided to toss it. I’m reminded of sticks of butter capped by Pepto Bismol. Yuck, yuck, yuck.

And why does my tower always insist on leaning? I try so hard to keep it vertical, yet not matter what I do, it leans to the right.

By now it’s Wednesday afternoon, and the deadline to submit this to Karin’s blog is tonight. In desperation, I turn back to the original painting, thinking if I just crop it, I might be able to salvage something by getting rid of one of those light sources. Cropping is easy, because I haven’t mounted the paper to the panel yet.

Maybe this:

Or this:

Hmmm…

I actually like both of those! Maybe the individual elements didn’t suck as much as the jumbled whole.

Maybe I will still crop it so I’ll have something to sell, but for now, I need to get something sent to Karin ASAP. So, after much indecision, I’m going with the original version. Which is like going on a two week vacation and returning home exhausted, poorer, but a little wiser. And that’s what painting is about, right? Learning a little something every time so that the next one will be better.

(Cue Lindsay Buckingham “Holiday Road.” God, I love this song! Did you see Linday’s recent solo tour? He’s still got it!)

"Oh, My Darlin'" Oil painting of a peeled Clementine on 5 x 5" panel by Lesley Spanos. ©Copyright 2009, all rights reserved.

It’s that time again – Virtual Sketch Date time! I had an awesome time with last month’s challenge, so here we are again. This month’s reference photo was provided by Jeanette Jobson. The image was huge and full of detailm which makes it so much easier to paint. Thank you, Jeanette!

I don’t recall painting peeled citrus before. When I saw the reference, thoughts of Carol Marine’s drool-worthy citrus paintings immediately came to mind. I love the way she depicts the light shining through citrus. While I can’t come close to painting as well as she does, I chose to make the translucency of the fruit my top priority.

Here are some photos I took along the way:

The canvas was toned with loosely applied acrylics in pthalo blue, burnt umber, and naphthol red. Warm colors in the foreground, cool colors in the background. After the background was dry, I switched to oils to paint the orange.

I’ve never painted an unpeeled orange before, so I was tentative in applying the paint, trying to discover the “right” color mixes as I went along.

It didn’t take long to get to this point – maybe twenty minutes?

Added some “stringy thingies” and adjusted the color on the pith a bit.

I was going to add some color to the surface the orange is sitting on, but on second thought, I think I’ll leave it as is.

Changed my mind about the table surface. Decided instead to paint it to match the frame I’m going to use.

A little more work on the details and edges – some sharper, some more blurred – and I’m ready to call it done!

Here it is in the frame:

This will be available on  Boundless Gallery tomorrow.

"Jefferson Memorial After Dark" by Lesley Spanos. Acrylic on 5 x 5" on canvas panel. ©2009, all rights reserved.

Yet another painting from Karin Jurik’s excellent “Different Strokes From Different Folks” challenge.

I’ve never been to the Jefferson Memorial, and the reference  photo didn’t offer a lot of information, so I had to do a little research on this one so I could understand what I was seeing. I couldn’t tell if we were on the water side, or the land side.  Knowing this was important because I wanted to brighten the dark foreground area with reflections, and I needed to know what kind of reflections to paint.

First, I pulled up the satellite image on Google Earth and calculated where Karin stood to take the photo. Okay, it looks like she was facing northeast,  perhaps standing in the drive or just to the west of it. That helped me to determine that we are probably looking at an asphalt drive, cement sidewalk, and lawn in the foreground.

Here’s where it gets really anal: Early on, I was thinking about putting stars in the sky, so I switched to the Google star charts, because I wouldn’t want the wrong stars in the sky. This is a well-known monument, and there are people who would appreciate that kind of detail. Eventually I nixed this idea and went for a looser look. Still, I like knowing Cassiopeia is there somewhere. Some people can copy the colors and shapes they see in a photo and create a great painting, but I need to be able to put myself in that location in my mind and paint from “life.” I need to feel the night air on my face and know where the North Star is, even if I don’t paint it.

Next I started studying photos and reading about the monument. I figured out why the light on the dome looks the way it does, almost like flourescent rings. (The lights focused on the dome are behind short “walls.”) I learned that the tree I’m painting is probably a cherry. I stopped before I got too carried away with what was happening on the interior of the building.

Here are some photos I took during the painting process:

I started with a blueish-blackish-reddish background, and left much of it exposed. Like Karen said, it’s best to work from dark to light when doing nocturnes.

I thought I’d keep the sky smooth and add some stars, but that wasn’t working. It was so boring.  So I repainted the sky wet-in-wet using all the colors used in the painting, and kicked up the reds a bit in the rest of the painting to tie it all together.

Oils would have been more suited for this because I could have blended more, but I opted for acrylics so I could frame it right away and put it up for sale.

The final step was to add a couple of people on the sidewalk, something I had to re-do four times before they finally looked human. Sort of.

Last month I ordered a box of chunky little frames with 5″ openings. Here’s how this painting looks in a couple of them:

When I offer this on Boundless Gallery I’ll let the buyer choose the one they like.

DSFDF in the news:

In just a few short months, “Different Strokes From Different Folks” has already become quite a phenomenon! Check out page 83 of this month’s issue of Southwest Art magazine for a blurb about it. Kudos to Karin Jurick and all the artists who have made it so special.