Spring is the time to plant gardens or paint them (or both!) I came across this book that contains garden-inspired artwork from 100 different artists in a wide variety of styles using various media such as oils, acrylics, watercolors, and pastels. Under each image, the artist discusses the inspiration, design strategy, work process, and materials used.
The cover is shown on the left. It’s pretty dull, which may be why this is a bargain book on Amazon, marked down from $24.99 to around $6.50. A couple of other titles in the series are also marked way down. The full title is How Did You Paint That? 100 Ways to Paint Flowers & Gardens. Definitely inspirational! I have some notions about adding some fabric collage, stitching, and beadwork to the mix... stay tuned.
On the I.N.K. blog today, I posted 10 Reasons Why Kids Need a Garden, which includes a collection of several recent books about gardening for kids. To the left is one that didn’t get into that post, so here it is. Gardening with Kids is by Catherine Woram and Martyn Cox, with photographs by Polly Wreford. It has 35 projects plus garden-related crafts and games.
Happy creating, whether with art or dirt (or both)!
While getting ready for the plein air workshop last week, my friend Joyce showed me a wonderfully concise guide to the activity by artist Tom Brown. Originally created as a handout for his own workshops, he now sells it as a PDF online through his blog. His April 12th post gives the details of what it contains. One of the DIY tools he shows is how to make a simple “viewfinder” to trace the basic shapes and especially the perspective lines when painting outside.
First let’s try it in Photoshop. Here’s a not-very-sharp photo of our kitty Knickers lounging in the guest room. While she loves it when the futon is open, it does get in the way of my quilting activities.
In Photoshop, you simply make a layer on top of the photo and start drawing the lines with a hard round brush. To see how it’s going, turn off the photo layer (click the eyeball). As shown below, I’m not trying to painstakingly copy everything, just do a reasonably good job of capturing the important contours. It’s very easy to get the lines of the futon going in the right directions to create a convincing sense of space. I just noticed that the line of the floor meeting the wall is missing... oops!
But what if you are somewhere without a computer? (Horrors!) The ideal thing is to develop the ability to look at a scene and put it on paper (i.e. learn how to draw from life.) But if you haven’t gotten around to developing that skill yet or are in a hurry, try this: get a piece of thin plexiglass at an art supply or hardware store (8" X 10" max) and a dry erase marker. Hold up the plexi, and start drawing. The drawing will be somewhat wobbly, but it still helps you turn the 3D scene in front of you into a two dimensional rendering. In case anyone thinks this is “cheating,” my response would be... so is buying paint in tubes instead of gathering rocks to grind into pigments. Or buying fabric instead of growing cotton and weaving your own. : )
As you can see below, Knickers had moved by this time. For some reason she is highly suspicious of many tools such as rulers, cameras, sheets of foam core, and heaven forbid, the ironing board. Anyway, what do you do with this scribble now, you ask? Use it as a stepping stone to create a drawing in your sketchbook, or if you’re plein air painting it’ll help you place the composition on the canvas, try alternatives, block in the main shapes, etc. 
Rather than plexiglass, I actually used a lightweight sheet of styrene from a craft store, intended to make faux stained glass. It would add very little weight to an outdoor art kit, which is always an plus. It would be nice to add a 5-step gray scale, too. At the workshop I discovered that while drawing is not problem for me, mixing the right color AND value of paint was another story. More about that another time.
Wow, what great news to come home to after a week-long painting workshop! The list of finalists are on the Quilting Arts blog, plus a giveaway. This was my second time trying for the calendar contest... when I get a chance, I’ll post my non-winning entry from last year. A portion of it forms my blog header but the entire image has not been previously shown.
Getting back to the plein air workshop, my fellow workshop attendee Joyce Shelton has posted about it on her blog, including photos of instructor Larry Moore’s demos. It was a wonderful experience but I’m debating whether to show my less-than-stellar efforts. We shall see!
Update on the calendar contest (4.13.2009): I had sent in two entries, but on the list of finalists it didn’t say which one they wanted. Turns out they want to see both... cool!
As I mentioned on Monday, this week is devoted to a plein air painting workshop held in Highlands Hammock State Park. It’s south of Orlando near Avon Park and Sebring. Today (Wednesday) we’ll start wandering through the wilderness dragging our painting gear, water, chairs, umbrellas... I suspect we’ll be forced to pare it down pretty quick. As I write this in advance on Monday morning, it is supposed to be in the 40s Tuesday night, so we’re probably shaking in our sneakers about now.
We’re lucky to have Larry Moore as our instructor since he has had a varied artistic career, working an illustrator, teacher, and now as a fine artist and workshop leader. And as anyone who knows him can attest, he’s a heck of a nice guy. My fellow artist Joyce Shelton and I have known him for over two decades and have even bummed some plein air gear from him for the week to try out. He has a studio in McRae Art Studios in Winter Park, FL. This page displays some of his beautiful paintings, many of Florida settings. He also has led workshops in Hawaii, California, the Grand Canyon, and other wonderful locations. His web site has more artwork, galleries that carry it, plus info about upcoming workshops. To keep up with his latest activities check out Larry’s blog, adventures of a migrant art worker.
I read somewhere that Highlands Hammock park occasionally has signs of Florida panthers... wouldn’t that be something to see! I’ll post some pictures from the workshop next week.
I’m taking a plein air workshop starting Wednesday with my wonderful artist friend Joyce (see her blog.) I’ll post about artist/teacher Larry Moore later in the week, but today was practice time. Larry was kind enough to lend us some gear since neither one of us has painted outdoors much. To get used to it and figure out what to take, I did some painting today. This photo was taken yesterday during the Winter Park Garden Tour. (It’s always fun to wonder through people’s yards looking at stuff!) Anyway, I loved how the bicycle was silhouetted in the background behind the geraniums.
Cropping it and using Levels in Photoshop for more contrast results in the image below. You can see a table and chair cluttering it up that I plan to leave out.
Below, the values are blocked in with purplish paint. One of the other main reasons to practice today was to help decide which paints to use. The workshop is officially for oil painting, but I’m going to take Golden OPEN acrylics if they’re good to work with. They dry much slower than regular acrylics which allows plenty of time for blending on the canvas. Plus you don’t have paint drying into hard little buttons after five minutes on the palette.
Below is a close-up of the background painted in. The idea during this workshop is to stay loose and not try to do finished artwork necessarily. As you can see, I didn’t attempt to create the lattice or plant shadows on the wall and instead made them into more solid shapes to keep it simple. Maybe next time.
The final image is below, or at least that’s what I got accomplished today. I might play with it some more, who knows? It’s not too bad considering how little I’ve painted lately. I love, love, love these paints and have zero complaints about them at this point. I’ll still probably take some oils and watercolors just for the heck of it. We’ll have three solid days of painting so there’ll be plenty of time to experiment. 
It’s pretty pathetic to paint inside using an outdoor set-up, but one step at a time, right? Besides, how else could I use my computer to display the photo reference? I’m so green at plein air I can’t remember the type of gear this is...might be a pochade box. Anyway, it detaches from the tripod and folds up into a neat little box, and the wet paintings can be carried in grooves on one side. Very nifty. Joyce has another brand, so we’ll see how that one works. This one, the Easy L, has worked fine today, but we’ll see what happens out in the field.
I am SO looking forward to this workshop. It’s supposed to cool down into the 60s during the day and it probably won’t rain this time of year... should be perfect!
Update Monday morning: naturally after looking at the painting again there were a few things I couldn’t leave as is. I added the threshold, tweaked the French doors, fixed the wall/floor boundary, added the plant shadow on the front of the pot, tried to relax the overly stiff plant and toned down the bright yellow green. I’m really finished this time... hopefully.
The cover is shown on the left. It’s pretty dull, which may be why this is a bargain book on Amazon, marked down from $24.99 to around $6.50. A couple of other titles in the series are also marked way down. The full title is How Did You Paint That? 100 Ways to Paint Flowers & Gardens. Definitely inspirational! I have some notions about adding some fabric collage, stitching, and beadwork to the mix... stay tuned.
On the I.N.K. blog today, I posted 10 Reasons Why Kids Need a Garden, which includes a collection of several recent books about gardening for kids. To the left is one that didn’t get into that post, so here it is. Gardening with Kids is by Catherine Woram and Martyn Cox, with photographs by Polly Wreford. It has 35 projects plus garden-related crafts and games.
