Painting Practice

This is another exercise from my watersoluble oils class. Again, we used portions of paintings as a base for the exercise. The point was to mix warm light and cool shadow colors with the proper values and of course, to have all the values in the final painting relate to each other properly. I think I did well with the values in the face. I tried to make the hair a different color from the face in warm light, which wasn't necessarily part of the exercise. I don't really like how the hair turned out, but since I was finishing this at home, the paint for the hat and clothing (darkest) had dried, so I couldn't use it to make shadows in the hair. Also, since I was just copying values from another painting, I was not thinking about what I would do if I were painting a similar portrait. Overall, I think she looks like a 1980s rock star, but I do think I learned the point of the exercise and will remember it.

This is a quick, 30 minute, study of water flowing over a rock in a stream. Ted went fishing and I sat by the stream and wanted to practice painting flowing water. A friend of mine and I are going to do some painting together this summer and she said she wants to paint water, so I thought I'd better get some practice in! As we can all see here, much more practice is needed! But I thought I'd post this as a first, quick, unfinished (the fish were not biting and it was time for dinner) example for reference and to hopefully see improvement. First, I believe that a better sketch before painting would have made the water movement make a little more sense to the eye. Specifically, the rock in relation to its wave is off and that was because I was working quickly. Also, more color change in the distant water would be nice...