Still Life with Garlic - Finished Painting

You all know I mostly paint women's portraits, but every so often, I have an urge to paint something else. In this case it was the little bowl we have in the kitchen that - at the moment - holds two partial heads of garlic, two shallots from the garden and three bay leaves Daniel brought home from a walk not long ago.

Every time I walked past this little still life, it made me stop for a second. There was something so simple and beautiful about it, I longed to paint it!

Still Life with Garlic
6x 6 inch painting on wrapped canvas

Now available in my Etsy Shop.

And a couple of days ago, I decided to yield, which is this week's Illustration Friday theme. I love how this little painting turned out. Not my last still life, of that I am sure!

P.S. It was difficult getting a photo that accurately shows the deep and rich cobalt turquoise background color. It is yummy!!

Watercolor Finished!

Well, at least it's close enough to being finished that I can show it to you here. And once again I realize I am not a patient person... Actually, that was totally evident throughout this watercolor project which requires that you let layers dry before you work on or near them again. I had to actually walk away so I'd leave it alone. 

I thought this would be my least favorite projects of them all, but it turns out it was the one I enjoyed the most aside from the first charcoal drawing. This was definitely the most difficult of all the projects because with watercolor I really had to plan ahead as it is a most unforgiving medium (as I know from years of watching Daniel master it!).

The paper we used for this painting was Richeson Premium 300lb. cold press watercolor paper, and I used Winsor & Newton Winslor Blue and Burnt Sienna watercolor paints.

Tonight I am going back in to work on my graphite drawing some more and then on Thursday we have our final critique and are done with the class. I can hardly believe it!! It was so totally worth it!

I have much more to share with you, but that'll have to wait for another post. I hope you are all doing well and that all of you dealing with the floods up north are safe and sound!

My latest drawing

Well, my drawing is not yet done (now begins the fine tuning), but it's done enough to show you. Plus we are moving on to our watercolor drawing and most of us will continue to work on our graphite pieces on the side.

It's a slow going process, that's for sure, but also very satisfying. Now I have to push my values and as I do that, everything seems to be changing in other places. I could call it done, but I want to learn as much as I can while in this class and detailed drawings are one of my professor's specialties!

Already it's way beyond what I thought I could ever do, so I am beyond pleased! I'll be sure to show you how it changes over the next few weeks.

For the watercolor drawing I'll be using the same still life - that old radio and I have bonded... Tonight I'm going in to do a watercolor sketch of it before I make any marks on the "real" paper!

Wishing you a great evening and a good night!!

Old Typewriters, Radios and Toads

Good monday morning, everyone! I can't believe it's been almost a week since I last blogged. A week filled with drawing, reading, spending time with Daniel, going to the movies, the theater, dinner with friends and much more!

Now, Daniel's summer break is over and he's teaching again. And I am on to my next drawing project - a very detailed graphite drawing. At first I thought I wanted to draw parts of that great old typewriter in the picture above, but somehow the typewriter and I never really clicked...

So, when my professor brought this old vacuum tube radio, I knew that this was the still life for me!

I've already worked on this drawing for quite a few hours and there's so much more to do! Just look at all that detail and texture. This morning I'm going to spend some time sketching out the power chord with those four twisting wires. I have a feeling they might give me some trouble...

In other news, we've had some regular visitors in our yard.

Two toads who haven't taken up residence in the toad houses Daniel put in our backyard,

but in the flower pots we have next to our porch.

The little one hasn't been back in a few days (we figure he was a male that moved on), but the big toad in the schefflera plant seems to have made that her semi-permanent home. For some reason that makes us both quite happy...

I hope you are all doing well and I hope to visit your blogs again soon... Until then I wish you a wonderful week!!

The Simple Joy of Observation

All the still lifes in this post are by Pieter Claesz (1596/97 - 1660)

I had a sort of epiphany yesterday as I was in the class room, getting messy with charcoal and working for two hours on my drawing, just sketching in the objects and blocking lights and darks. The two hours felt like five minutes and while I was working, the whole world sort of fell away.

There was no room in my mind for anything else - only looking and observing and translating that to my paper. The objects I was drawing (an old bar stool, paint cans, rope and an old car tire) ceased to be those objects and simply became shapes to draw. I never once considered how I liked them or how exciting they were, they just were and I was drawing them and getting lost in that process.

And for the first time I understood the allure of still life paintings. I had never quite gotten that, always standing in front of those paintings in museum and wondering why the artist would do something so boring. Why paint a wine glass? Or a tea pot? Or an apple?

I'm starting to understand that it's not about those objects (although many still lifes have special meanings to the painter), but more about the composition, the lighting and the overall harmony of the piece. And then it's about painting or drawing it.

All the still lifes here are by the Dutch painter Pieter Claesz. We are going to do watercolor value studies with pieces from the old masters to learn how they worked. I'll show you some of these once I do them.

For now, I don't have anything to show you yet from class, except me covered with charcoal, but unfortunately I was by myself and nobody there to take a picture...

Finished Still Life

Well, the drawing is finished (you can click on it to see a larger version) and I am darn proud of my very first still life drawing. This morning, we had our critique in class and it was so great seeing everyone's finished pieces. We all have our different styles and perspectives. Some pieces were cropped, some were not, and all of them were interesting to look at.

This was definitely an exercise in drawing slowly and being patient! You know how well I do with being patient...

I was going to show you a few more things today, but I'm a little pressed for time, so I'll save those for this weekend. And I hope to visit some of your blogs this weekend as well. I need to get back into my normal blog commenting routine - I miss you all!!