Initial drawing on board

Painting at end of video

Background added

Beginning grasses

Water and foreground added initially

Hi Friends.  I’ve had several things “hanging over me” lately.  One is to get a good enough video of the Bach fugue I’ve been working on for over a year to share with my piano group.  The second is to provide a short video for District Arts Gallery in Frederick.  It’s a wonderful place and I said immediately that I’d do it!  Had no idea HOW I would do it.

I started by creating short teaching videos for my students and ended up creating a YouTube channel!  It’s not impressive but there are two short videos on there under my name.  For the gallery video, I wanted something short and to the point and decided to discuss and demo an underpainting.  I chose a scene from the Eastern Shore for it’s fairly straightfoward shapes and printed it out in B&W.

For the underpainting, I chose some oranges, orangey browns and violets–colors I really like!  I added the alcohol to the sky horizontally, then  moved from the tree line down using vertical strokes.  This produced a really interesting, colorful, very loose underpainting on which to work.

I worked solely from the B&W photo. The color image wasn’t terribly inspiring so I just decided to use my intuition and it worked pretty well.  For the sky, I lightly brushed a Girault violet over the orange underpainting and something in the texture of the paper left a lot of the orange showing through.  It looked like cirrus clouds!  I really liked this effect but wasn’t sure what to do with it.  I had in mind adding some aqua at the bottom of the sky to indicate a break in the clouds, which I did.  But I ended up leaving some of the orange showing through and I like it.

I started with a violet for the distant trees and later added a dull gray green over them.  Then used a combination of yellow ochres and reddish browns for the flat grassy marsh.  For the tall grasses, I used a comination of greens, browns, violets, ochre and pink.

When I got to the water, I could see that there was some real brightness in it. I put in the green/brown reflections first, then used three different values of violet to lay in the water horizontally.  I finished this with a light yellow Terry Ludwig pastel to provide sunlight hitting the water.  (There may be clouds in the background but there’s nothing to say that there couldn’t a little sun coming through overhead!)  I really liked the effect of this.  I next added the lower grasses and dirt and indicated some shadow under the grasses.  I brought some magenta into the lower grasses to help tie them to the reds above, and I added the same color to the dark green bushes (not sure you can see it).

This was a fun painting to do. Much easier than a self portrait!  Or even my dancing cloud.  But it posed its own problems and I spent a wonderful afternoon painting after dealing with the frustrations of technology!  (And–this morning i produced the first complete recording of the fugue.  I’m making progress!)

Stay well.

Cloudy Day Marsh, 11″ x 14″, UART 320

Happy Dancing Cloud, 20″ x 24″, Pastel Premiere “Italian clay”

Initial lay in of sky

Detail of colors in cloud

Hi Friends.  How are you all doing?  I’m holding out here with John, doing a painting a week, teaching, practicing piano, and trying to do some videos.  I’ve done two short ones that aren’t great!  But it’s a start. They are on Youtube under my name.

After doing the self portrait (which was revised since I posted it), I wanted to do something a little less demanding.  I had been looking at this cloud picture for some time.  We took this in Wyoming on a day when we were driving from Laramie to Boulder Heights to see our friends Ben and Susan Foster.  So I was a little concerned with time.  We decided to take a shortcut (it looked great on the map!) and ended up on a dirt path driving through open range land with pronghorns leaping about!  I’d never seen them but somehow I knew exactly what they were.  It would have been a rather happy occasion if we hadn’t been so lost!  But finally, I saw a tiny truck on the horizon, indicating a highway up ahead and sure enough, we got back to civilization.  But not before i took this photo from the car window.  I just loved this cloud and I’ve thought about painting it since 2017.

I would like to have done an underpainting, but i don’t have 20 x 24 UART and I wanted this to be a big picture.  So it’s on Pastel Premiere, Italian clay.  It’s really a lovely surface and not that hard to cover.  Nevertheless, it took some doing around the edges.

I did a color study of various Ludwig blues to get the right ones. I wanted a fairly dark and pretty pure blue sky with greens at the bottom fading off.  I ended up using a combination of Ludwig and Girault.  Ludwigs for the inital layin of color and the Giraults to smooth it out and fill in the cracks.  Worked well.  Later in the process, I added a soft very light red violet at the bottom beginning on the left and dragging some of it over to the right.

For the clouds, I began at the top and worked down. Here’s where I could have benefitted from an underpainting.  I got too detailed too soon!  I used a wide variety of light Ludwigs: violets, blue violets, greens, turquoises, pinks, oranges, and finally yellow.  It may not look this colorful  but all of these colors are there. However, it’s a very sunny day cloud so it’s all fairly light.  I also added some light warm color at the bottoms to indicate the reflection of the land below.

For the land below, I used a variety of soft warms–odd greens, brownish oranges, etc.  This is all very dry country so it has to be warm in tone.  I used the varying colors to create bands and shapes of colors to given the ground more interest.  In the foreground, I had to have a little more detail.  I first added some dark cool green under the grasses with a brighter orange around them in the very bottom.  Today, when I looked at it, I was  concerned about the completely different colors in the top and bottom.  So I added some of the blue sky color Girault to the darks areas under the grasses and also signed my name with a dark blue pencil.  It’s interesting how often the choice of color in the signature helps balance the colors in the painting!

This painting was really fun to do and it’s a cheery subject and a remembrance from a very happy day.  We had a wonderful time at the Fosters and were lucky to see them again last year.

Self Portrait 2020, 20″ x 16″, Pastel Premiere Italian clay

Charcoal drawing

First stages with color

Adding the hair

Hello Friends. I trust you are all still well.  I’ve been keeping in touch with the 20+ students that I had over the winter and several of them did really nice self portraits. So I decided it was time for me to take the challenge.  I have never done a portrait in pastel!  I did some in colored pencil back in the 80s but when I tried to do one in pastel, early in my time with the medium, it was a disaster.  So I decided it was time!

First I tried working from a photo that was taken over 12 years ago.  There was nothing particularly dynamic or interesting about it.  I got the measurements wrong in the face and it came out rather badly.  I plan to brush/wash it off–it’s on Wallis Belgian Mist.

Then last week I took some selfies and found one that I really liked with my head at an angle and my hair doing interesting things.  So I decided to give it a try.  I realized that I had 10 sheets of Pastel Premiere that I purchased to use in the Sally Strand workshop, which would have been this week!  It’s a perfect surface for a vignette portrait like this.  Very easy to work on and the color is lovely.

I spent all Saturday afternoon doing the drawing, first in graphite on drawing paper, then with charcoal on the pastel paper.  I immediately realized how much better charcoal is for doing the drawing for the painting. It’s so easy to change and work with.  I worked and worked and finally got my chin really straight and got the thinness of my face right. Then it started to look like me.

Then I was afraid to touch it!  I haven’t done drawings like this in a long time and realized how lovely it is to do this sort of drawing.  But I didn’t want to leave it at that!  So today I took the plunge and began adding color.  All of the colors in the face are Giraults–a mix of warmish pinks, oranges, browns, and a number of different warm greens.  The only soft pastel is in the hair.

When I did my original portrait, several weeks ago, I found that I had to keep reworking, brushing off, completely lost the drawing.  This time I was careful, knowing that the drawing was accurate. I wish I could be one of those brave portrait artists, like Christine Swann and Diane Rappisi, who Ive watched start out with a few charcoal lines and two values of color.  But, I’m NOT a portrait artist and I figure I can do this one the best way I can.  So I was happy not to lose the drawing.  And by using Giraults, I kept the pastel from getting cakey.

I wanted to keep the hair and clothing fairly loose and suggestive so didn’t labor over it too much.

I’m really happy with this attempt!  And yesterday I was able to set up a Youtube channel and put my first very crude video on it. It’s nothing I want to advertise a lot at this point, but I’m learning a lot!  This is a good time to be challenging ourselves in order to keep from worrying about other things.  I hope you are finding your own worthwhile challenges.

Spring in Washington Grove, 16″ x 20″, UART 320

Underpainting, stage 1

Underpainting, stage 2

Partial completion

Hello Friends.  I’m continuing with all my routines, including painting.  This painting was primarily done last weekend but I knew there was something wrong with it.  I just fixed it!  Still not perfect but at least ready to send out.  This is a painting from the small, lovely community of Washington Grove, in Gaithersburg, MD.  It was formerly a Methodist summer colony with small houses with very pointed roofs. The houses are now occupied full time and many have been expanded. There are beautiful gardens, walking paths, and a feeling of great peace.  I need to go back soon!!!

What I liked about the photo for this painting was the strong diagonal of the tree shadow and the garden at right that lead the eye to the house, where a green tree and red bud are catching light.  (In the photo, the redbud is behind the tree and has no prominence. I fixed that!).  I also liked the way the orange sunlit bush at center right mimics the colors of the red brick house.  The house is of two colors, brick on the left and a grayed blue or violet on the right, which sets off the bush niclely.  This is a complicated picture, however, with many things overlapping others!

We were there on a day when it was sunny but clouding over fast. The lower part of the sky seemed a little darker and cooler than the top, which I think had more clouds in it.  I started with the sky and used several Ludwigs blue violets and turquoises, then did a little burnishing with a Girault.  I added the smaller  branches with several violet Giraults.

My main problem, which I fixed today, was the roofline.  If you look at the earlier versions of the painting, you’ll see that I didnt include the top of the roof extending to the left over the dormer.  When I saw this on closer examination of the photo, I knew immediately what was wrong!  Also, originally, I used only a light violet on the sunlit portions of the roof. Today, I added some yellow orange and yellow green to it and now it looks much more natural and fits into the overall landscape much better.

The most difficult part of me was the right side, with all of the various elements going on.  But getting the fence in really helped with the overall triangle-nature of this portion.  This painting is all about triangles!  There are many flowers and flowering bushes all competing with each other for the viewer’s attention.  The tree shadow was also a problem. Too straight!  I tried to break it up in places.  I also started the lawn with more yellow greens and my husband said it was too chartreuse!  So I cooled off the right side and bottom and left the warmest parts for the grasses leading into the center.  I love the way the land undulates!

Rockville in Spring, 20″ x 16″, UART 320

Underpainting

Painting partially done

Redo of underpainting on garage

Hello Friends.  I hope you are fairing well and keeping your spirits up.  We are all in this together!  I’ve been playing piano, listening to classical music on the radio and painting.  For the past week I’ve spent happy hours working on this painting of a house in Rockville that I filmed last Monday.  I loved the shadows that the ladders cast, the array of pots (I changed the colors!), and the early spring daffodils.  But the picture seems like a picture of the times: No one is coming back to continue the painting of the stucco wall and there are no plants to fill the pots!  But spring carries on.

The photograph was interesting due to the shadows but it was almost all white!  The garage is actually white and in bright sunlight.  I knew this was going to be a problem!  (More later).  I did a very colorful underpainting and fell in love with it. I really wanted to just keep it as it was!  So 20th century modernism-looking!!!  But, of course, that’s not me.  Soooo….

I painted everything in this picture, with the exception of the daffodils in the foreground (which weren’t in the picture) with Giraults.  They just worked so well for the subtle layering that I wanted. For the house, I used a combination of light violets, blues and greens, along with a light warm orange or the areas of brightest sunlight.  The roofs have slightly darker combinations of the same colors.

The shadows were a challenge.  I added a can of paint that wasn’t there and tried to indicate a shadow of it.  My major problem was using different colors and then trying to make them more similar.  In addition to the ladders, there is a tree casting a shadow that seemed pretty interesting.  And there is the big V of sunlight ont he green wall below.  I was concerned that this might be too prominent and softened the edges with my finger.

The area with the pots was another challenge. There was a bush that I tried to add, then took out.  I included the tarp-covered grill–which my husband said I should leave out–it filled the space and it is definitely something someone would have on their back porch at this time of year.  I wanted to keep the pots more suggestive than highly defined. I ended up doing some of them several times and brushing off but I was finally happy with them.  I covered the lovely red orange with green and it started to look more real.  (By the way, while this is early spring, the house has an evergreen and a magnolia surrounding it, so there is a lot of green on the upper sides.)

So then I got to the garage. I knew i would add a daffodil but I really didn’t know where I’d go with the color.  The roof is green and i used several cool greens and decided that this worked very nicely.  But then I got to the wall. I tried several combinations of colors, I tried adding horizontal lines, I brushed it off twice!  After the second brush off, I wetted it to get back to the original underpainting, then I did a new one over it, using a green and a blue that became a lovely robin’s egg blue!  This color worked much better with the house.  I then used some light layers of blue greens and browns, subtley indicating vertical boards and adding a window.  I was much happier!  I resisted adding any bright light to the garage in order to keep the eye focused on the house. I then added the fig trees and the mulch in front of them.  I like the fact that the mulch provides a shape of different color that complements the green grass.

When this is framed, I’m going to lose the top of the painting, which is not so good.  But, I’m otherwise pleased.

As I was working on this painting, I thought about why it is that I love to paint the backs of houses, alleys, etc.  I realized that they tell much more of a story about the house and its inhabitants than the more formal fronts. The disarray of pots and stuff is so much more interesting than the chairs on the front porch. And the work in progress also adds a note of informality. This seems to be my specialty and I was happy to find a subject so close to home to explore. Now I need to find more!

I hope you too are finding some interesting subject matter to engage you.  Stay safe and keep your spirits up. This, too, shall pass.