Painting Still Water in a Landscape

Today I attended a workshop at On Track Studios taught by Karen Philpott. It was a really good workshop. Karen had a presentation showing how various artists have handled painting still water. It is really fascinating to see how different artists handle similar scenes. Then she demonstrated how to paint a still water scene. And then, each of us students started working on our own still water paintings.

Here is my painting.  I am pleased with it, and now I'm anxious to get back into my studio and try another still water painting.

"Morning Reflections" oil on 12x16 linen panel

After looking at the painting more, I made a few changes - nothing major - just a tweak here and there.  So this is the final painting:

"Morning Reflections" Oil on 12x16 linen panel

Packing to Paint in Italy

I will be 70 in a few months, and in March I will use my passport for the first time in my life. I can't believe I am so un-traveled! We will be staying in a villa in Gaiole, Chianti which is near Siena which is in the Tuscany area. We will stay at that villa each of the nine nights we will be in Italy. We will do day trips and excursions from there. We wanted our first trip to Italy to be low-key and relaxing. So no big tours in the major cities - just settling in for a few days and getting to know one small area.

And I want to paint while I'm there! I've spent a LOT of time thinking about what to take in order to be able to paint but not be loaded down with too much luggage. I THINK I have it figured out.  Here's my art packing list:

• A Masterson 12 x 16 Palette with palette paper inside
• Water-soluble oil paints (limited palette) which I will wrap individually and place inside the Masterson palette for travel. 
• 1 tube of Gamblin Solvent-Free Gel (placed inside the Masterson palette with the paints)
• Brushes in a cloth roll
• A very lightweight folding easel
• Three PanelPaks - a 9 x 12, an 11x14, and a 12 x 12.  That's 6 panels. I was originally going to take a 9x12 Ray-Mar wet panel carrier that hols 6 panels - but it is heavier than the PanelPaks. (I may leave the 9x12 PanelPak at home.  If I come home with 4 paintings, that will be fantastic.  I seriously doubt I will do 4 - much less 6!)

Those supplies should easily fit in my suitcase, with plenty of room for my clothes and toiletries. Ron and I will be packing only about 3 changes of clothes each. There is a washing machine in our villa, and we will do a load of clothes a couple times while we're there, and thus we won't need many clothes.

My plan is to sit on the patio of the villa to paint - or inside if it's too chilly to be outside. I've looked at the photos of our villa, and there are plenty of chairs and tables. I can set up the easel, put the palette on one of the tables and sit in a chair to paint. With our excursions, I won't have time to paint more than 6 paintings,  As a matter of fact I'll be surprised if I paint that many! I don't plan on doing any plein air painting away from the villa. So I won't be hauling painting supplies around Italy!  LOL! I will take photos during our sightseeing and exploring, and I will paint from the photos after returning to the villa. I might do plein air painting AT the villa, though. From the photos, it seems to be situated in a very scenic area - with vineyards and gorgeous scenery all around. We'll see. I know how promotional photos can skew reality.

Using water-soluble paints will keep me from having to deal with solvents. I will include the TSA label that all the art folks tell me should be put with the art supplies in the suitcase. The top one is for the Masterson palette box with the water-soluble paints inside, and the other one is for the PanelPaks on the way home when, hopefully, there will be completed painting inside.

Dramatic Cloud Study

I took the following photo and wanted to paint the scene - with the clouds being the dramatic focus.

So I painted it. Here is my first attempt. Now, I have had two different "cloud lessons" from Rachael McCampbell over the past couple years - and doggone it, I STILL can't do clouds well.



So, after being totally unhappy with those clouds, I scraped off the sky entirely.


Then I painted it again.


Okay - it sucks. So I left it - figuring that if I let it dry a little overnight, it might work a little more easily.  Right now it's just a mass of paint. "Muddy" is the term that comes to mind. I will tackle it again in a day or two.

One thing I considered was that I used an Ampersand Gessobord for this painting. The Ampersand Gessobord has a very slick surface. Maybe I should have tried one of my Belgium Linen panels. I may re-do this scene on one of those. The other thing is that maybe I'm putting on the paint too thickly. I tend to be overly generous with my paint, and that makes it more difficult to finesse things like clouds. So there are two things to work on for this painting.

Stay tuned for more attempts. I know I can get the trees and the grass and the hay rolls to look right. They don't look right now because I've just blocked them in. But I know how to paint them. It's just the clouds right now that have me stumped.

#Oilpainting, #paintingclouds, #marycarolart, #cloudstudy

Across the Field

Saturday morning, I went for a long drive.  It took about an hour to drive around the countryside around Leiper's Fork looking for scenes to paint.  I was specifically looking for barns and fields - something similar to what we did in Kathie Odom's class last week.  It was too cold to paint outside - plus I was by myself.  So I was armed with a camera.  I took a bunch of photos, and after I got home, I decided to paint the scene below - which is actually about a mile away from my house on Carl Road.

I first did a wash of brown on the lower 2/3, and a purply-pink on the upper 1/3.  The image below is after I blocked it out and applied the first colors.

The photo below is where I ended things last night.  The issue I see is that I have the trees wrong.  I have it looking like evergreen trees when they aren't at all.  I deliberately cropped the photo so that there was a bunch of sky.  I wanted to do some dramatic clouds to practice what I had learned in Rachael McCampbell's class this past November.  So I made it a very cloudy day.

I have appointments all this morning and into early afternoon (dentist and hair dresser) - and then Disciple Bible study is tonight. So I will only have maybe a couple hours later this afternoon that I can work on it. Three things to work on:  Make the main barn bigger and more squatty - actually mostly just the lower right roof line, make the trees more realistic (not evergreen - although if it becomes too complicated, I can just leave them as they are - artistic license), and work on the sky to make it more interesting and dramatic.

I will take this painting with me tomorrow when I go to Knoxville for Kathie Odom's second mentoring session on Thursday. It will be interesting and helpful to see the suggestions she makes for this painting and also for the painting I did from the class last week.

Later note: Kathie had lots of suggestions for that painting. I don't think she found anything positive about it. Very disappointing. So much "critique" that it was more than I could deal with or even remember.  So I decided to just chuck it. I would rather wait till spring and take a pretty spring photo of that scene and paint that.

Much later note: Although looking at it again, it's not THAT bad. I think it can be salvaged.  I will work on it again eventually.

Finishing Up and Touching Up and Varnishing

Yesterday's mentoring session with Kathie Odom really inspired me to work on my art today.

First, I finished up the painting I started yesterday in Kathie's class.  I'm really pleased with it.  It will be interesting to see what suggestions she gives me for improving it when I go to class next week.  Here's my finished painting.

Then I decided to do some repairs and improvements to three other paintings. First I took the painting below of Radnor Lake.  There were a few marks on the lake - probably from having the painting sitting around for so long. No telling how those marks got there.  I painted over them, and then did some other improvements to the painting.

Then I took the painting below - one that I painted when I was in Gatlinburg back in October.  When I showed the painting to my mother, she asked what that was in the lower left side of the painting.  I had FOURTEEN rocks in the painting. When Mother asked her question, I realized that it looked totally unnatural.  I had started painting rocks -because there WERE a lot of rocks - just not that many and only a couple large ones - but once I started adding rocks, I just kept going - and they kept getting bigger and bigger.  So I painted over eleven of the rocks and left just three in the painting.  I think it looks much better, and the rocks looks like rocks.  However, I still don't like the way the rocks look.  So I may work on it more tomorrow.

My next project was my second Radnor Lake painting.  The rail along the left side of the trail was too perfect.  So I put some plant growth over part of it to break up the line of the railing, and I worked on the trail a little, too. It's still not one of my favorite paintings, but I'm done with it.

Then, I decided it was time to varnish some paintings.  I took about 9 paintings out the garage and varnished them.  None of the ones above since they all have wet paint on them - but some of my others - some that I really like. So now I've varnished some paintings.  I need to take a bunch of my paintings out of their frames and varnish them and re-frame them.  That will be a project I work on over the next few days and weeks.

Overall, I had a really good day today.  I love it when I get "lost" in painting - and that happened today.  Several hours went by as I worked on the paintings above, and I totally lost track of time because I was so engrossed in what I was doing.  I was listening to an audio book the other day and it mentioned how one get to "flow" when the rest of the world is nonexistent as we concentrate on our art or work or whatever.  So today I was in my "art flow," and that's a good thing.

Winter Mentoring with Kathie Odom

My friend, Sheryl, signed up for Kathie Odom's 3-month winter mentoring program.  However, Sheryl had already planned to be out of town for all of January.  So I am taking the three sessions in January, and Sheryl will do the ones in February and March.  The sticking point is that Kathie lives in Knoxville, and that's where the mentoring sessions are held - at Kathie's home/studio.  Knoxville is a 3+ hour drive from Nashville.

So I drove to Knoxville yesterday (Wednesday), and all today was the mentoring session.  As soon as it was over (5:00 today), I drove back to Franklin.  It was a lot of driving - and I stayed in a hotel by myself last night, which was actually rather enjoyable.

The mentoring session today was wonderful.  Of all the artists I've met the past year or two, Kathie is the one whose work is most like what I aspire to for myself.  I love her use of colors and the general "look" of her art.  So I listened carefully today and did my best to emulate her work.

First we chose the photo use as our reference for today's work.  Here it is:

Not a great photo of the photo - it wasn't as bluish/hazy as this photo.  Then we had to sketch it in our sketch books and then do an underwash on our canvases and then sketch out the big shapes.  Here is my panel with the greenish underwash on the bottom and a purpley underwash on the top.

Then we worked on filling in big shapes with the correct values.  Still no color beyond the brownish one.

Then we began filling in color.  I got sidetracked with getting the far back hill on the right the right color.  I finally got it a decent blue/gray - but it took several tries.  Below is where I was at the end of the day:

And below is Kathie's painting at the end of the day:

I will finish my painting tomorrow and will post it here. I will also try to paint another similar painting from my own photographs in order to practice the things I learned today.

I'm looking forward to the next two weeks of mentoring sessions. Very worthwhile so far!

1/11/2019 - Here’s my finished painting

Three Painting at my Mother's

I spent the past week with my mother in Georgia. There was much to do there, and it was several days before I had time to paint. But then I set up my art easel/palette, and other supplies in the breakfast room. There's a nice antique round wooden table in there that I covered with newspaper, then set up my Coulter easel beside it. Each time I started to paint, my mother would come in and sit at the table and watch me - asking questions, making comments, and offering suggestions. It was a tender time spent with my mother . . . and I finished 3 paintings while there.

This first one is a scene from Radnor Lake in Nashville.  I went there last year to hike for awhile, and I took a lot of photographs.  This is one scene that I thought was particularly beautiful. I loved the path to the water - with the trees on either side - the hills on the far side of the lake. The colors are prettier, I think, in the actual painting. The photo washes it out a bit. Radnor Lake is such a beautiful place - lots of trails through the woods and beside the lake.

Roaming Around Radnor, Oil on 16x20 board

For the second painting, I decided to paint a scene I photographed at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico when I was in Santa Fe and the surrounding area for the Plein Air Convention and Expo (PACE) last April.  Ghost Ranch was where Georgia O'Keefe spent her last years.  The scenery was breath-taking, and it was very different from anything I would ever see in Tennessee or Georgia!  And technically, I'm not finished with this.  My sister, Joan, suggested that the tree and the hill to the left of the center have too similar outlines - and they do.  So when I get a chance to get up in my studio, I will make some changes to either the tree or the hill.

Ghost Ranch Panorama, Oil on 16x20 panel

For my last painting while visiting my mother, I decided to do another scene from Radnor Lake. I had taken a photograph of a walking path with a wall along the side of it.  There was actually a man walking almost at the end of the path, but so far I haven't been able to make him look realistic in the painting.  So I've taken him out each time I've tried to put him in. Now that I'm home again and can work on it in my studio, I may try to add the walker again.  It really shouldn't be THAT difficult.  In the photograph, he is just a dark shape far away.  On the evening that I painted this, my sister, Beth, was also there working on her own art. As I painted this, I showed her how my various art teachers taught me to start with the darkest shapes - to concentrate on the "big shapes."  And the picture DID "emerge" from those shapes.  My mother came in and offered some great suggestions.  It was a fun experience.

Down the Path at Radnor, oil on 11x14 board

A workshop with Rachael McCampbell

I signed up for a 5-week workshop with Rachael McCampbell. I've taken several workshops with her - including the week-long workshop at Arrowmont in Gatlinburg, TN back in October.  As it turns out, I will only be able to attend two of the five sessions.  Last week was the first session.  The second session will be December 12th.

The class is on landscapes.  Here is what I did last week.  It is based on a photo I took right outside of Gatlinburg during the Arrowmont week.

I like the little house on the left.  It was actually a barn.  However, I took artistic license and made it into a cabin. It seemed to fit in better with the painting.  I will be looking for what I want to paint at the next session.  This is actually one of my favorite paintings now.  I wish I had put the barn/cabin a couple inches further into the painting.  It's so far on the edge that in most photos, it hardly shows up.  When I frame it, the frame will probably cut off a little of it.

The cotton fields of home

I remember throughout my childhood seeing cotton fields as I drove or rode around the countryside in Georgia. Now when I drive to Georgia to visit my mother, I pass quite a few cotton fields. Cotton fields are strikingly beautiful! I love the look of the cottony whiteness covering the ground.  I've stopped several times on my way to or from Georgia to take photos to use in painting. Finally, this past week, I followed through and painted one of the fields.  I painted it while I was visiting my mother. This field in my painting is actually in Alabama - just a few miles from the Georgia border.

I like the trees - I'm not sure about the cotton. Overall, I like it - although I'm not sure I have it where it looks definitively like a cotton field.  It could be a white-flowered field.  There wasn't a creek in my photo, but I felt the painting needed something more of interest. So I added the creek and the rock in the foreground.  Otherwise, it follows the photograph fairly well.  If I "widened the lens" there would be a house on the far left.  I may re-paint it and widen the perspective to include the house.