I’ve pulled a 30 x 40 inch painting of a pine tree out of the rack. I began it a while back but I’m ready to finish it now.
Made this drawing above to sort out some questions I have about the top of the tree. The drawing measures 24 x 18 inches so the image is just a bit smaller than the related section of the painting.
The pine tree is an oil painting so I’ll be switching gears from acrylic to oil. The studio will soon be filled with the wonderful aroma of linseed oil. Soon!
Been busy this week cleaning and organizing my studio — and getting ready for an even bigger cleaning event — the BIG SPRING CLEAN! So not so much painting in the last few days.
However I did go to the National Gallery of Art yesterday for a few hours and while I was there I made this drawing after a Rodin sculpture.
Spent some time looking at still lifes too in anticipation of my switch from landscape to still life which is coming, coming — soon! Every time I am out where cut flowers are for sale I am thinking also about still life. Soon, soon!
Here’s what I was looking at:
Drawing and redrawing the motif to get myself revved up to continue painting — on this:
https://alethakuschan.wordpress.com/2018/01/17/crepe-myrtles-are-the-best/
Here’s an even closer detail of the drawing. There’s a sort of riot of lines.
I am redrawing things that are in the painting, reconnecting myself with individual parts of the motif to get myself ready to continue working on it, stitching the parts more securely together — or preparing to do so — since the real discoveries will happen on the painting’s own surface. These are just ideas.
So I redrew the roses and then added the top of the clump of hydrangeas below these roses, just to help myself think about some ways that these two parts might connect. These are the hydrangeas that I drew in the previous post. The drawing measures 14 x 11 inches and depicts the flowers actual size.
Here’s the whole painting in its present form:
https://alethakuschan.wordpress.com/2018/01/30/also-around-the-corner/
The roses and the hydrangeas are located in the top left hand side.
Thoughts from the pen for a little landscape picture.
I read through the forms using a ball point pen in the previous post, and here I’ve rehearsed the forms in color using Caran d’Ache Neopastels (oil pastel). The drawing measures 18 x 11 inches. Didn’t color everything. It’s just a dress rehearsal, still thinking out loud.
Chaotic looking here, but this was my first practice for a painting. Describing the shapes to myself using the pen helps me find a thought path into the painting.
The drawing I’m using for the lay-in is a very broad working drawing. I draw then paint, draw some more, paint some more. These are first thoughts.
I made a little pen drawing for a new motif, but it wasn’t as helpful for thinking through the forms as the pen drawings have been for other subjects. So I began a one-to-one drawing in oil pastel to use as my rehearsal. It measures 24 x 36 inches.
And here it is further along —
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