Flowers For Momma

Added 1/19/2018 - Here is the finished painting.

With the proverb, "nothing ventured, nothing gained," in mind, I decided to start on a painting based on a photo of Joey that I took around 1982 of him holding a bouquet of roses to give to me.  Joey was always giving me flowers, and so that's a special memory for me.  I actually wrote a post about this earlier today - and that post inspired me to go ahead and give it a try.

Here’s the photo.  Precious little boy!

Then I sketched out the basic shapes with vine charcoal. I’ve never seriously tried to do a known face before. Here's the outline I sketched directly onto the panel.  You can see that it is only the outline - no shading or other details yet.



I then started painting.  I did basic skin color, hair color and began on the shirt.  The photo is black and white.  So I'm guessing on the colors of his shirt and the flowers.



I added in the main flower colors and began on the leaves.



I put in a background.  I didn't want to do the house and trees that are in the photo.  I will add more to the background to give it a more blurry and nonspecific look.  Added some shading in the flowers and leaves.  Added some shading to his face as well.



Then I added some yellow to the background.  I'm not a fan of how that looks.  However, I am going to leave it for now.  I kept telling myself to go ahead and try things.  I can always start over with a new panel if I totally screw it up.  :-)



So this is how it is now.  I will leave it for awhile - let the paint dry a bit.  You'll notice on this last photo that I added some shading to his arm - as well as working on his ear a little more.  Overall, I am pleased with it.  I am quite sure I will work on it more tonight and probably tomorrow until I get it to look the way I want it to.  I plan to work on the background a lot - will probably get rid of the delineation between the blue and the brown and make it just a completely out of focus background.   And of course I will do a good bit more work on the flowers and foliage.

I'm working on the poem to go with this painting.  Here's what I have so far:

Flowers for Momma

You were a little boy picking flowers

A gift for me, your momma.

Multi-colored roses from our garden

Or dandelions clutched in your fist

Maybe wild daisies – a favorite

You’d hold them up to me and smile

“These are for you,” you’d say.

So much love wrapped up in blooms

Tender memories for this mother’s heart. 

(Later).  I went back upstairs to my studio and worked on it a bit more.  Here are a couple of progression photos:

First, I blended the background - making the brown flow into the blue and muting it all

Then I put more detail in the flowers and leaves.  I put highlights on his shirt to show some folds - although looking at the photo, that doesn't really show up.  I will make the highlights more distinct tomorrow.  I worked more on his nose and cheek and ear - trying to get them more natural looking.  I will let it dry overnight, and tomorrow I will do some more fine-tuning.  I think I will probably finish it tomorrow morning.  The biggest issue I see now is his hand.  His arm and hand run off the bottom of the panel.  I need to figure out how to make it look like that rather than looking like he has stumpy and misshapen fingers and thumb.  LOL!


For tonight, though, I'm done.

Today was a snow day for school children, and tomorrow is, too.  Since it is only 5 degrees outside and not supposed to get above freezing tomorrow - and the roads are icy, and the ground covered with snow, school will likely be out on Thursday as well.  Now that I'm retired, that doesn't really affect me anymore.  However, it feels like I have permission to do only what I want to do on snow days.  Guess the teacher in me is still alive and kicking and looking forward to snow days.

Update: Wednesday, 1/17/2018
I worked on this more today and find myself at the end of my ability for now.  I'm going to take it to the art class I'm taking on Friday.  The teacher, Rachael McCampbell, has agreed to look at it and offer suggestions.

Here's where it is for now:

(Thursday, 1/18/2018).   What does one do when the arm and hand just don’t look right? Take them out entirely and make the out-of-focus background surround the figure.  I think the face is very close to what Joey looked like at that age. I'm not entirely happy with the background.  I used a palette knife to do some scraping to "fracture" some of the lines.  However, it doesn't look like I want it to look.  So I will go back to the studio in awhile and work on the background a little more.  Oh yes, I added another rose to it.  When I looked at the original photograph more closely, there was a smaller rosebud in the middle.  So I added another yellow rose there.  I like the blurry background completely surrounding the figure; it helps the face and flowers stand out more.  I'm actually in a little bit of awe that I could do a face that well.   

I decided to work on the background a little and put some “suggestions” of other flowers near the others - and the suggestion of a structure behind him.  I also added a little shading around his head to make it stand out a little more.  

April 26, 2016 - The day I learned that perhaps I could be an artist

April 26, 2016 was the day that my sister, Beth, and I went to a paint-along class in Franklin.  It was at an artist's studio in downtown Franklin, but I won't name the place since the owner of the studio didn't teach the class. I don't want to give her negative publicity since she didn't have anything to do with the class we took.  There is another artist (the one that taught our class) that uses that studio to teach classes once a week. The teacher, who I also won't name, was nice in some ways and pretty awful in others. She let us switch the painting that we would do as a class.  So that was nice. She ignored my sister's questions, and then when I asked her a question about painting the background flowers, she took my brush and finished my painting for me.  Really!  She took the brush, sat down on my stool and finished my painting!  I kept saying, "OK, I understand now" "Thanks, I see now" and similar comments, hoping she'd stop and let me finish my own painting.  She kept on sitting there, though, and not only painted in background flowers, but finished the entire thing for me - going back over the shading I'd already done and re-doing the leaves and some of the flowers.  Sigh!  I have zero feeling of ownership of that painting now.  How could I?  And my sister kept asking for help, and the teacher either didn't hear or chose to ignore her.  The teacher talked on her phone and acted really impatient to get us out of there!  There were only 3 people in the class.  So it wan't as though she had a bunch of other people demanding her time.  It wasn't the best introduction to painting - except that I realized that before the teacher commandeered my painting, I was enjoying the experience and I wasn't as awful as I always thought I would be.

I had it almost finished on my own when the teacher took over.  :-(  The first photograph is one I took of my painting a little while before asking the teacher how to do background flowers.  I had smoothed out some of the shading before she took over - but not a lot.

And here is the "finished" item.  She re-did the leaves, added flowers, worked on the shading and highlighting.  Really, I was dumbfounded as I watched her.  She totally took it over, and completely ignored my very pointed comments that anyone with the least bit of sensitivity would understand was a nice way of saying, "Stop it!"   Of course, it is a better painting as a result of her work on it.  However, it isn't "my" painting.  Sigh.

Painting #1 - Three Flower Pots
(Acrylic on canvas - done in a "paint-along" class, April 26, 2016)

A few days passed, and Beth and I decided to buy some painting supplies and try painting on our own.  After all, if someone as bad as that teacher could do it, then we figured we could, too.

Beth looked at a lots of YouTube videos that basically followed the same format as the class we'd attended.  Following a video would be easier and cheaper (we thought!) than going to another paint-along class.  The artist in the video would paint a picture - describing what he/she was doing - and people who watched the video could follow along to paint their own picture.  I looked online at videos, and I finally decided to paint-along with the "Art Sherpa" (Cinnamon Cooney) and paint a rooster.  I raise chickens, and so a rooster is an animal I'm familiar with.  Here is my first painting using a follow-along video:

Painting #2 - Rooster
(Acrylic on canvas - done following a "paint along" video by The Art Sherpa, May 2016)

Overall, I am pleased with it.  However, I still don't feel that it's "mine" since I merely followed along a video - imitating everything the teacher did.  Everyone who followed along with the video would end up with a painting that looks basically like mine.

My next project happened when I went to my mother's.  We covered the table in her breakfast room with newspapers, and Beth and I - along with our sister, Joan, and nieces Brianne and Natalie - painted.  I chose a painting of a rose that I found in a book.  This was the result:

Painting #3 - Red Rose
(Acrylic on canvas, done following a painting in a book, May 2016)

What I learned from this painting is that I need to think of what a REAL rose looks like. As I finished this painting, I realized that I had not even tried to "see" the rose, I had merely tried to copy the brush strokes I saw in the painting in the book. Overall, though, I was pleased with this endeavor. It was only my 3rd painting, but it was the first one that didn't involve any active instruction. I had to look at something and try to paint it. While there is much I could improve, I think it's a fairly decent attempt by someone who never considered that she had even a smidgeon of artistic ability. I want to paint roses again - and next time I will think about what a rose looks like as I paint it.

The next day at my mother's I decided to paint more flowers. This time I would paint daffodils or jonquils. I sketched out the table, background and vase with chalk on the canvas - and used the illustrations in the book about drawing flowers to make the blooms. The painting turned out okay for a fourth attempt at painting. The vase is too large, there needs to be more flowers, and the shading/highlighting needs work. However, it was good practice. Someday I'll do another painting of jonquils.

Painting #4 - "Jonquils"
(Acrylic on canvas, May 2016)