The Art League of Alexandria, Va

July 12, 2014



 I titled this blog The Art League.  I am trying to decide which class to take there in the Fall.  My goal has been to improve my paintings of children, but overall just improving has always been my goal.  Here is a link the catalog if you are interested. 


The Art League Catalog

When I lived there it was so convenient to take classes from The Art League and there were so many outstanding teachers.  One semester I even took three classes.  Now that I live about an hour away, it is more difficult to drive to Northern Virginia from Fredericksburg. 

I've included notes from some of those classes in past blogs.  One blog was about Robert Johnson (if you use the search button you can find that post).  I took his workshops because I admired his paintings of flowers so much and have been painting some flowers from my garden lately.  Following what I learned from him here is  series of photos that loosely show the steps he uses. 

 

Loose placement of flowers and shadows

 Worked on front flower, continue to work all over canvas

Applied background

 

Decided to use carpet in foreground.  The vase looked better in earlier demo, might go back and rework the vase. 

By the way Robert Johnson has great demos on his website.  http://www.robertjohnsonart.com/Robert_A._Johnson_Art/Demonstrations.html

His book On Becoming a Painter is worth getting, too.  You can purchase it from his website.  I've almost worn out this book which I got autographed when I took the workshop.  I guess I'm a "groupie", at least one who greatly admires this artist's work. 

 

 

Daily Paintworks Challenge

July 3, 2014

Happy July 4th!


The Daily Paintworks Challenge was to paint a Peanut Butter and Jelly sandwich, something I have wanted to try for quite awhile so this pushed me to do something new.   I think it would be a good idea to do a number of these and, hopefully keep improving. 

Thank you to Abbey Ryan for designing this challenge.  She does beautiful work.  Here is a link to her blog: http://ryanstudio.blogspot.com/

I saved some step by step photos:

Photo:   (I made the sandwich on frozen bread hoping it would last a little longer without looking too droopy).

 Loose drawing

 Established darks here

I chose blue for my background because it made me think of July 4th so it is a patriotic painting of a PB and J.   I did the reflections to give it a little more interest.  My set-up has a piece of Plexiglas if I want to use it. 
(http://www.dailypaintworks.com/challenge/the-pbandj-challenge/242)

 

I started a board on pinterest for Pbj paintings.  I thought it would make me continue with this subject and work on values plus come up with more ways of setting up the still life.