Apple Blossom

Found a nice little picture of an apple blossom on pmp-art.com.  Couldn't help myself, I had to paint it.  I think it came out ok.  I'm working on putting light next to dark and smooth transitions of colors.  Also If I can get multiple colors into each space, so much the better.  The leaves are mostly HBC green #1 and #2 but I've snuck in some Perm. Yellow Lemon and some Viridian too.  The petals are Rose Madder and Vermilion. 

In the original picture the whole branch must have been set on a white sheet, because it had a very soft grey shadow.  I tried to replicate that here. 

I hope you like this one.  I think I'm gonna do a video for htis one, keep a check out for it.

Practice Fruit

I had a little time on my hands during lunch, so I decided to sketch a few fruits.  Yes, red was the theme.  I gave myself two minutes a piece to paint each one.  I like the apple and the single cherry.  I really want o like the double cherry but the shadow i put on it kind of ruins it for me.  The tomato..... well, i think it went a little south.  lol.

Green Apples and a Clean Palette

 Mmmmmm, who doesn'l love tasty delicious apples.  They are nutritious, delicious, and I'm told that if you eat one a day no doctors can be around you.  It must be kinka like that garlic/vampire thing.  I don't really know why apples and doctors can't get along, but so be it, more apples for me.

For about the past month, I've been trying to use the last of all the paint I had on my palette without introducing any new paint.  In this painting I have exhausted all of my yellow, nearly all the red, and all the green.  What's left you ask,  a little vandyke brown, some purple and both light and dark cerulean blue.

These paintings were actually done with almost no paint of any kind that has green in the title.  I had just a dab of viridian, and you can see it just slightly in the top painting.  the bottom one has none.

In looking at the bottom apple, I should have put a different stem on it and called it a green tomato.  I think it turned out more like a tomato.  LOL.    Well, anyway, tomorrow I start with a totally clean palette.


Its been a long time coming that I clean and reorganize my palette.  When I first set it up I had only about 6 colors, then slowly added more, and kinda just lumped the colors together.  Now that I have read up on color theory a little bit, I really want to group things a bit differently.  I'm gonna go with some sort of warm, cool, and earthy groupings.  Wish me luck.  And while I get them all worked out, enjoy some apples.

Speed Painting With My Daughter (Now with Sparkle)

I love painting with my daughter.  Like me, she makes up stories about the things she paints.  (She got that from me, and I in turn, got it from Bob Ross.)  Her stories are always outrageous and seldom have any place in reality.  Perhaps thats the imagination of a 5 year old.  I could just sit next to her and listen to her stories all day long, but I'm lucky enough to be able to paint with her while being regaled with these outlandish stories.

This past Saturday we were sitting at the craft table painting when we were just finishing out first paintings when she decided that fruit would be a good thing to paint.  I would quickly sketch out a couple of pictures (one for her and one for me) and we would set out to paint.  She got to the point where fruit was a solid color with a green leaf all lobbied onto the paper in one gleeful moment.  We both ended by laughing and painting furiously.

Then she remembered that she has glitter watercolors.  We had to revisit and add the glitter (she calls it shimmer or sparkle.)  The following was my contribution to our time together.

Apples and cherries were the first pictures we did.
 

I didn't have time to draw my own grapes, so I just freehanded them.

This peach has a generous amount of shimmer on it.  I guess it is substituted for fuzz


No, a chili isn't really a fruit, but she suggested and I obliged

Second attempted portrait.

First portrait attempted.

Strawberries definitely have shimmer.

A tree to end out fun for the day.

Buckets of Apples

Since I'm in the "Heavy Metal" challenge this month, I decided to paint a few more metal pictures.  I think that I get carried away trying to make my painting look "right."  Whatever that means.  In so doing, I end up putting a lot more paint on paper than I want to, and my paintings lose some of the transparency, or lightness that I want to keep.  I want to get to a place where very few washes will satisfy what I want the painting to look like, and then to stop fiddling.  I'm not there, but I'm still working to get there.

Hope you enjoy these fun little paintings.