Virtual Sketch Date - November 2008

pen and ink in sketchbook

I've been reading Stephen Quiller's book Color Choices
so I decided to use this month's Virtual Sketch Date to do a limited palette study. I'm enjoying this book, especially the way he does several studies of the same scene using the same palette and creates different effects. The book also includes a nice color wheel. He starts off with monochrome palettes and gradually adds in more colors.

This month's reference photo was provided by Jeanette Jobson. To keep myself from following the photo too closely and getting caught up detail, I made a quick sketch of the photo (above). Then I did the painting mostly from the sketch. While these aren't colors I would normally pick, I got a lot out the experience. Here's the final study. I'll have to live with it a few days to see what I think. I'll experiment with other color combinations though.

acrylic on illustration board, 8 x 10 inches

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See all of my Virtual Sketch Date posts.

Last Three Peppers

Last Three Peppers, 6 x 5.5 inches, acrylic on gessoed watercolor paper
Copyright - Sydney Harper

When I grabbed that last eggplant a while back before our first frost, I also grabbed the last three cayenne peppers. At the time, they were still green with just a hint of red. I wasn't sure how they would ripen and dry out, but now you can hardly tell them from the others. The background looks a little brighter on my monitor than in real life. This is another acrylic painting that I did on gessoed watercolor paper samples. I liked working with this one much better than the previous sample. I don't know if my technique was better or the paper made the difference. The paper is 126 lb. Archette CP. I'm not even sure they still make Archette. It was a fun and quick little painting. Basically I tossed the peppers several times until I got an arrangement I liked and went from there.

Twyla Tharp on Creativity and Success

Just a short post so I can sqeeze in some painting tonight. I found this video today and just had to pass it along. There's a lot of good advice packed into a little over three minutes. I have Twyla Tharp's book The Creative Habit and I love it. I keep going back and rereading sections. I like her ideas for inspiring creativity and her practical advice. In this video she discusses creativity, success and failure, and money. I particularly like the part where she talks about the goal of creativity to make money versus creativity because you want to create something. Well she says it better. Here's the video.