Gloria J Zucaro's "First Five Days of Creative Jumpstart 2017"

I joined Nathalie Kalbach and 27 other artist demonstrators to participate as a student for the month of January.  Since I can only show Paint Party Friday one post, and since I have to post each project separately for the special CJS 2017 link-up, this is my second post tonight.  I will show you the 4 days of projects so far.  Day one was a welcome video by the hostess Nathalie.  Each of the other four days were other artists whose demos we watched and used some of their techniques to do our own version of the project. Please check in to Paint Party Friday hosted for the last 6 years by Eva and Kristin.  You will find wonderful art and inspiration there.

First Project Day 2 with Marsha Valk

Day 3 with Mystele Kirkeeng

Day 4 with Glyn Macey

Day 5 fourth Project with Pam Carriker

Gloria J Zucaro's "Day Three Of CJS 2017 with Glyn Macey"

The third day of Creative Jumpstart 2017 was with Glyn Macey.  Glyn talked about how cropping your paintings/pages can improve their composition.  He also talked about using simple tools you have around the house for mark making and how different looks can be achieved when you mix your colors by scumbling, glazing and direct mixing.  In my project below I applied two coats of black gesso over an old painting done on an 8"H x 10"W board.  Then I picked out handmade papers, mostly Gelli prints and applied them over the gesso.  I made circles of the three primaries, red, yellow, blue and tried the three methods of paint application.  Then it was just adding dots, drips and scratches through the surface until I felt I liked the results.
Have a great day, stay warm!
                          Gloria

Gloria J Zucaro's "Composition Gauguin"

I decided to do another in the floral series using an "Old Master" painter's work as a reference.  I picked a Gauguin floral still life this week.  I researched his color palette and a little about his technique.

These were the colors mentioned.  They are oil colors.  I am currently using pastels.  Since an oil painter can make many combinations from these colors, I started with these basic pastels but added to them to get the colors I needed.

• Prussian blue
• Cobalt blue
• Emerald green
• Viridian
• Cadmium yellow
• Chrome yellow
• Red ochre
• Cobalt violet
• Lead white
• Zinc white
• The basic colors mention in the article on Painting.about.com
  
• Typically Gauguin painted outlines of the subject directly onto the canvas in diluted Prussian blue. These were then filled in with opaque colours (rather than building colour up through glazes). The dark outline heightens the intensity of the other colours. 

Here is that original photo of my set-up

The first thing I did was draw my original floral on the canvas in pencil.  I then added some new parts to the composition to mimic Gauguin's composition.  He had put a Japanese woodcut into the background and had a very South Seas looking jug.  Since I had neither, I made up an abstract in the background and added a jug-like vase in the area where he placed his.  I then outlined everything in "Prussian Blue" as the article mention.  Gauguin's painting seemed very flat with no real light source.  He also had some stray leaves pointing up at his still life, so I did the same.  I used many of his colors rather than the Fall colors of my original reference.

Below is my first step

Next starting to color in the background.

.

Then I totally forgot to take pictures until I was finished!

Here is my reference from Gauguin

Here is my final "Composition Gauguin"

8" x 10" Soft Pastel on Sanded Paper Unframed.

Contact me with questions.

gloria@gloriajzucaro.com

I hope you enjoy my paintings :>)  Gloria

I was invited by Valerie & Susi after posting, to join in to Art Journal Journey.  Their site is featuring each artist's version of a "Master" painter that they like, so my current theme series fits right in.  Thank you ladies.  Pop-in to see each artists' rendition of their favorites painter.

I was also invited to share my work on "The Queen of Creativity" by Kate. Thanks so much!

Linking to Paint Party Friday, Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest

Gloria j Zucaro's "Summer Sloth"

That is such a funny word!  I know it is one of the deadly sins in the Bible.  It is also the animal that moves so slowly you can hardly notice(except your eyes are glued onto his terribly threatening 4 inch toenails!).  But sometimes I feel like a sloth because I think I should do a particular task, and then I think, "Oh, I will do that later, I would rather..."  So I actually didn't even realize that 4 days had gone by since I last posted!  I have had decisions on moving, conversations about finances, open house visits to possible houses, doctors appointments, scheduling for carpet cleaning, electrical fixes and more pleasurably, visits with friends and family this last week.  But now I am here and ready to show you some of the fun and challenging projects we did at The Clearing.  

Our second painting that we started on Monday afternoon was an "Egg Painting using color references from Zhaoming Wu."  I am quoting Frankie's title on our synopsis of projects.  Frankie had made many reference photos of eggs nestled into fabric.  Some were on pedestals, some just surrounded on the fabric.    We were to use these only as a starting point, but to learn from this how to design/compose a painting by placing your egg in an area and leading the viewer to it.  We were also supposed to show how the colors surrounding the egg reflect onto it.  Use soft and hard edges and most important, too, use a color combination that we didn't ordinarily use or even disliked!  Here is my pastel painting of my egg.

8" Square Wallis Paper with Terry Ludwig Pastels.

I surprised myself with being more abstract than usual.  If you notice, no turquoise!

Tuesday morning was the beginning of a really fun project!  Frankie titled it "Paint an Ice Cream Sundae".  Frankie and her husband Jay decided to stop at Steak & Shake to do research(Yeah, I bet! lol)  Anyway after taking pictures at Steak & Shake for two days in a row of different ice cream concoctions that they paid for and ate, Frankie decided it was going to be too expensive and fattening to make 30 reference pictures.  So she went on-line and got copyright-free photos.          This was my choice to paint because, of course, I was attracted, not to the banana split, but to the background colors.  Well originally I tried to put in all the squares of color, but alas, it looked horrible!  So a very abstract background using those colors is shown below with my actual painting.  

8" x 10" Wallis Paper with Terry Ludwig Pastels.

It was so much fun that afternoon to see all the different ice cream treats created by 15 artists!

More tomorrow or the next slothless day!