I really enjoy painting bunnies. I named this one after my Niece Jackie, she is the original Super Bunny.
Monday, April 28, 2008
Super Bunny!
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About Me
- Abbe Nelson
- I am a Jersey Girl living in Georgia now. I am currently painting with pastels.
2 comments:
Very nice work! And congratulations on your decision to paint every day- that, as they say, is the key. I worked with a coach who had trained athletes for the Olympics, and he insisted that the single most vital point was making the decision to make training an important part of your life.
It's much the same with art, and people do it different ways. Some people work fine in isolation, others find that conversation with other artists can be a real benefit. It sounds like you have a good teacher, and that's fantastic!
So since I dropped by (I'm a retired art teacher who visits random blogs, and very occasionally comments, usually about art) I thought I'd offer some feedback.
I like your choice of pastels, it gives you a very bold color range and makes it easy to dive in and cover the surface. I'd like to see you work in other media though, because I see you pushing the pastels to have a precision they just aren't made for. Try colored pencils- realize that you can blend them like pastels, only you may need to use a brush or Q-tip. Prismacolor are very common, and if you dip a brush in alcohol you can blend them like watercolors. I myself prefer Rexel-Derwent watercolor pencils, which do the same with water.
Anyway, the idea is that colored pencils will give you a sharper edge and more control when you want it. And pencils are a much easier way to apply color than paint and brush- although I'd encourage you to try that too.
As far as media goes, have you worked with any digital media yet? Photoshop or Painter? I know, I know, there's nothing like the real thing, digital is a pale shadow. But... there are advantages to digital, it makes it easy to save different versions and undo and stuff. One key is to use a tablet and stylus, not a mouse. Big ones are expensive but the little ones are just fine and they're cheap- and often bundled with Painter, which is a great program.
Reason I say this is not to be a proponent of digital, but because with your eye for line and color, you could do very very well with media like that, and I'd like to see it happen.
Anyway- you've got a great sense of color going, and you're obviously good at using your eye- really the key to it all, your eyes will tell you all you need to know, as they say. You're doing a good job of finding hidden color in things, surprising colors at the edges of flowers and birds and shadows. Very good- that's the tasty part.
One thing I'd suggest you experiment with is complementary colors- red to green, orange to blue, purple to yellow. Notice how these colors appear in the shadows of an object- dark green shadows on a red apple, for instance, and how this intensifies the lusciousness of the color. Try to avoid using black (not as a rule,b ut as an exercise) and see how you can paint dark shadows using only color- and don't forget the dark yellows we call browns.
Another thing you're doing very right is have a sense of consistency. This is far more important than accuracy or any such thing. My old painting teacher used to take a paper print of some painting- a van gogh landscape, for instance, and cut it into strips for us to look at. The strips were small enough that the sense of picture, image, what you're looking at, was lost and it became abstract. And the interesting thing we noticed was that every bit of the picture was painted with the same intensity and interest.
This is btw the reason those velvet paintings and such are so horrible- not jsut that they're kitschy trash. It's like some people I know who used to draw faces, and they'd spend about a million years on the eyes and lips, and about two seconds on hte elbow or something 'boring'. You can see it in those inconsistent works where some parts of the painting obviously got far more deatail than others. Whereas, like, look at Manet- he'll paint a beautiful woman and you look close and her face is a couple of smears that aren't very accurate at all- and meanwhile the trees and the grass and everything is all equally attended to by the brush.
I see you working out some of that in your work- at first doing forebround objects and then experimenting with placing them in teh visual field and then giving hte background and other parts life too. Keep it up, do more of that.
There are many things you're doign very right, keep it up! And possibly those suggestions will help you find new directions with them. As far as weaknesses- it's time for you to start working on composition more. Right now you've been centering things pretty much, or simple proportions based on landscape. Trouble is, centered is boring- and it makes the background space boring. One way to make your backgrounds (and middle grounds etc etc) more interesting is to get away from centered composition, and include more off-center balances. How do you do this?
I would suggest you do some practice at cropping- get a bunch of magazine pictures you can cut up. Using either scissors or a couple strips of cardboard, experiment with different ways to cut the edges off to make an interesting composition.
There is a rule of thumb in photography (and it holds true for painting) that a standard way to create a good compositional balance is to draw a tic-tac -toe grid over the picture. Then put objects of interest- faces, eyes, puppies, etc- at some of the four intersection points of the tic tac toe grid.
Another thing to do (especially when dealing with interesting subjects) is to get really close. If you have a face, you don't have to show it- maybe just one side and the rest is off the edges. This is one of the biggest differences between amateur and pro photography- the pros are unafraid to get up close and personal, the amateur shows a pic of the grand canyon with a little stick figure standing in front (centered!)
Do a bunch of practice with magazines you can cut up, and then think about how you could apply what you found to your paintings.
Another thing to look at when you're doing this is look at empty space (negative space) as a shape too- like those pictures of the vase that's two faces? look at the empty space around your object as a shape to be sculpted too. These two things will really help liven upwhat your'e doing.
Congratulations, you've got some real skills and dedication, and you're doing good work. Unlike most people, who don't try hard enough and so they remain on a plateau, you will continue to grow and evolve. Your work is beautiful and good now, but I predict it will continue to grow even more breathtaking and brilliant.
Cheers!
-P
Wow! YOu spent so much time giving me feedback, I hope you stop by again.
You sounds like my retired art teacher...never use black she drilled in in our heads, I even asked my new teacher about black and how she feels about it. We use an eggplant Terry Ludwig for black although I may have used black in my poppies.
As for consistency, I know what you mean about velvet paintings and I "get it" about objects floating in air. My old teacher drilled that on into our heads too. She always said your paintings have to work together the entire painting background and all.
I actually have good natural composition skills maybe I have not shown it..there is so much to think about, I guess I let that lapse.
I know I have some weaknesses specifically in making the background go back and seem far. I was thinking about going back to the drawing basics and refresh.
My goal of couse is not to make a photo copy, but to give it integrity and to work as a entire painting and to give a mood about the subject. I'll never technically be good enough to draw things that look like a photo.
Thanks so much for your comments...my blog has been kind of lonely.
Have a great day!
My teachers blog is http://kemstudios.blogspot.com/
She is very talented and it is worth checking out.
Abbe
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