It's Caturday!

Venus is my purrfect painting companion and studio cat. She curls patiently around my feet, keeping me company while I paint, never bothers any of my painting supplies and as a bonus, makes a beautiful subject to paint. After spending the past two weeks working on still life homework for my pastel class, I decided to take a break last evening and paint something just for fun and just for me.

© 2015 Tammy Kaufman - Catticus Finch - pastels on Uart 600 7" x 7"

I'm please with how this one turned out for a variety of reasons. First, it's a huge step outside my comfort zone as I painted it using only value and temperature to choose my palette, instead of relying on color hue. It is from my own photograph, as most of my paintings are, but for this one, I cropped it down much tighter than I usually do to achieve the final composition and greyscaled the reference image it so I wouldn't be distracted by color.

Original Photo Reference in Greyscale

Additionally, I made a conscious decision to avoid drawing all the details and then "coloring within the lines", instead choosing to let the big value shapes define the subject. So after cropping and greyscaling my photo, I used the Picture Perfect 3 in 1 Viewfinder's red filter to help me determine the values. I drew only the general location of the eyes and nose but nothing else in order to avoid that "coloring inside the lines" appearance and set to work. Once I had my values mapped out, I selected pastels from the corresponding value compartments with no real regard to the color itself, although I did try to consider temperatures based on my light source when choosing which pastels to use.

All this was a bit scary for me, but I want to learn to trust my instincts, as well as what Addren has been teaching me. During our initial lesson, she had helped me arrange my pastels by value and sort them into the six compartments in my pastel box - dark darks, light darks, dark mids, light mids, dark lights and light lights. So for this painting, I made no conscious decisions about color hue, selecting my pastels solely based on value and temperature. I realize I'm still very early on my path to becoming an artist, and very possibly a year from now I'll look back on this painting with embarrassment, but today I'm happy enough with this little experiment that I decided to mat it - in a mat I cut myself! - pop it into a frame (please pardon the glare and reflections from the standard glass) and hang it on my studio wall. :-)

© 2015 Tammy Kaufman - Catticus Finch - pastels on Uart 600 7" x 7"

A Practice in Patience and Perserverance

Well, it only took less than two weeks before my impatience kicked in! I've been working exclusively on still lifes as part of my values and temperature in color theory pastel lesson, and a dozen or so of those things are already starting to try my patience and make me look forward to eventually hopefully returning to my beloved landscape and animal paintings! But I'm not giving up, and will figure this out no matter how long it takes! A big hurdle for me at present is actually getting the still lifes set up. I use a small spare bedroom as a "studio" so am quite limited on space, and setting up the painting subjects appropriately is a challenge in and of itself, to say the least. Currently I'm using a tiny computer table with a clip-on lamp, and hinged cardboard to serve as a backing. I have several of those brightly colored presentation folders to use as various surfaces when I don't want to use just the white table. One of my biggest challenges is the fact that I have to paint in the evenings after work, so must use artificial lighting on my easel by which to paint. This can sometimes interfere with the shadowing on my still lifes, even though I try to shield them as much as possible from all but the lamp. Then add to all that my amblyopia visual distortion, and it can occasionally make for a bit of stress to get the homework studies even close to correct! So far in the past couple of weeks, I've painted several objects in greyscale, including an egg, a cowbell, shaving brush and razor, fruit (apple and pear), coffee mug and spoon, bar of soap and a shaving bowl.

Greyscale Still Life Homework Assignments © 2015 Tammy Kaufman

And I've done several color studies as well of the cowbell, shaving brush and razor, fruit (pear and apple), shaving bowl, and coffee mug and spoon.

Color Still Life Homework Assignments © 2015 Tammy Kaufman 

Most of the homework has been much less successful than I would have hoped, and I've had more than a little difficulty "seeing" all the values and temperature changes within the objects and shadows themselves, not to mention the reflected light and color in the backgrounds and surfaces. Who would have thought still lifes were so tough?! But I'm still pressing forward, fully intent on "getting" this color theory thing one way or another.

Back to School

School is in! This morning was my first pastel lesson with Addren Doss, and I am just thrilled she accepted me as a student - she is such a wonderful teacher/mentor! We're starting out with color theory, working on values first. Addren is incredibly patient and knowledgeable. She made sure I understood each step before going to the next, and was very willing to answer any questions I had along the way. She helped me organize my pastels by value, and explained the correct use of the Picture Perfect 3 in 1 Viewfinder that she recommended I purchase (this thing is awesome!). Then, after showing me how to set up a still life with correct lighting (she wants me to use a single light source initially), she gave me a six-part homework assignment of using a very limited palette of grey pastels to do smallish still life value studies. I did my first one this afternoon of an egg using a total of four hard pastels - a light/mid grey, a dark/mid grey, a black and a white. I also, per Addren's suggestion, refrained from finger blending on this and instead let the pastels do the blending work themselves. The setup I used initially consisted of a box with only the side facing me open, the egg on a white surface inside the box, and the light source coming from the right.

© 2015 Tammy Kaufman

As requested, I emailed the image to Addren for review and was delighted with the immediate and helpful feedback. She asked me to think about things I saw while working on this still life that I may not have noticed before, and it was eye-opening just how much I've missed previously with the distraction of color! In particular, I was surprised that the shadow was a lot darker than I would have thought - the Picture Perfect viewfinder really showed this to me, much more so than the naked eye.

I'm looking forward to continuing with the remaining five homework assignments, and hope to see much improvement with the practice. Very thrilled and honored to have such a wonderful mentor teaching me, and excited to see what Addren has in store when we meet again after the completion of this assignment!