Well-------------as it turned out my DW Melissa went into work at the Yoga Studio as one of the instructors decided to teach her class today. Soooooooooo for me that means another session in front of Mr. ED the easel.
As I've mentioned before, I'm always trying to loosen up my style and be just shy of sloppy. My motto regarding DETAIL is LESS IS MORE. I do not enjoy doing detailed paintings - my attention span is severely lacking in attention! :>)
Soooooo quite often I challenge myself to do a painting as fast as I can and certainly under 15 minutes based on a 5x7 size. It is an exercise in loosening up and not thinking (which I'm not very good at!!) also about NO composition - color- form of any of those painterly terms that most people say you should do before touching brush to the surface. To that - for this I say HOG WASH!!!!
Before it turned over to WINTER, we had some lovely autumn days and we also had some very brief snow squalls up in the Sangre' de Christo mountains. I love the Sangre' de Christo mountains - it is quite and very beautiful up there. They are a very short distance from us and in fact we can see a rather large expanse of these mountains from our TINY UNIT as we could from the house we sold. I normally go up to about 9500 feet above sea level - a short distance into the woods as I'm scared of wild animals - and no matter where you look there is a painting waiting to be done. I always take reference photos and this 5x7 painting was done today, just a few minutes ago, on gallery wrapped canvas wet into wet and completed in about 12 minutes. As I say a lesson in looseness and LESS IS MORE. No thought - no pre-planning - just paint it!!!
I love to start these with a round brush and some Payne's Grey paint and just create a very quick 1 - 2 minute sketch - I mean there is nothing hard about three tree trunks!!! DUH!!!
First a blank 7x5 canvas
I found this canvas under my painting table so I must have kicked it a couple of times as the canvas has dents in it!!! No matter as the wetness of the paint and little bit of water I use will cause it to shrink up enough for the dents to dissipate.
Then a 1-2 minute sketch of tree trunks DUH!!!! So far - nothing to write home about!
OK - now I will very quickly add various elements to this DUH sketch such as:
Aspen tree bark
BG forest with indications of trees in the distance
FG indication of grass and autumn color
Indication of a splattering of light snow from the squall
This will be quick with no Blah-blah-blah as 12 minutes is not very long!
First aspen tree bark - BAM!!
Next some BG forest with indications of distant trees - BAM!!
Next FG indication of grass color - BAM!!
Next some autumn color with snow splatter indications BAM!!!
DONE
Some closeups for my buddies who say
"HOW HE DO DAT?"
This is how I loosen up my style in order to not "over work" a painting and to present a visual cohesive appearing painting without an abundance of DETAIL
( Can't see the dents in the canvas now - can ya )
I call it fun and to me very educational
Soooooo my Blog Buddies - I hope you enjoyed this quick 5x7 demo
Until next time
JR :>)
