Extreme Composition 2

Lesson 1 Part 2 Dancing Lines on Colored Backgrounds

We were to paint colored backgrounds with soft transitions and low contrast on which to draw lines.
I worked on heavy 23 x 30 cm, brown paper mainly with watercolor crayons and water medium, one was done with OP and turps. I know that with paints the backgrounds would be much different. I will have to take that jump and learn how to handle acrylic paints.

Click on Images to enlarge

Background Watercolor Crayons with Water

Lines

White Oil Pastel

Black Graphite Stick

Pink Crayon

Background Oil Pastels

Lines

Black Oil Pastel

Ball Point Pen

White Marker

The colors in the photo are way off

Orange should be light pink !!!!

Background Watercolor Crayons with Water

Lines

Medium Marker

Sepia Stick

Background Watercolor Crayons with Water

Lines

Fine Marker

White Marker

 I find it still difficult to free myself with all the concepts of painting and just really be free to explore. 

New Directions Extreme Composition 1

During the 30 x 30 challenge this past September I was impressed by the work of one artist, Dotty Seiter that caught my eye at first because she was working in  B&W. I also was working mainly in charcoal and gray and white pastels. I was impressed with the works she was doing following an online course by Jane Davies,  She was doing the 100 drawings on the bottom of the page.
Following Dotty each day and seeing how her work was developing I decided that I should try one of the courses. This is my new direction. October is a month of holidays and we will only have 2 workshops so I decided to JUMP in.

Lesson 1 Lines and Dancing Lines

These are all just experiments!!!! I am really mainly posting for myself to see my own development in this course.

Did a test sheet of various lines with pencils,markers, pens, charcoal, and crayons to see their marks.
Then we were to do exercises with what Jane calls the wandering line. Letting the line go where it wants, rather intuitively.  Then add another line to compliment or go along with the first, Jane calls this a dancing line.  I many but wasn't getting really what I wanted. Need much more practice
I have a large 11 x 14 " sketchbook with fairly good quality paper. 

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Black oil pastel and lt brown conte stick.  My observation is that it's much too busy. 

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This was done first with a watercolor graphite pencil and then the conte stick... photo came out too faint, but you can get the idea.  The stains are from a work on the next page. This page probably was wet when I closed the book. I like this one much better. 

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We were to make backgrounds with low contrast colors and do the dancing lines on them.

Background oil/wax crayons with some medium. The lines were charcoal stick and 2B graphite pencil.

 Jane works in acrylic paints. I mainly work in oils so I did experiments with my wax/oil crayons and watercolor crayons with medium and without. Not good on plain paper so did a few on heavy brown paper and pieces of cut canvas, 

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Top strip is watercolor crayons with water added on heavy brown paper.

Bottom strip  using my oil/wax neocolor I crayons by Caran D'Ache. with added medium of  linseed oil and turps. Like the watercolor crayons best. I have cut sheets and will do some more. 

The cut canvas trials did not work out too well. I hope to open my paints and do them again,

Painting Flowers with Leslie I

Painting Flowers with Leslie I

This month I decided to jump in and take an "online" course with Leslie Saeta... this month painting flowers. A beautiful bouquet of white flowers on the window sill. I always loved the simplicity of Leslie's paintings and hope to learn more about her pre-mixing and palette knife technique.

These post will be work in progress.... so first the sketch.... On gessoed cardboard... 13 3/4 x 10 1/2 " It's a bit cut off..... panel is slightly larger than my scanner head... but you can get the general idea...

Now to start color mixing!!!