Art class picspam

[sepdet]

California impressionist piece is finished!
Here's the final painting plus progress pics..

(Click my user name at the top of that post to see previous paintings as well, including an exercise who's finished result frustrates me, but that's because it's hard to drape a cloth gf exactly the way you had it five weeks earlier.)

Blergh. This is migraine weekend, and today is a nasty one. Time for my second attempt to knock it down with maxalt.

Comments

[sarasa_cat]

Go you!!! I swear you'd had a major breakthrough while studying Alson Clark's painting!

I love the impressionists and how they handled color and light/shadow. Gaaaah. Have been wanting to start some studies of earlier impressionist works and seeing your recent series of master copies has been inspiring. also: omfg trees and shrubs.

Sorry about the migraine.

[sepdet]

I didn't have a specific "aha" moment, but it's the first painting where I felt like I knew what I was doing from start to finish, and it was just a question of working patiently through the steps of roughing it in, refining, and looking to see what needed more work. The only thing giving me any trouble now is fine lines.

It was a lovely feeling. I looked forward to working on this one every week.

The California impressionists play with light/color like the Europeans, but they're not so interested in texture or big blobby strokes. I'm still getting the hang of those, whereas the light/color is coming together for me. I'm proud of the fact that I'm still sticking almost entirely to 3 primary colors plus white. (Although this time I had to throw in some Prussian Blue for that sky, and while I was at it I mixed a bunch of greens from it for highlights. That's what causes the greens and blues to pop out on the final day.*)

It helped, too, that this painting depicts something local to my area—that lighting, that particular shade of cloudless sky, the dry alluvial soil and green hills (in March, at least) are all very familiar now, as are stucco/adobe walls, arches and red tile roofs. Having grown up in rural Pennsylvania, I'm almost more aware of the landforms and architecture than the natives, because there's some little part of the back of my mind thinking, "I'm on a different planet. It's beautiful, but it's not the one where I grew up." Luckily, i've fallen in love with it.

*This studio has an odd quirk: the founder Larry Glück liked to use two different primary-color palettes, one he called "American" and the other "European." The "American" palette is pretty much the most pure primary colors one can buy in oils, ultramarine blue, cadmium red and cadmium yellow. Those pigments are good for mixing subtle gradations on the yellow/orange/brick red/poppy red side of the spectrum. The "European" palette is spaced evenly around the color wheel just like the American one, but slightly offset, like a minor key. Prussian blue is slightly greenish, Alizarin red is burgundy, and cadmium medium yellow has a touch of orange/mustard. Those pigments are best at mixing the blue/green/violet side of the spectrum. We try to stick to one set of three or the other, because we can be assured of a harmonious color palette, but sometimes the real-world limitations of pigments force us to add a few extra pigments to cover colors they just can't mix.

[sarasa_cat]

Ahhhh. I just love color and how color changes under different lighting conditions. OMNOMNOMNOMNOM. I have a massive thing for the impressionist movement and I am a bundle of joy for anyone who (successfully) drops highly chromatic color into shadows. Gaaaaaaaah. That is life (as I see it).

I need to check out the California Impressionists (and have started googling). Thanks for alerting me to their importance and how the differed from the European counterpart of the movement!

The Gluck palette: Oh, interesting. I enjoy hearing how different artists, including teaching artists, set up their palette and/or their student's palettes. That approach makes a lot of sense because, yes, it is so much easier to control color harmony with only three pigments. Interesting how Gluck decided to use two (almost-)perfect triads as a way to bake in, presumable(?), either a warm chromatic base with mostly neutral cools or vice versa? If I am correctly understanding the real reasoning behind his choices? If so, makes sense!

...but sometimes the real-world limitations of pigments force us to add a few extra pigments to cover colors they just can't mix.

Totally. Because any triadic gamut is going to restrict the chromaticity for any hue beyond the three points (hues) selected on the wheel.

I've met people with a variety of different philosophies on color and, honestly, it really depends on what you eventually decide to go after. Do you *actually* need or want to color match everything in your image as closely as possible? (And why? Because there are many good reasons why but one needs a good reason!) Or can you instead just let value tell 80+% of the story and map perceived real life colors to something within the more limited gamut of your palette? After all, clever juxtapositions can perceptually fool the eye of the viewer into thinking that, say, Cad Red Dark or Alizarin is on that palette when, in fact, not a single cool red was ever used.

aaahhh. Suddenly missing doing traditional painting. Because color. OMNOMNOM. Hahaha. ;D

Yay for your inspiration!

[sepdet]

This is my first exposure to the most rudimentary color theory beyond "RGB is subtractive, CMYK is additive" and complimentary colors.I knew different artists have different preferred pigments, but it hadn't quite clicked that different teachers would teach specific starting palettes, because yes, of course they would.

I know from all the color challenges in fanworks that you can make a picture with just about any set of colors and mentally color grade however you like.

Which is what I was doing. But pigments are real physical things that don't mix according to theory, but chemistry. So you get more subtle gradations of green & blue Prussian Blue with some things with Ultramarine Blue, even though the latter looks more saturated on its own.

The question is whether one wants to reach for those stronger colors and risk throwing off the color balance of the painting. In this case, I did, because I know what the light is like here. Which was a fun discovery. I didn't *know* I knew, because I wasn't born here, but there really is something about the light in southern California that begs for Plein Air/Impressionist color/lightplay. Same with southern France along the Mediterranean, which is why Monet's got a bunch of paintings that look like California.

I can't wait until I'm allowed to work from a photo. I took SO MANY photos of the poppies on the hills during the superbloom, trying as best I could to capture the way the light glows through them like stained glass. (A subject which, unsurprisingly, a lot of the California Impressionists loved painting.)

[sarasa_cat]

And add in transparency vs opacity of the pigment for more variables. And you've probably learned something about the differences between mixing different kinds of colors that are actually further or closer in hue along the color wheel like, say, the difference between mixing a cool red and a cool yellow (e.g. Alizarin + a Lemon Yellow) vs a warm red and a warm yellow (e.g., cad red medium + cad yellow deep)?

The question is whether one wants to reach for those stronger colors and risk throwing off the color balance of the painting.

Right. Because everything needs to work together as a whole because any color you add, saturated or neutralized, needs to sit in the context of everything else already there. When you pull the saturation up in one area, how does it affect everything else? That's a choice that an artist needs to make holistically and there really isn't a single answer. Going towards (masterful/controlled) over-exaggeration or towards (masterful/controlled/purposeful) under-exaggeration can often produce a far more satisfying/interesting image than an overly literal, slavish copying of one's general visual perception of the scene.

I can't wait until I'm allowed to work from a photo. I took SO MANY photos of the poppies on the hills during the superbloom...

omg the SUPERBLOOM. Photos plus your on-location memories and impressions just BEG for painting. dkfljaslfkajflakjfal. \o/

Why wait? If you are painting from a home studio (or your own plein air kit), you already have permission to paint anything you want.

If there is one piece of advice I can give it is this: the number #1 thing an artist can do to stunt their growth is waiting for a teacher or mentor's permission (obviously, boss/art director is a different matter, lol) and following the so-called "rules."

Added because the though hit when I went to make more tea

[sarasa_cat]

I need to schedule time this week to pick out an impressionist I want to study via a master copy or something similar. My life needs it. :D Ahhhhhh.

Re: Added because the though hit when I went to make more tea

[sepdet]

I am so glad to have inspired you to reach back to your own painting. It sounds like you have extensive experience!

One thing I've done is add a bunch of Impressionist painter Twitter channels. I dunno if you do Twitter, but really good digital photos of impressionist paintings often show a lot more detail of the brushstrokes than book plates, so I like zooming in and examining them.


I follow:

https://twitter.com/artistmonet
https://twitter.com/vangoghartist
https://twitter.com/sisleyalfred

who occasionally reblog other artist accounts as well, so that yields lots of impressionist picspam breaking up fandom geeking and depressing politics on my timeline.

Re: Added because the though hit when I went to make more tea

[sarasa_cat]

I need to get back to twitter. For some reason I just keep abandoning that platform, 13 years and running. idky.