charcoal drawing of Pitcher Plants

I did a few sketches and decided to use this one as a starting point. As I was scribbling in those jagged leaves I knew the gardeners would be there soon to pull out the weeds. They came by the next day to do that but I decided the painting didn’t need the weeds anyway.

Pitcher Plant Flowers / oil paint in the couch

oil paint technique and mediums

When I started painting with oil paint last year I remembered Maroger Medium, but they don’t sell it in art supply stores. At York Academy of Art, Ted Fitzgee and Tom Wise wanted us to use Maroger Medium because it’s what the masters used. We bought it in York PA. at a store where the owner mixed it up for the art students. You can find recipes online , but you might have to cook lead, and I can’t do that safely. So I bought a tube of Grumbacher Gel Medium and used it for my first 10 paintings. It’s thick and I mixed the color paint I needed then added some of the Grumbacher Gel and turpenoid to make my glazes. I ran out of the Grumbacher Medium and couldn’t find another tube of the same medium in the stores, so I bought a bottle of Winsor & Newton Liquin Light Gel. I remembered  “painting in the couch”, a technique Fitzgee told us to use. That’s when you paint the canvas with medium and paint with oil on top. The Liquin Light Gel is thinner wetter and slick so there’s no drag on the brush. You can use less turp to do your glazes. And it saves time because you don’t have to mix the medium in with each color you want in your layers of glazes. The Liquin Light Gel gives the painting a shiny surface. I was glad I remembered “painting in the couch” from Y.A.A. I had fun with it and I will continue to practice this technique

Stone Wall in the Garden / oil paint

I saw on the local news that Lewis Ginter Botanical was rated in the top 10 gardens in the country ! Congrats L.G.B.G. ! Rock On !

As usual, the colors look better in person than they do in my camera shot. I’ll take it to the pro to get a photograph for my web site when I have 6 new ones finished, because I get a better deal if he sets up to shoot 6 at a time.
I saw some other artists working in the garden yesterday. I got to say, it’s the most beautiful and safest place in town for me to draw !

Japanese Weeping Cherry Tree

oil paint

Last year it was warm in March and the cherry trees bloomed early and the flowers didn’t last long. One hot day they dropped like snow under the trees. I knew if I wanted to paint the Weeping Cherry when it bloomed I had to plan ahead for 2013. So I started working on this painting in Feb.
Then this year the weather stayed colder, cloudier, wetter and windier. I worked on the background a couple hours at a time on sunny days. I took my time drawing the tree and added more whips every time I put another glaze on it.
I came to a stopping point waiting for the little tree to bloom. Then I waited for spring impatiently for weeks. Finally the tree is blooming. The flowers were about half way open two days ago and I was so excited to finish the painting that I didn’t wait for the full bloom.
The other cherry trees aren’t blooming yet, but they’re not the same variety as this little grafted Japanese Weeping Cherry.
I took some shots of the painting showing the layers of glazes. They’re posted below stripping off the layers back to my underpainting.

East Meets West @ Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden

2500 origami cranes

This is hanging in the conservatory. The whole garden is beautiful at night with all the Christmas light displays.

I’m working on a nocturn oil painting of a view of Ginko trees with Japanese lanterns. There’s blue and green lights on the ground around them. It’s a challenge painting in the dark, mixing the colors as its getting darker. But there is some light from the spotlights on the trees . I’ve never tried to paint a nocturn before, so I don’t know if it will work out.  As an artist its important to challenge myself. I don’t know if the other people think I’m crazy to paint outsde in the cold at night.  If it comes out I’ll post it on the blog in a week or two. If not, oh well.

this is me in the Healing Garden @ Lewis Ginter

They gave me a big mortar and pestle and said, ” Get busy, girl, large quantities of meds are needed. ” 🙂

free art lessons / fawns in the museum again

I'm not finished with the fawns.

I took the paper off my drawing board and taped it to the sketch book, and covered it with glassiene paper to protect the pastel from smearing in the parts with layers built up ,while I work on the fawns.The museum has a policy of pencils only, and they limit your paper size. You can get a permission paper allowing you to bring an easle or other media in, but I can’t plan that far in advance to list dates and times I’ll be there with my easle. Outside in the sculpture garden ,they don’t care. But in the galleries, I just stick to holding my sketchbook in hand while drawing, instead of bringing my easle.And I used my pastel pencils here. The pencils don’t have the brightness and pigment that is in regular pastels, so I think the fawns look a little weak next to the rest of the picture. I’ll have to do something about that.Also the fawns sculpture in the museum is made of aluminum, and its not colored like real fawns, so I took my best guess on the colors here.

free art lessons / fawns

I got the middle ground under control.

I usually start with building up the background first, because working from top to bottom keeps pastel dust from falling on to finished parts. But here, I worked on the middle ground first because I wanted to get the spring foliage in before it goes away.  I put layers of pastel on the Loblolly pine to make the bark texture. I don’t have dark enough pastels to make a dark enough black, so I used my charcoal pencil in the cracks of the bark. Sometimes you hear people say, ” don’t use black. ” But I use it when I need it, and I don’t see the mud. Do you see mud ? Artists, don’t fear black.  The tree looked too red with my first colors, So I put in some grey, and didn’t blend it. Then it was too grey, so I put some burnt umber on top of the grey. Then I liked it.  There’s a lot of layers of pastel on the path . I adjusted the colors and values a few times till I got close to what I see. I got the sticks back in the picture from the dried hydrangeas around the pine tree. And I scrubbed the brown out of the fawns with a dry sponge, but the color is still there. Now I can go back to the museum with pastel pencils and conte pencils and finish the fawns.  I didn’t work on the top background of the picture yet, or make the background trees visible yet . That’s still one layer of color.

Free Art Lessons / drawing the fawns in the museum

I get better results standing in front of my subject and drawing slowly, than I get tracing from a photo. You can see a faint grid I made when I used the head as a unit of measure to make my fawns come out in correct proportion. I didn’t work on shadows yet. You can also see faint marks from when I traced this study and transfered it to the other paper.

Fawns Playing in the Garden ( detail )

heads at 1″ is the scale

You can see the texture of the paper showing through. It’s yellow paper.

 

I finished the drawing last week. It’s hanging at Crossroads Art Center. But it won’t show up on my website for a couple weeks, because I didn’t send the web master the image yet.

 

This is only a small section of the finished pastel.

 

The scene is at Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden. The fawns are at the VMFA. This is my best guess for color, because the ones at the museum are the silvery aluminum color.