A Meerkat and a Template Change

Meerkat, 7 x 5 inches, acrylic on illustration board
© 2010 Sydney Harper

I changed my template to one of the new Blogger templates. I’ve read that it doesn’t work well with IE6, but I have no way to test that. So if you’re using IE6 and having problems, that’s why. I like the new template choices though!

I’m still painting from some Atlanta Zoo photos I took a while back. This is a little acrylic painting of a Meerkat. All of the meerkats there looked a little chunkier than the ones I’ve seen on TV. I don’t know if it’s just better fed than wild meerkats or a different, chunkier meerkat than the ones I’ve seen. It was perfect for a limited palette painting.

I’ve been filling in for someone who hasn’t been able to work lately. I don’t really mind but it has thrown me off schedule and limited my painting and drawing time. I’m slowly getting back on track.

A few links.

Here’s a few interesting links I’ve found lately.

The Dimensions of Color by David Briggs. If you’ve been wanting more technical information about color, this is your place. I plan to spend more time here. I like the 3 dimensional color space. There are also several interactive graphs that are helpful. (via James Gurney)

Harmony is an online drawing tool written in HTML5. It won’t work at all in Internet Explorer, so don’t even try. (via Drawn!) The Drawn! link has some example drawings and a video.

Flame is another online drawing tool I found on Drawn!. It does much as its name suggests. It is a flame-like brush tool that lets you select color, noise, softness and other characteristics.

Jack’s Branch in the Spring

Jack’s Branch in Spring, © Sydney Harper
Acrylic on painting board, 5 x 7 inches

This is the perfect time of year to drag out some old photos to paint. Throughout the year, I’ll print out photos that I would like to use as a reference and stick them in a notebook. It’s a good resource for those days when I don’t know what I want to paint. This painting is from a photo at the Jack’s Branch rest area along the Natchez Trace Parkway. It was spring when I took this photo and everything was bright and green. It’s a perfect resource to work on when everything is dull and gray like it has been lately.

I painted this very quickly. It’s practically a sketch. It was one of those days where I didn’t have a lot of time to paint but I wanted to complete a painting. Since I exceeded my goal of 40 paintings last year, I decided this year’s goal would be 100 paintings. I have a tendency to get caught up in details when I paint, so this will be good practice for relaxing a bit with my paintings. Now if I can just forget I set this goal like I did last year, I might just exceed it too. Like my paintings, if I think about my goals too much, things start to drag.

Katie Cat and Four Motivational Links

Katie Cat. © Sydney Harper
8 x 10 inches. Acrylic on hardboard.

Update: I replaced the picture. I kept looking at the painting thinking something wasn't quite right. Then I figured it out. Whiskers! LOL!

I have sketched Katie many times, but I never painted her or any other cat until now. It took me a while to finally say “Done”. I started it in 2009. I would paint a bit, let it sit for a while and then go back to paint some more. Finally I got to the point where I was done with it. There’s some things I would do differently next time but I was ready to move on from this one.

I’m still working on my goals for 2010 so here are four interesting links I found over the holidays. Hopefully they’ll help you, and me, get motivated to do whatever we have been putting off.

• Is there a fear shortage? Seth Godin covers a topic that is a pet peeve of mine.
  
• Beware of Life. Chris Guillebeau covers a similar topic. The comments are worth reading too. Note I’m not proposing that you go out and be reckless, but maybe there is something you keep putting off out of fear.
  
• Get Excited and Make Things! Wil Wheaton urges everyone to quit procrastinating and make whatever it is they have been wanting to make.
  
• Finally, a bit of Patience for the thing you are going to do. This is a lovely video about a book within a book within a… It’s a little over 6 minutes long.

Turtle Point Alabama

Turtle Point is a country club along the Tennessee River in Killen, Alabama. I was there one dreary, misty morning for a baby shower. The river (and the country club grounds) was just beautiful so I walked around for a while taking pictures for use in paintings later.

Turtle Point
5 x 7 inches. Acrylic on painting board

This is a view up the river from the main country club building. I took some artistic liberties with the painting. In reality there is a boat dock and a small pier there. It was the rest of the view that interested me though.

There’s a lot that I like about this painting. This is another limited palette painting. Actually given a choice, I prefer limited palettes. If I have too many colors on my palette, I get caught up in the colors rather than the painting.

I’m still going through Stephen Quiller’s Color Choices. I had to smile at his comment at the beginning of Chapter 3. “I recommend doing many small studies before working large and going for your ‘masterpiece’! You can cover a lot more ground with a series of small examples rather than laboring over a large piece that, when finished, may or may not work.” I know I’m enjoying working on the small pieces and I don’t feel so bad when they flop.

Narcissus

Acrylic on Daniel Smith painting board, 7 x 5 inches

We have a lovely patch of narcissus blooming in the yard right now. The daffodils came earlier, right before our last snow. I brought a bunch of them inside and there are still lots of blooms outside. This is the best that I’ve seen them. So I just had to do a quick painting. I had to keep reminding myself that this was supposed to be a quick painting, using up some leftover paint on my palette.

Just to show that you can make art with almost anything, I'll leave you with this Extreme Sheep Herding video.

Two Truffles

Two Truffles
acrylic, 5 x 5 inches on Daniel Smith Painting Board

I had two dark chocolate truffles left over from Valentine’s Day, so I decided to paint them before I ate them. it’s an incentive to paint quickly. I painted it on some old Daniel Smith Painting Board I found the other day. I don’t even think they carry it anymore. It is stiff and slightly flexible with a surface texture much like watercolor paper and the thickness is similar to the heavier watercolor papers. The down side is that it’s brittle. I haven’t had any chip with normal use, although I suppose it would if you dropped it. It’s not that easy to cut though. Even with a straight edge, that last little bit tends to break off randomly. Otherwise, I like painting on it.

While I’m thinking about it, check out this video at the Digital Photography School. It’s about creativity and inspiration and lack of inspiration. The focus is on photography but I think all creative types can relate. The Digital Photography School is also a good place to learn about using your digital camera, whether you have SLR or a simple point and shoot camera.

Virtual Sketch Date, February: Lake Louise

Lake Louise
8 x 10 inches, acrylic on canvas

This month's reference for the Virtual Sketch Date was a photo of Lake Louise, Canada was provided by Debbie Later. I decided to do this month's Virtual Sketch Date in acrylic. I tried not to get too caught up in all of the details in the rock layers. If I don't watch myself, I will. I had fun with this and learned a little in the process.

I visited Lake Louise many years ago. It's absolutely beautiful. It was spring when I visited. There's a trail that goes around the lake. At that time on the shady side of the lake, there was still some ice. Some of the ice was in little needle like pieces arranged vertically. When a breeze would come through, you could hear the little ice needles tinkling as they fell over.

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See all of my Virtual Sketch Date posts.

Cypress Inn

Cypress Inn, 5 x 7 in, acrylic on illustration board
Sydney Harper

This is a quick little painting of the cross roads at Cypress Inn, Tennessee, just across the Alabama border. It's actually more of a community than a town. In this part of the country, you often see these older buildings right along the road. Often they've been abandoned and overcome with kudzu. This particular building looks like it's being used. I painted this from a photo I took last spring. At the time, it looked in better shape than the previous time I saw it. I've always been curious to know it's history though. It's located close to the Natchez Trace Parkway.

I said it was a quick painting but I tried it several times before I got something I was willing to keep. I started out a few times in watercolor but quickly ditched those efforts and moved to acrylic. I don't often paint buildings so I'm trying to get more practice at it.

Speaking of photos, I came across a good method for organizing your photos in the Adobe Photoshop CS4 Classroom in a Book. I take a lot of photos for reference and other purposes. Finding them again can be a challenge though. Jay Graham proposes making a folder by date and subject and then numbering your photos by date inside the folder. For example photos of Yellowstone on June 20, 2008 would be in a folder called 20080620_Yellowstone. The photos inside would be named something like 2008_06_20_01 with the last number being the number of the photo. I do something similar. I make folders by subject with folders inside that by date. I may try to reverse that one of these days.

Finally thanks to Michael Nobbs' tweet, I found a copy of Harold Speed's The Science and Practice of Drawing on the Project Gutenberg web site. I did a little search and also found Walter Crane's Line and Form. The last book is focused mostly on decorative arts but there's still a lot of good information in it.

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.

The Last Eggplant

The Last Eggplant

6 x 5 inches, acrylic on gessoed watercolor paper

Copyright - Sydney Harper

I like gardening but it really isn't a big priority for me. I had a small vegetable garden this summer but I started to forget about it as the weather got cooler. I went out the other day to clean it up a little bit and discovered it was doing quite well. Since we had our first serious frost last night, I went out and gathered up the last of the vegetables. This almost perfect little eggplant was one of them and I just couldn't resist painting it.

The painting is on a small piece of gessoed watercolor paper. Years ago I bought a sampler pack of watercolor paper and a pack of oriental paper from Daniel Smith. At that time, you got a huge variety of papers but they were small pieces. Now you get a smaller variety but large sheets. I've been using some of the oriental papers but I had forgotten about the watercolor papers until I found them a while back. So I took a couple of the sheets that I knew I wouldn't use for watercolor and applied some gesso. This particular sheet is a little thinner than I'd like but it worked well. It's a quick little painting but I'm pleased with it.

Radio TV Hospital

Radio TV Hospital
9 x 12 inches, acrylic on panel

I started this painting a while back when I wanted to try out some gessoed panels. The subject is a tiny oddly shaped building near Pope's Tavern in Florence, Alabama. It used to be a Radio TV Hospital. There was something about the odd shape and the broken sign that appealed to me. In reality there were a lot of houses around the area but I decided to simplify the painting so I could focus on the building. I might do a little more tweaking but basically it's finished.

I learned a lot while painting this. I'm still not used to this gessoed panel. Even after all these layers of paint, it feels slick compared to canvas. Maybe I'll try another brand after I finish these or even make my own. I spent a lot of time trying to get the perspective right since this isn't a normal box-shaped building and since I don't paint that many buildings. I'm glad I did. I used yellow to highlight the sunny side of the building instead of white. I'm not sure if it's obvious from the photo but this worked really well. (Thanks to James Gurney for all of your posts on color and light.) The painting started out as an experiment that I almost abandoned a couple of times, but I'm glad I stuck with it.

Struggling and Experimenting

Work in progress. Acrylic on masonite panel.

A while back I bought a couple of small gessoed panels. Normally I use canvas, but panels seem to be convenient and easy to store. So the other day I decided to try them out. I also wanted to experiment with colors and glazes and such. It was a real struggle at first. I was totally unprepared for the slickness of the panel. Add in my other experimentation and I almost tossed it. Now I'm glad I stuck with it. Once you get the first couple of coats of paint down, it gets much easier. This is an old, oddly-shaped building in town. I've always wondered about its history. I've still got a lot of work to do on it but it's coming along.

My How Time Flies

I'm not sure what happened. I got busy with life and suddenly months passed without posting. I haven't really done much art either. So I decided that the way to get back into a routine was to jump in with a painting. I have this birch tree in my yard that I've sketched and photographed several times. It's a large healthy tree right outside by office / studio window. The beautiful peeling bark on this tree inspired the painting below.

Tree Bark, acrylic on canvas, 11 x 14 inches.

Abandoned Art

This week's Challenge for Inspire Me Thursday was to search our studios for art that had been abandoned and finish them or to make a new piece of art from something that was abandoned. At first I couldn't think of anything because I really try to finish my pieces. Then I remembered this one. I probably started this around 1990. Talk about abandoned! Several times I was going to either toss it out or gesso over it. Then I decided if I'm going to throw it out anyway, I might as well experiment with it. I tried several things but ended changing some of the colors a bit, bringing some of the green down into the buildings, and painting in some smoke from the chimneys.

The changes weren't that major but I feel better about it now. I still like the general idea behind it. I've always been inspired by rooftops so I'll probably try another similar painting one of these days. So thanks to Inspire Me Thursday, it didn't get thrown away.

Rooftops, acrylic on canvas, 9 x 12 inches.

Inspire Me Thursday: Heart Art

In honor of Valentine’s Day, this week’s challenge is Hearts. Heart-shaped art… the symbolism of the heart… hearts folded, cut up, torn, broken… the anatomy of a heart. Be creative in your interpretation!

This is a quick little piece that I did for Inspire Me Thursday. I meant to post this yesterday but a little stomach bug delayed me.

I was visualizing raindrops, or teardrops, turning to hearts in someone's hands. It's done in acrylic, 9 x 12 inches.

Studio Friday: Proud Artist Of...

"How about you show a piece of art, or something that you have made in your studio, that really nobody has seen and you are proud of. "
~ Lee

I had to think about this for a while. My goal this year has been to actually show off my work, rather than just stashing it away. So I went back through my old stuff, and I mean really old stuff, and came up with this one. Up until this point, I viewed my sketchbook as just a place to practice my drawing technique. This painting came right out of material in my sketchbook. That's when I realized that my sketchbook was a good source for future paintings. You can see the transition in the type of material in this sketchbook from that point. I like it because I see it as a transition.

See more art at Studio Friday.