Sketching and Painting

Hello,
Where does the time go?!  This week I was preparing for book club at my house, as well as sketching and painting.

I am posting to a great weekly website called Paint Party Friday.

A few looks into this last week.

 This is the start of an upside-down-blind-contour sketch of a martini glass.

Here I added a couple of lines to complete the sketch after looking at it.

Both were along the right edge of the base and stem of the glass. The sketch is done with white school chalk.

I started painting the tabletop and the glass. I wanted to do streamers, like a celebration, but I changed it in the next step.

Here is stage 4. I still have some work to do on it. I want to change the values on the table top so that it doesn't look flat, and I want to add more paint in the same value as the background. It looks too skimpy right now.

Here is the black and white version of the original reference from my workshop with Ardith Goodwin called "Expressive Sketching for Painters"

Have a good week,

Gloria

The Limited Stroke Challenge- "A Real Lemon!" Study #2

Study#2

In my second painting, I wanted to try to use even less strokes.  I tried for half of the 25 aiming for 13.  So instead of doing the blue bottle in 2 pieces of blue and pieces of light blue and yellow, I painted the bottle cobalt in all one stroke, using a lot of paint mixed with mineral spirits.  Then I added the light blue reflection and the reflection from the yellow over the transparent blue. So instead of using 4 strokes on the bottle, I used three.  For the shadow behind the bottle, which had some light in it from light coming through the bottle, I mixed the basic shadow color and then added a little more blue because I thought it was too brown.  A happy accident happened and the blue which was not thoroughly mixed on my brush made the effect of a light shining through the bottle, all in one stroke.  That effect had taken me three strokes the first time around.  Two for the two different colors and one to correct the value.   I did the lemon in three stokes instead of 4 the second time. The biggest save on strokes was in the background and foreground.  I mixed a lot of very liquid paint and did both the background in two strokes opposed to 3 and foreground in one stroke instead of two.  I also left out the more minor highlights on the bottle.  I used a #10 (worn) flat for this study, also saving more strokes.

Now if you are not a painter, please don't look at the drawing aspect!  I know that my bottle is lopsided in both studies and that the lemon is very sharp-nosed!  Those things were not the object of the challenge.

The Limited Stroke Challenge- "A Real Lemon!" Study #1

Study#1

This challenge was really fun and a great learning tool. The object to use as few strokes as possible to do a very simple painting.  If you lift the brush off the surface, your stroke is done.  I had learned from a wonderful artist,Diane Rath, who recently died of cancer, about loading your brush fully and smoothly using your whole arm to move the brush up and down (with darks, to lower the reflection) and side to side (with lights to catch more light reflection) in one easy stroke.  I did the challenge twice.  The first time I allowed myself 25 strokes.  I was able to complete the first challenge in 23 strokes initially.  I used the extra two strokes to go over the two areas to darken them.  I used a # 6 worn down flat brush for this first study(edges had rounded down quite a bit).