"Travelin' Shoes" by Lesley Spanos. Acrylic on 10 x 5.5" paper. Copyright ©2009, all rights reserved.

This Different Strokes airport travelers challenge reminded me of Elvin Biship’s song, “Travelin’ Shoes,” which I put on repeat as I painted. These days the lyric should be, “gotta put on my (easy on easy off no metal shank) travelin’ shoes.” Nothing like some good foot stomping butt swinging music to make the hours fly by in the studio.

I loved the drama of Karin’s high contrast airport photo, but for my purposes it was a bit too dark. I couldn’t see the feet in the shadows, and I was having a hard time imagining what they might look like from that perspective. Also couldn’t see the colors in the darker cast shadows.  So I lightened the reference photo in Photoshop.

Here’s a quick explanation of the hows and whys of lightening shadows:

It’s difficult to capture the full range of light and dark in a single photo. If you expose the light parts correctly, the shadows might get get too dark. Expose the shadows so they glow, and the highlights burn out. As an example, I took four photos of plants on my kitchen windowsill.

In the first, the meter reading came from the impatiens on the right. They look okay, but everything else is too light. The coleus leaves on the left are disappearing in a white glare.

The second photo was exposed so the coleus on the left would look good. But now everything else is too dark! We can barely see the impatiens in the shadows.

The third photo uses the camera’s automatic settings, averaging the lights and darks  to arrive at something in-between. I’d love to be Goldilocks and be able to say this one is “just right,” but it’s not. The lights are too light, and the darks are too dark. These are some of the same auto-exposure issues I saw in the airport photo.

The fourth was taken with a flash. The colors are much closer to what I was seeing in real life, but the shadows are off because the main light source is from the front. I won’t paint from flash photos anymore, because it’s almost impossible to make the painting look like anything but a copy of a flash photo. Not good, when my goal is to make everything I paint look like it was painted from life.

Ideally, when taking reference photos I bracket the exposures, so I have good shots of both the light and dark areas. If I use a tripod, I can take it a step further and use HDR software to combine multiple images into one. Often that’s not possible, so what do we do when we have only one dark photo to work from? Here’s my quick Photoshop solution:

These are both photo #2, but in the second version I’ve lightened the shadows in Photoshop. This can be done using levels, or with the “lighten shadows” slider. It’s a quick, easy fix that selectively brings light back into the shadows without destroying detail in the lighter areas. This image is the closest to what I saw in real life. Gosh, I really need to scrub down that kitchen wall.

Here’s the same effect used on Karin’s photo:

Lightening the reference made the feet and shadow colors more visible, though I must admit I still had to fake the shape of the feet (and they still don’t look right).

Now, on to the painting. These are a few images I took along the way:

The acrylic underpainting loosely suggests where the light and shadow areas will be.

The sketch began with pastel pencil, so I could easily wipe off my mistakes and start over. I knew I’d be making a LOT of mistakes on this one.

Once the drawing was as good as I could get it, I started reinforcing some of my pastel lines with acrylic paint so I wouldn’t accidentally wipe off all my hard work.

More detail in acrylic. I was going to switch to oils before now because I thought it would be impossible to create a soft transition from light to shadow with acrylics.  Not so – my test transition was nicely fuzzy – so I kept going with the acrylics.

I paid special attention to the lower left corner, where several floor sections intersect in the middle of a shadow. Getting the values and colors right in that area were the key to creating the illusion of a shadowed terrazzo floor.

I gave the floor depth by making the speckles in the foreground bigger and brighter, fading them out as they receded into the background. Also it gets bluer as it recedes, just like a landscape.

One of the last details was to give the woman Captain’s stripes on her sleeve. I liked the idea of black heels and power.

Here’s a little Elvin Bishop, if you care to listen to my painting soundtrack:

"The View" by Lesley Spanos. Oil on 6 x 6" Gessobord panel. Copyright ©2009, all rights reserved.

My answer to Karin Jurick‘s Different Strokes City Rooftops challenge. Thank you, Karin, for another versatile reference photo. The shot was taken from her hotel room in San Francisco, which reminded of Gerry Beckley’s (America) “View From The Hotel” series of photographs. He shoots the view from every hotel on tour, even if it’s just a parking lot, then catalogs everything by date on his website. Very cool. These kind of shots remind me that it’s the more mundane views from our travels that are often the most interesting in retrospect.

This was a fun painting to tackle. Here are a few shots taken along the way:

First I laid down an undercoat of acrylic in greyed purple-ish tones found in one of the buildings in the background.  (It’s also the color of my bedroom.) Most of the foreground buildings will be yellow, so setting up a complementary color scheme early will hopefully keep the colors harmonious.

A loose drawing in grey marker went over the top of the acrylic.  Even though this won’t be an abstract, I’m looking for shapes that would be pleasing and balanced if abstracted.

These next few shots were taken in the studio at night with little color correction, so they look warmer than they actually are.

Next I start to apply the oil paint with a 1″ slant brush. Usually I try not to premix my paints much, but on this one I am because the colors are so delicate, and the values are so important. I’m even using a value card to get those values right.

Here’s a color I love: Naples yellow! Mixed with titanium white, it’s like creamy sunshine. It makes me happy just looking at it. I don’t use yellow ochre. Though many artists use it successfully, it’s dull and heavy in my hands.

Finally, I get to paint the metal thingies on the roof! I love painting metal. I’ve taken some artistic license and made them shinier than galvanized steel, more like stainless, just ’cause I love painting shiny things

Oopsy, some of those horizontal lines aren’t very horizontal – gotta fix that!

The final piece, shot outdoors and color balanced so it’s as accurate as possible. (Though I was kinda loving the red tones.)

I don’t know what time of day Karin took her photo, but I’ve been trying to portray the pale lemony light of early morning in San Francisco, with a bit of fog hovering in the distance.

If I’d been doing this image purely as a cityscape, I think I would have left off some of the fussier details, like the metal bands (probably an earthquake retrofit) on the building on the right. But in an abstract state of mind, I sought out and emphasized repeating shapes and rhythms, and those bands gave me an opportunity for a nice vertical rhythm. I tried to hit every number between one and six when I chose how many items to put in each group of images. Maybe it’s just me, but I believe this creates a rhythm which is pleasing in a Sesame Street kind of way.

"Chocolate, Vanilla, Chocolate" by Lesley Spanos. Oil on diagonal 6 x 6" Gessobord panel. Copyright ©2009, all rights reserved.

Our Different Strokes From Different Folks challenge subject this week is cupcakes. Now, I love cupcakes, even if I don’t eat them. In fact, I firmly believe that some of the most exciting things happening in the arts these days are taking place in cupcake world. If you want to see what I mean, take a look at one of my favorite blogs, Cupcakes Take The Cake. Such creativity! We painters find it hard to do anything that hasn’t been done before, but the cupcake artists are giddy with exploring new territory every day. Or maybe it’s just a sugar high.

Karin’s reference photo was reminiscent of a Wayne Thiebaud painting. He’s one of my absolute favorite artists of all time, so to try to copy him would be a sacrilege. I’d fall terribly short of my goal and embarrass myself. Like this:

"I'm no Wayne Thiebaud" by Lesley Spanos. Acrylic on 7 x 5" museum board. Copyright ©2009, all rights reserved.

But I had to try. This first attempt was done with a lot of modeling paste in the “frosting.” I thought I could shape it to look like 3-d, but it was a lot harder than I expected. I mean, do I let the frosting cast its own shadows and light the painting just right when it’s done, or do I paint the shadows in in addition to the texture so if the lighting isn’t just right they will still show? I can’t remember how Thiebaud did it. I just know that mine looked lame no matter what I did to it, and it was impossible to photograph the texture.

So, that’s the tosser.

My second attempt was more traditional, with little texture, and shadows painted in. The hardest part was getting all those little confetti quins the right color in both light and shadow.

Here are a few images taken along the way:

Happy one year anniversary to all Strokers!

"Telegraph Hill" by Lesley Spanos. Acrylic on paper. Copyright ©2009, all rights reserved.

This was one of those crazy weeks when I thought I’d never get anything done for the current Different Strokes From Different Folks challenge hosted by Karin Jurick. My first mistake was forgetting to seal the paper before I started painting in oils. The paper sucked all the oils out of the paint and it felt like Play-Doh under my brush. I should’ve just started over, but I kept torturing myself with it. Here’s where it was when I abandoned it:

"Up Telegraph Hill" by Lesley Spanos. Oil painting on paper. Copyright ©2009, all rights reserved.

It didn’t totally suck – the light was okay in parts of it – but I didn’t like how tentative it looked. It was obvious I was unsure of myself and was adding detail just because I didn’t know what else to do.

I needed to loosen up, and it was too early in the day for wine, so I turned on some music, got out my acrylics, out and did a quickie:

Not pretty, but it got me out of that paint-every-detail mindset so I could move on. I started wondering how much detail I could omit and still have it read as a street on a hill. Using the same colors I used in the first painting, I painted this:

I almost left it like that, but I thought it needed a couple more identifying elements:

Hopefully now it looks more like city streets than a canyon.

I tried a new technique to get the telephone pole straight: I dipped the edge a piece of cardboard in paint and stamped it on.

This is going to be one of those paintings people either like, or will say “WTF?”

Just in case any of you artists are still working on this challenge and need a street view of some of the finer details, here’s the location:
View Larger Map

This is actually a block closer than Karin’s view, at the 3-way intersection at the bottom of the hill. I know that view well – Karin was probably next to the San Francisco Art Institute when she took the reference photo. There’s a cable car line that goes from Taylor to Columbus in this intersection, so painting in a cable car wouldn’t be out of the question. (I thought about it…) Just around the corner on Columbus, you’ll see the world famous Bimbo’s 365 Club. Up at the top of Telegraph Hill a couple of blocks over is Coit Tower, which has some really cool murals in it.

"Waiting" by Lesley Spanos. Oil on paper, 11 x 8". Copyright ©2009, all rights reserved.

This is the latest from Karin Jurick’s Different Strokes From Different Folks challenge. Though I know this was a figure challenge, what really attracted my eye was the chair on the left. I loved the contrast of textures, the shiny metal and smooth leather. So I copped out and beheaded the poor man so he wouldn’t detract from that beautiful chair.

Here are a few images taken along the way:

"Chicago Lifeguard" by Lesley Spanos. Acrylic on paper, 8 x 12". Copyright ©2009, all rights reserved.

Here’s the latest challenge from Karin Jurick’s Different Strokes From Different Folks. This time we’re painting a floating lifeguard on Lake Michigan. I wonder what it’s like out there, isolated on that little boat for hours at a time? Is it a fun way to spend the summer, or the world’s more boring job?

Here are some images taken along the way. I spent too much time watching the Michael Jackson memorial on TV, so no time left for commentary today:

"Sweet Georgia Grown" by Lesley Spanos. Acrylic on paper, 14 x 7". Copyright ©2009, all rights reserved.

Sometimes the paint flows, and sometimes it doesn’t. This was one of those weeks when the paint was not my friend. When I saw the reference photo on Karin Jurick’s Different Strokes From Different Folks painting challenge, I thought it would be an easy assigment after the complicated Amish farm scene. I thought I could blow through it in three hours or less.

Oh, silly me.

Here are a few images taken along the way:

The drawing in pen. Not worried about being neat, because most of it will be covered with paint eventually.

Starting to put some transparent color down, keeping it sloppy. All the veges get a coat of cad yellow before I layer on the other colors. Reds and greens have a nice glow when painted over yellow.

The colors in the onions looked pretty good in this step.

But I couldn’t keep it fresh as I added more detail. There must be twenty layers of paint on those onions, every one of them an attempt to “fix” the previous layer. Instead of getting better, things got progressively worse as the acrylic paint piled on. I find it hard to mix light colors in acrylics, because they dry so much darker and yellower than they look on the palette. It’s like painting blind because I have to guess how it will look when it’s dry. Oils would have been a better choice.

In the end, I didn’t finish the onions… I simply gave up on them.

The upside is that they have plenty of texture.

I learned a lot about tomatoes. Not having painted tomatoes much, I assumed they were red, but as I worked, I discovered oranges, fushias, and green. Lots of green especially on the stem end.

The corn silks didn’t turn out well (OMG, did you see Karin’s silks? Such flow!), but I was happy with the husks. I barely did anything to them – I spent maybe twenty minutes total – yet they look okay. I love it when that happens.

The finished piece. Or is it? I’m still playing with cropping. Since the corn silks didn’t turn out well, the right side of the painting is dead, so I’ll probably cut it off.

As always, thanks for stopping by for another episode of “As The Paint Turns.”

"She Brings Lemonade" by Lesley Spanos. Acrylic on panel, 14 x 8". Copyright ©2009, all rights reserved.

She brings lemonade for her man, and water for the horses. Is it any different than when I bring my husband a beer while he’s working on his Jeep on a hot day?

This is another painting for Karin Jurick’s Different Strokes From Different Folks painting challenge. This time we’re in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. I’ve never been to Lancaster County, but my ancestral roots run deep there. I’m only a couple of generations removed from making quilts instead of paintings.

A few images captured along the way:

Photograph by Karin Jurick. Copyright ©2009 Karin Jurick, all rights reserved.

My photo of a farmer and horses laid over Karin's photo.

I’ve got to admit that empty landscapes don’t hold my interest. Maybe because I’m a city girl, they seem sad and lonely, like empty stage sets waiting for the actors to bring them to life. That’s not to say that I don’t appreciate other artist’s landscapes – some painters do fabulous things with dirt and sky! I just feel that if I want to enjoy this painting, I need to add some people. Amish people.

I use Photoshop to layer images together so I have only a single reference to work from.  I was envisioning a farmer working the fields, and luckily I had photos I’d taken of a man with some horses at the state fair last summer. With a little makeover he might pass for Amish, so I traveled to Google Land to look for tips on clothes, hats, and beards. A lot of their fabrics are blue or purple – I wonder what kind of dye they’re using? Must be a natural plant dye. My guy’s going to get a nice purple shirt, because I love purple.

This time I’m painting on a bright yellow/orange/red background. The yellows will help the transparent greens to glow, and the complementary red and orange will help tone down the greens.

Blocking in the colors. I’m trying hard NOT to cover all that orange. I need some peeking through for interest.

Here I’ve added the Amish women.

The horizontal lines in the field have been changed to sweeping curves to show the woman’s path. Also, I’m hoping it helps show that we’re on a hill.

I don’t know why, but this exhausted me! Nothing seemed to go right, and I really struggled with the horses and the man. By the time I got to painting the landscape details, I realized I was out of time. Karin’s deadline for the DSFDF challenge is in a couple of hours, so I’m calling it done and submitting it. Maybe later I’ll go back and fix a couple of things, like the man’s shirt and hat.

"Madison Avenue" by Lesley Spanos. Oil on Gessobord panel, 6 x 6". Copyright ©2009, all rights reserved.

Here’s another painting for Karin Jurick’s Different Strokes From Different Folks painting challenge.

View Larger Map

The reference photo. Photograph by Karin Jurick, copyright © 2009, all rights reserved.

Karen tells us that our location is the corner of Madison Avenue and 39th Street in New York City. This is useful information, because it allows me to look it up in Google Maps using Street View.

I can’t paint from a photo unless I can imagine myself inside the scene, and Google Street View helps me do that. I can see what’s behind me, up, down, on the next block, etc. I can even see that beyond that red awning there’s a McDonald’s in case I want some virtual high octane coffee while I paint. Photos are never as good as being there, but Street View is the next best thing. (BTW, if you haven’t seen it yet, check out Bill Guffey’s Virtual Paintout challenge. They paint – with Google’s blessings – from Google Street Views.)

By looking at the Google map, I can see that we’re facing north, and the time of day is probably – as I’d guessed – morning. That will help me make my color choices. Coincidentally, the Google Street View image looks like it was taken about the same time of day that Karin took her photo.

For comparison, I’ve also included Karin’s original reference photo. It’s the same scene, the same size, yet see how different these two images are? Photos DO lie! Always. Neither of these photos is completely accurate. The Google image was taken with a series of wide angle lenses, creating all sorts of distortion and making distances appear much longer than they really are. My guess is that Karin’s was taken with a bit of a telephoto, compressing distances unnaturally. The truth can be found somewhere between these two images.

If I had time, I could try to correct the distortion by drawing the buildings using perspective. But I’m in a rush, and more attracted to the cars than the skyline (I like colorful shiny things!), so I’ll focus just on the lower right corner of the reference for my painting.

Here are a few photos I took along the way:

Hmmm… what color to tone the background? Well, the tail lights are my favorite part of this photo, so let’s try “tail light color.”

The background toning is acrylic. From here on out, I’ll be using oils.  I didn’t want to get too fussy, so I’m drawing directly on the panel with a brush and Mars Black oil color.

(Note: The next few in-progress images are were taken in the studio with a camera at night, and I didn’t take the time to color correct them well. Too much red, too little blue.)

The painting progresses, and I can’t make up my mind about the figure on the street corner…

A woman striking a “casual” pose?

A businessman on his way to work?

An indistinct cluster of people?

Yeah, I think I’ll go with that last one.

This final image was done on the scanner and color-corrected so it’s truer to the original painting.

"Boogie Fever" by Lesley Spanos. Gouache on paper, 5 x 9.5". Copyright ©2009, all rights reserved.

I’ve long admired artist Karin Jurick’s paintings of people relaxing on the beach, so how cool is it to get to paint from one of her beach photos, with her blessing? That was our assignment for weeks 27-28 on Karin’s Different Strokes From Different Folks online painting challenge.

It’s mega cool, yes, but also intimidating. If there was one contemporary I wish I could paint like, it’s Karin. Her colors are rich and pleasing, like comfort food for the eyes. Her brushstrokes have that confident, casual look I long for in my own work. Her narrative demonstrates a keen sense of observation and a quirky sense of humor which takes a pretty picture to the next level and makes it Art.  She’s building a solid body of work, and I fully expect her work will hang on museum walls some day. Man oh man, why didn’t I buy something when her paintings first showed up on eBay, when they were more affordable?

Because I like Karin’s work so much, I have to dig deep each time I participate in her challenge to find myself. The last thing I want to do on her blog is a cheap imitation of her work, from her photo! I think it’s a dilemma most of the participating artists share. It’s like being a contestant on American Idol, trying to put your own spin on an iconic song. It’s damn hard, but if you can pull it off, you’re a better artist for it. Even if you can’t pull it off, you’re still a better artist for it, because you were true to yourself. That’s a big reason why I keep doing these challenges – it forces me to listen to my own voice.

That, and it makes me stretch my abilities by painting stuff I normally wouldn’t paint. Like those people on the beach – I love to paint surf, but I have never included a person in a seascape. Never! So it’s Challenge Time!

Here are a few shots I took along the way:

The painting begins with a waterproof pen drawing on paper.

This time I toned the paper after doing the drawing, using transparent washes of acrylic paint. Why? I dunno. Just felt like it.

The rest of the painting was done using M. Graham gouache. My palette consisted of:

• burnt umber
• phthalo blue
• ultramarine blue
• dioxazine purple
• cadmium red
• quinacridone rose
• cadmium yellow light
• zinc white
• titanium white

Oils might have been easier and more effective, but I needed a good workout in gouache. Gouache is tricky, because you need to work quickly, and you can’t put on too many layers before it turns to mud.

Waves are well within my comfort zone. People aren’t! So the beach background fell off the paintbrushes effortlessly, and within twenty minutes, it was done. Then I spent the next two hours struggling with the figures.

Having painted a few waves in my lifetime, I think the main thing I need to keep reminding myself is to let them flow. Because when you let the paint do its thing, all sorts of happy accidents happen that make it look more convincing. Labor over a wave for hours, and it looks contrived, like those frozen in time paintings of waves where every little droplet is defined. (You know the ones I mean… usually there’s light shining through the wave right where it’s starting to break.) I like to paint waves as I see them, churning and violent and random. Today’s waves started as dark humps with lots of brown mixed in, because they’re dirty with sand. Then I made a pass with a lighter color, using a circular, rolling motion to imitate the motion of the breaking wave. The cool thing about gouache is that it remains water soluble even after it dries, so as I painted the undercolor was picked up by the lighter paint, mixing with it and creating multiple tones in between. I finished the wave with a pass of thicker white mixed with a tiny bit of red. The red makes the white pop against the complementary blue-greens of the water.

That’s me smiling at my favorite happy accident in the painting.

Starting to mess with the figures (and yes, they are a mess)…

…and the (butt) end result. I’m not really happy with the figures, or with my gouache technique here. I didn’t know what colors to use or how to define the planes on a human body with paint so I fussed with them too much. Gouache strokes should look confident. Lay them down once, and move on! Mine are unsure. You can see me searching for the right answer. That’s why I need to practice in gouache a LOT more.

But there are some things happening here that make me happy. I like the bits of underpainting showing through, and I wish there were more of them. I like the looseness of the sky and the rough indication of clouds. I like the lack of hard edges around the figures, though I could have used a few hard edges here and there. I like the girl’s hair, another happy accident.

The foreground is a big part of the painting and it needed something to define it and bring it forward… so I added sand texture and pebbles. I flicked some light color on with a brush, then added burnt umber shadows to each speck. Fun.

What color is wet sand? Well, it’s darker than dry sand, and reflects a LOT of sky color. The wetter it is, the more sky it reflects. So I guess sand is a dirty brown mixture of sea color and sky color.

Here’s the finished piece. I was getting ready to send it in to Karin, but I have a few free hours to paint today (after I subtract Earth Hour), and there are more figures in the reference photo calling to me. I could just stop here, but in my head I hear Thelma’s last words to Louise – “Let’s keep goin’!” I’m thinking it’s diptych, or even triptych time!

"Kalifornia Roll" by Lesley Spanos. 12 x 9" oil painting on panel. Copyright ©2009 Lesley Spanos, all rights reserved.

A California roll is to sushi what Tex-Mex food is to Mexican cuisine – a Western adaptation of a traditional food using local ingredients more suited to the American palate.  You can find them in shopping malls and supermarkets throughout the US.

The California roll is an inside-out roll (Uramaki), with the rice on the outside, because it was thought that non-sushi-loving Americans would balk at the sight of nori (seaweed) on the outside. Inside is avocado, cucumber strips, and some really gross fake crab (Krab) made from molded cooked fish paste. There are many variations of the basic California roll. Some include mayo, cream cheese, and other stomach-churning ingredients. I’ve had them with crab salad inside (real crab, even!), and while the concept grossed me out, they were actually much better than I expected. (The key is to think of it as an hors d’oeuvre rather than sushi.) Some rolls are sprinkled with sesame seeds or fish roe (Tobiko), while others are served plain.

I did the painting as part of Karin Jurick’s Different Strokes From Different Folks web challenge. If you go here, you can see the original reference photo for this challenge, as well as the other artist’s interpretations.

I love being part of this challenge, but I almost didn’t do this one because it was such a difficult photo for me. Here are some of the issues I had with it:

• There are few shadows to define the form, and I rely on shadows a lot in my painting.
• There is fish roe on the rolls. I don’t do fish roe of any kind. Can’t even look at it without my stomach doing flip flops, due to a bad New Year’s Eve experience with some caviar a few years ago.
• The rolls are drenched in shoyu.

I decided the only way for me to do this painting was to gather some of my own visual information, and combine it with Karin’s photo. I needed to see what color the rice would be without the shoyu, and where the shadows would fall if I changed the lighting. I make simple “mom” style sushi rolls at home, and we had some leftover rice in the rice cooker, so I made a quick mock-up using only rice.  The rice wasn’t properly prepared for sushi, so I added a bit of rice vinegar and nuked it to make it stickier. Fortunately, it didn’t have to taste good. All I needed was a “blank” so I could add the characteristics of Karin’s sushi on top of it.

I arranged the pieces like the ones in Karin’s photo, and played with the light and the arrangement of the other elements. Here’s my final choice:

I wish I’d moved the wasabi out of the shadow, maybe to the upper right corner.

I used a 12 x 9″ gessoed masonite panel. To tone the surface, I used several thin layers of acrylic paint, separated by clear Atelier binder medium, and finished with a top coat of binder mediun. You can’t really see it in the photos, but the layering gave it a tortoise shell-like surface with lots of depth. I almost didn’t want to cover it, and promised myself that I’d leave as much exposed as possible.

The drawing was laid in using a permanent black pen. Mistakes on binder medium can be erased with a cotton swab moistened with rubbing alcohol.

Then I began painting in oils, using lots of red in the rice to prep it for the reflected greens from the plate.

Just feeling my way around here, trying to figure out the colors. The aqua of the plate was particularly hard for me, but eventually I realized it needed to be dirtier and more yellow.

I tried to stay as true to the original photo as possible when painting the sushi. Everything else is mine, but I wanted those to be Karin’s sushi… minus the shoyu and roe. Because the Krab and avocado in the reference were brown from the soy sauce, I had to create those colors from memory.  In the end, I felt the greatest sense of accomplishment from painting those two ingredients.

I kept the plate and mock sushi in front of me, and ended up painting more from life than from the photo. So much subtle color is lost in a photo!

For once I remembered to leave space around the edges for the frame. If I hadn’t, that shoyu dish at the top probably would have been cut off. I want that dish almost kissing the edge of the painting, which probably breaks someone’s rules of composition.

Here’s the finished piece, with the edges cropped as they might be by a frame. The final touch was a drop of shoyu on the plate as a tribute to the original photo.

I’ve dubbed this a “Kalifornia Roll” because it’s filled with Krab.

"The Girls" by Lesley Spanos. Oil painting on 14 x 8" wood panel. © Copyright 2009 Lesley Spanos, all rights reserved.

I can’t say that “Sex and the City” has ever been one of my favorite television shows. I’ve laughed at times – sometimes really hard – when I’ve  stumbled across it, but it’s not anything I’ve ever gone out of my way to see.  It’s hard for me to relate to characters who obsess over shoes and clothes. Though I can understand a good, healthy obsession with sex.

So I’m surprised at myself for painting a tribute to Sex and the City. The source of inspiration was a photo of a wig shop window taken by artist Karin Jurick, posted on her Different Strokes From Different Folks challenge. It’s a very cool image, with many stylized wig heads to choose from. My first thought was a take on the Rolling Stones “Some Girls” album cover, but then I noticed these four “girls” grouped together, and from that point on all I could see was Samantha, Carrie, Charlotte, and Miranda. (I had to look those names up on Wikipedia.) I searched the web for photos of the actresses, because the only face ingrained in my memory is Sarah Jessica Parker’s.

Here are some photos taken along the way. Please excuse the poor image quality and uneven lighting, as I was shooting in the studio at night.

This surface is a little unusual for me. It’s a piece of birch plywood I stained with a wash of orange acrylic, then sealed with several coats of Atelier Binder medium. I like this stuff, because it provides good adhesion for the paint, and dries crystal clear. Think of it as a clear primer. The way the paint feels when it glides onto this surface is wonderful – sort of buttery and silky at the same time.

The drawing was inked in roughly using a waterproof pen. I’m reminded once again that I should take more time to get the drawing right, because there were a few problems I could have avoided if I had.

The hair seemed like a good place to start establishing the characters. Kim Cattrall’s ‘do came from a red carpet photo rather than the TV series. For a wig, the height and Marilyn Monroe sweep seemed more appropriate than her straighter TV hair. It doesn’t look like her character, but it’s my favorite head in the painting.

Carrie’s hair wasn’t supposed to be green (I got some black paint in my yellow), but I liked it, so I left it that way. It fit with the look I was going for, a mix of reality and caricature.

How’d Courtney Love get in there?

Okay, I’ll just paint out Courtney’s face and hope to simply suggest Miranda with a blank wig head. Not a bad solution, because my heads were looking too human, and I want some of them to look wiggy.

If it’s not one thing, it’s another. Now Charlotte has morphed into Lisa Ling…

…but it’s nothing a big pair of sunglasses won’t (mostly) hide.

I left the background as is, just the stained/sealed wood surface. I love the look of the paint next to the wood grain.

And so we end another painting adventure. Thanks for stopping by!

P.S. It’s just occured to me that I have painted characters who idolize fashion with no bodies for their clothes, and no feet for their shoes. No, my girls are all brains and witty dialogue!

"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!)

"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.

"Mystery Artist," an oil poirtrait of an unknown artist by Lesley Spanos. ©2008, all rights reserved.

“?”
Acrylic on Raymar canvas panel, 9 x 12″

Who is this lovely mystery woman with the bright smile? As I write this, I don’t yet know.  I was paired with her through the luck of the draw. Artist Karin Jurik came up with a fun year-end challenge on her Different Strokes From Different Folks blog.  One-hundred and thirty artists sent her photos of themselves, and she paired each of us with a partner to paint. So while I’m painting this artist from her photo, she’s painting me from mine.  In the end we’ll find out each others identity and perhaps trade the portraits.

My apologies to the Mystery Artist! I captured a little of your sparkle, but I didn’t manage to capture your look.

UPDATE, December 31: Now the mystery artist has a name:  Sally Tharp! I’ve admired her art on her blog before. So nice to put a personality and name with the face. Check out her gorgeous portrait of me on her blog. She had a tough photo of me to work from, with lots of shadows, but she did amazing things with it. Her use of light and color really blew me away! It’s like me, only better.

Here are a few in-progress images:

Sketched directly on the canvas with ink.

Next an underpainting in acrylic is added. I went heavy on the green so it would contrast with the skin tones:

The underpainting is done.  If I knew this person wouldn’t mind it as is, I might be tempted to leave it like this. But not everyone likes having a green face! So I forge on, now switching to oils:

Hmm, that green t-shirt and yellow background aren’t working for me. Let’s change them:

Much better! (BTW, I didn’t realize until later that I was wearing a purple t-shirt when I painted this.)

The reference photo was taken with a flash, so there were no shadows. You can always tell when someone has painted from a flash photo, so I struggled to make it more portrait-like by shadowing the face.

I had all my colors turned up to 11 on this one, and I’m thinking now that maybe the red was too much.

Done!

But is any painting ever really done? There are things I would change if I lived on a deserted island and had only that one painting and all the time in the world to refine it. But I don’t. I have to take what I can learn from each project, and move on to the next challenge.

"Gogh All The Way," an oil painting of boots by Lesley Spanos. ©2008, all rights reserved.

“Gogh All The Way”
12 x 9 oil painting on Raymar canvas panel

When I saw Karin Jurick’s photo for this week’s Different Strokes challenge, I saw a modern version of Vincent van Gogh’s “A Pair of Shoes.” It can’t be a coincidence that they were so similar to the boots he painted in 1885, right down to the odd horizontal composition. Can it?

"A Pair Of Shoes" by Vincent Van Gogh c. 1885. Public domain image.

So I thought – with a nod to Eric Carmen -  if I’m going to paint this image , “please, let’s Gogh all the way!” As you can tell from my last post, I’ve been on a Vincent kick lately. Copying famous artists wasn’t part of my art education,  so I’m filling in that gap now.

I love boots! Putting all the nasty things like global warming,  economic crisis, and torturous high heels aside, aren’t we lucky to be alive right now? Our feet are so pampered in our modern work boots. We have a nice padded collar and tongue,  stiff ankle support, a steel shank, and a protective toe,  not to mention the modern miracle of our time, wicking socks! I don’t think I’d last the morning in van Gogh’s floppy, ill-fitting boots.

Ever notice how van Gogh’s shoe and boot paintings are among his most somber? Perhaps when he was stuck indoors with nothing to paint but shoes he was at his unhappiest. No sad boots for me! I expressed my boot-love with a cheerier palette.

Lately I’ve been getting too tense and tight when I paint, so I made myself dive in without a sketch or even any real plan.  I turned on some music (the Raspberries, even) and danced with the paint while wearing my new snow boots. OMG, they are so comfy! I think I will end up wearing them in the house more than outside.

Here’s how the painting went, from start to finish:

Notice how the perspective is off? I did that intentionally, because van Gogh’s perspective was usually twisted. It drove me a little nuts, though.

"Favorite Things," an oil painting by Lesley Spanos. © 2008, all rights reserved.

“Favorite Things”
Oil painting on hardboard panel, 11 x 14″

A few of artist Karen Jurick’s favorite things. This was painted from her photo on her weekly artist’s challenge, Different Strokes From Different Folks. Go to the blog to see the reference photo we were given to use, and the many interpretations submitted by artists.

Somewhere I have a similar painting I did ten years ago, of some of my favorite things at the time: A white ceramic Buddah given to me by a friend in college, a glass and black metal votive holder with lighted candle, a carved brass vase from India via Pier One, and some tiny yellow mums (not my favorite) to bridge the composition. I could have easily used hydrangeas instead – I always have dried hydrangeas, cat mint, and statice hanging in the kitchen. My hydrangeas are a light lime green.

There were too many things demanding my attention this week, so I really struggled with this painting, spreading it out over three short sessions due to lack of time. I never really got into the “zone.” There are still things that bother me about it, but I’ve tortured it enough. Sometimes you’ve just gotta clean those brushes and move on to the next thing!

I don’t think she’s really from Tennessee. I just like the name. This is another one from Karin Jurick‘s “Different Strokes From Different Folks” weekly challenge. We were given a really cool reference photo to work from – very Hopper-ish -  but it was upside down! Karin asked us to do at least 95% of the work with the photo and painting inverted.

Working upside down isn’t unusual for me. I work flat and rest my hand on the canvas while I paint, so spinning it in any direction to find a dry spot is second nature. The real challenge here was painting heels. I struggled with those shoes upside down and right-side up. In fact my entire 5% of right-side up time was wasted on those darn shoes. I really seem to have a mental block against them. Maybe it’s my hatred of wearing heels manifesting itself through my art.

Just for kicks, the second photo shows this painting in the early stages. Often I paint on a red ground, but a dark black/blue/red color seemed the way to go with this one. I was able to leave much of it exposed in the window and coat. This in-progress shot also shows my lack of pre-painting preparation. I don’t like to draw much in advance. I think of painting more like sculpture – I’m coaxing the form out of nothing.

After I finished the painting, I looked at the reference image on the computer and noticed there were some interesting reflections in the window that didn’t show in my printout. A man and a car. Darn! I hope someone else does something with them.

Here’s how it looked as I worked on it upside down.

Do you like Edward Hopper as much as I do? Writer Kevin Grandfield has created a really cool blog about his work: Hunting Nighthawks: On the Road with Edward Hopper.

In last week’s painting of the US Capital building, I struggled with the cars, and never could get them right. So I decided I needed to do some visual research on cars. I look at cars every day, but I don’t see them. I only glance long enough to avoid a collision. So I took the dog for a long walk on a busy street and studied cars in motion. I noticed how the lower half of most cars reflected the street or nearby vehicles, the horizontal surfaces reflected the sky, and highlights were usually small, intense dots rather than streaks. I didn’t have time to fix the cars in last week’s painting, but I put my new-found knowledge to work in today’s painting. I actually LIKE that little silver car. I accomplished something new here, and that makes me happy.

This painting is from Week #10 of Karin Jurick‘s “Different Strokes…” challenge. Go see the other other interpretations!

I feel like I’ve waited for this day longer, and with more anticipation, than I waited for Christmas as a kid. Finally, it’s Election Day in the US, and a new era is here! I’ve never felt this kind of electricity before at election time. From what I’ve heard standing in line at Obama rallies, there’s going to be partying in the streets tonight because “this is bigger than winning the Superbowl!” We’ll be celebrating more quietly at home, watching election results on TV with a bottle of champagne.

Karin Jurick provided us with a fitting challenge this week on “Different Strokes From Different Folks.” The reference photo lent itself to many interpretations. I’m on a bit of an Obama painting kick, so my first thought was to build a composite using him in the foreground. But, I decided it would be more of a challenge to paint how I feel without including him. So I made it my goal to paint one feeling: Fresh. I wanted to illustrate a fresh, clean new beginning for our government. I used a fairly high key palette and “pretty” colors. The clouds are receding, and the world is bathed in morning light. The Capitol dome is soaring toward the heavens, enduring and… oh, crap, just a little crooked. I just can’t seem to get buildings straight no matter what I do.

I feel like the kid who just got my homework in early! This is my response to Week 8 of Karin Jurick’s “Different Strokes” challenge. Compared to the last challenge, this one went quickly, and it was a lot easier than I expected.

"New York Stock Exchange" a painting by Lesley Spanos, copyright 2008

“New York Stock Exchange”
Acrylic painting on paper, 7.5 x 16″

Here’s another one painted for Karin Jurick’s “Different Strokes” weekly challenge. You can see her original photo on the Week 6-7 thread on her blog. It was quite complex, and a small image, so not much detail was available. I guess that’s a good thing – it keeps me from going too crazy with the detail. (Yeah, like I didn’t anyway!)

The floor was one of the first things I laid down. I was going to start bright with the underpainting, then overpaint it with a duller color. But the yellow reminded me of a Van Gogh floor (albeit brighter than his), so I left it that way. Yellow is almost universally used to suggest cheerfulness, but as I painted, I realized that Van Gogh had a knack for making yellow look somber and somewhat mad. If a headache had a color, it would be the throbbing yellow of a Van Gogh floor. It’s a color that says, “I’ve gone insane because the floor keeps me awake at night.” Maybe not a bad color for the trading floor after two weeks of financial chaos.

I might add more people later. For now, I need a break from painting little men in ugly smocks!

Acrylic painting of the Cloud Gate sculpture in Chicago by Lesley Spanos. Copyright 2008, all rights reserved.

“Da Bean” 12 x 9″ acrylic on panel

Talk about being late – this one was supposed to be done by October 8 so I could send it to Karin Jurick for her Week 5 challenge on “Different Strokes From Different Folks.”

But somehow I got lost in a gloomy diptych which was probably way too challenging for a quick project like this. That’s the bottom image, still in progress.

"The Day The Met" and "The Day They Married" by Lesley Spanos. Copyright 2008, all rights reserved.

I don’t know how it got so dark and depressing, because that wasn’t what I was going for. I think maybe I was reacting to the gloom and doom surrounding the economic collapse in the US, and it came out in my painting. Maybe one of these days I’ll try to finish it, because I like the concept. My intent was to put the couple making out under the bean in the left panel, and the same couple having their photo taken on their wedding day on the right panel. Maybe I’ll keep the rain on the left side, and make the right side a sunnier day.

(Now maybe I shouldn’t point this out, but doesn’t the left-hand panel remind you of Eric Cartman mooning? All I can see is a big, fat cartoon butt.)

The much brighter piece at the top of this post is an acrylic I did at the last minute just so I’d have something to turn in, but not fast enough to get it to Karin for her to put it on her blog. It’s listed on my Boundless Gallery space for $70, shipping included.

An oil painting of minature white pumpkins by Lesley Spanos, copyright 2008.

“Shhhh! She’s coming!”
8 x 6″ oil painting on Raymar archival panel

When I saw Karin Jurick’s photo on this week’s Different Strokes From Different Folks challenge, the image that stuck in my head was two mini white pumpkins gossiping about a third. I don’t know what that says about me!

Do check out the rest of the work on the Different Strokes blog. There’s some amazing work there!

UPDATE:
This morning when I looked at the painting in the daylight, I hated the red lettering on the bench. So I changed it to white to push it into the background. Here’s the current version, which also shows the color better:

I painted on a red-toned background, so the colors are very warm.

This week’s challenge on Karin Jurick’s Different Strokes From Different Folks uses her photo of a place called Rehoboth Beach as the reference. I have no idea where that is, but I’m guessing it’s on the east coast of the US somewhere.

The photo shows the scene in full daylight, but I’ve been wanting to try a moon, so I changed the time of day to night. Not sure how successful the change was – it looks to me like a snow scene from a vintage Christmas card – but at least I tried to stretch my comfort zone.

I haven’t painted much lately, but thanks to artist Karin Jurick’s new blog, Different Strokes From Different Folks, I’m getting the kick in the pants I need to get started. Karin is a kick-ass artist best known for her paintings of people interacting with art in art museums. Once a week she will be offering a single photo for artists to use as reference for a painting. It’s fascinating how many different ways artists can interpret one photo.

The inaugural week was devoted to paintings of Cracker Jack, Karin’s beloved dog who passed over the bridge recently. I think I’ve finished exactly one painting of a dog in my entire life, if you don’t count kindergarten, so it was quite a challenge for me. It’s not really “Jack,” but I was satisfied it at least looked canine.