Barn with Yellow Irises or Change of Focus

 Barn with Yellow Irises 8x10 inches acrylic

Today I'm talking a bit about establishing a focal point in your painting. In this bitty painting, I used a photo I took of one of our barns, in the background. The foreground interest was some yellow irises in the back yard. I decided to paint this on a small canvas, changing the focus from the foreground yellow irises to focusing on the barn in the background.

 

I began with a pencil outline on tracing paper of the photo. I cut out the barn outline on the tracing paper, and laid it over the canvas' already painted blue sky. I then painted in the barn's reflecting roof and darker metal sides. This only took a few brush strokes of my already mixed colours.

 

You can see here how well the stencil worked to lay in the barn, just where I wanted it, with a minimum of fuss. I easily got a nice sharp outline to focus the eye on the main subject of the painting.

 

I proceeded to work on each section of the landscape in the same manner. Here I've gotten to the foreground irises which I had left outlined when I painted in the surrounding grass and bushes. The tracing paper stencil left me a beautiful outline of the iris blooms without a bit of pencil sketch showing thru, since I didn't use any pencil to sketch!

 

Here I'm working on the yellow irises. Tho' I worked a fairly tight detailed painting on the irises at this point......I later went back and blurred the petal outlines, and reduced the chroma (intensity) of the wine coloured lines on the petals. All done to leave the impression of backlit yellow petals in full sunlight, but leading the focus of the painting back to the barn. This was helped by the detailing I painted on the barn, it's straight lines and intense shadows pulling the viewer's eye back to the area of higher contrast in value and detailing.

 

Teacher

This week I'm sharing a guest blog post by sculptor Frank Lyne.  This blog post is introducing his latest sculpture......TEACHER.

   

My favorite wood for making figurative studies is maple, because facial features show up better in maple than any other wood I have on hand. The primary draw back to maple is that it frequently gets too wormy in storage to be fit for any use. Early this February, I started going through some of my maple stock. I discarded 2 billets entirely because they were wormy throughout. Then I found one that seemed to have worm free heart wood and started by carving a face in what looked like the soundest side of the billet.

 

The shape of this billet didn't allow many options for the placement of the arms and I could see early on that a big crack on the opposite end was going to make planting both feet on the floor challenging. To work around these problems, I elected to have her leaning on some as yet to be defined object, which would both give something for her straight up and down arms to do and allow one of her feet to be off the floor without looking unbalanced. At about this point I had a couple of different drop in visitors. Nephew asked without giving her more than a casual glance, “Haven't you done something about like this before?” Don't remember how I answered that, but my thought bubble said, “Sure, it's about like something I did before in that one human looks about like another.” My second visitor, a logger, had a more interesting reaction. He seemed taken aback upon seeing her and seemed to contemplate a moment before saying, “She looks like a member of the British Parliament.” I guess her big, wavy hair made him think of the wigs worn by the British judiciary. I took his comment as positive in that it seemed to imply that he thought she had presence.

I had her almost entirely shaped and still didn't know what the object should be that she was leaning on.

 

Then Kitteh returned from a month long sabbatical to supervise the remainder of my work and suggested that she should be a teacher.

That seemed like a good idea, and with Kitteh's help, it became so.

Hopkins County Madisonville Public Library Authors Reception....or how I spent Saturday afternoon

 

This is just a bitty blog post about how I spent the Saturday before Easter at a lovely Author's Reception at the Hopkins County Madisonville Public Library.

I and fifteen to twenty other book authors and author/illustrators were invited to set up a table in the main room of the library, to show off our creative endeavors. There were a few authors I'd met before at previous book fairs.....and a whole bunch of new authors to meet and greet. It was a lovely afternoon of chatting with my fellow exhibitors, and a nice sprinkling of local library patrons, along with some family members.......folks just plain ole' interested in BOOKS !

A HUGE shout out to the kind folks at Hopkins County-Madisonville Public Library, the very nice volunteers, and local library patrons who helped make it such a lovely occasion.

I also got to visit a bit with my fellow SCBWI Midsouth member Patricia Wiles......and chat about our joint obsession......kids books!

  

Thanks to all who helped make this such a fun Saturday.

Now that You've Bought It.....Displaying Artwork in the Home

 

This time around, on the subject of Displaying Artwork in the Home, I'm gonna talk “how” you can display your new artwork. Since Frank and I are constantly creating new artworks, we also try to be creative about displaying those artworks. Since I am 2D and Frank is 3D, I tend to take the walls for my display spaces, and Frank takes any flat surfaces. That being said, we still have a limited amount of display space in our home.....just as is the case with customers that purchase our artworks.

As you can see in the first photo, we have a lovely antique bookcase made of a dark stained wood. This bookcase is a lovely centerpiece for the living room wall, and is perfect for Frank's Fawn and otter along with his Loon. Then your eye is led to his dark wood framed portrait above. I'm also showing one of my Still Life in Blue small unframed less formal paintings as a counter to the larger pieces.

 

On this wall I've arranged a trio of his semi-abstract sculptures that all point upwards in different fashions. They “point” or lead the eye up to a small piece I painted, called Haying. These smaller different sized sculptures make a nice grouping, in and of themselves.

 

As an artist, I like painting pieces that are slightly different from the standard size and shapes. And I like to think an art consumer, who is willing to hunt for just the right size/shape/orientation might find just that “perfect piece” on our website. This piece, “Rain Drops Keep Falling on my.....” is a perfect fit in this small bit of wall beside a doorway.

 

Then there are spaces, in “alternative” rooms, like the bathroom, that you don't normally consider a display place. But this little piece, Teacup Rose, fits perfectly in our bathroom, right over a towel rack. The piece goes perfectly with the colour scheme of the bathroom, white with dashes of peach, and navy.

 

Finally, there is always the consideration of just where a piece is displayed to show off the “best views” of that piece. Frank's recently finished piece, Turkey Hollow, puts it's “best beak forward” on this shelf somewhat above eye level. It shows off particularly well the burl of the head and the side grains of the hollow of a tree stump that the turkey is sitting in.

Everyone's home is different and has different opportunities to show off artworks in a person's home collection. All it takes is a bit of creativity and experimentation to show off each piece's best side.

What He Saw or a Portrait with Lotsa Texture

What He Saw

9x12 inches acrylic on gessoed masonite 

  

This time around I'm showing a small 9 x 12 inch acrylic portrait that I just finished. I've been working on getting the 'sunlit” look. One of the guidelines for working with values (shades of black and white) is to indicate what the light is hitting and what is in shadow. For artists, it's usually expressed in a ten step value scale.....with zero being white and ten being pure black.

In a couple of art books I've been reading, it says that sunlight is best represented by using a four step value separation....in other words any object in the sunlight has a shadow four steps from the value of the highlight value. I know......sounds all stuffy and “math-y”. But in practice it's pretty kool.

I set up my 10 step value scale beside my canvas, and each time I painted a bit of color on the face, I first compared it with the portion of the value scale that I was working with. And it did indeed help me to judge the respective values of the shadows underneath the nose and chin and neck.

As a bit of an extra challenge, I wanted to add in a bit of funky texture to the painting. The background was just broken colours of a landscape, to be painted in loosely. So before I painted in the background, I laid a stencil on the background, and scooped a palette knife's worth of white paint over the background area. This left a slightly raised area on the background that only showed in a certain light. When I painted the background over this, it visually totally obscured the pattern......unless it was viewed in just the right light angle. Sorta a “secret visual surprise”!

 

Next painting I intend to go the further step and work on learning more techniques of “sunlight”. I want to play with colour in shadows and with “bounced” sunlight.