Ohio State Murals

Last week I painted a couple murals, one of Woody Hayes, another of Ezekiel Elliott, in a 'man cave' for a client in Michigan. Yeah- he was born in Ohio, but he still lives in Michigan, and loves his Buckeyes apparently.

These are acrylic paint and measure about 52" x 42".

Last painting for the Spring Session

11" x 14" oil on canvas-- from a photo I took when I was in Phoenix and the students did a pretty nice job with it too!

Week Five of Our Painting Class

I've been leading some painting classes on Tuesday nights and last week we painted a rooster. To everyone's surprise, including my own, it was an easy piece. All bright colors, mostly primary, and keeping an eye out for the major value change on the bird's neck.

Sharing the Joy

Every year I teach a fall and a spring class at the local Senior Center. I ask them to commit to four sessions because I really don't want people who expect a paint by numbers class. I enjoy teaching retired folks who have a genuine interest in learning the craft.

When you retire you should try all the things you wanted to do when you were working but didn't make time for. Notice I didn't say "have"time for. That's because I believe if you really want something you will make time for it. The time may only be available if we're willing to give up another activity. I stopped watching television in order to have time to paint. I'm pretty sure I didn't miss anything. When I play Trivial Pursuit I don't so well in the Entertainment category, but that's OK.

In our  four two-hour sessions at the Senior Center we don't have time to learn much more than the basics, but you can do a lot if you have just a little knowledge about painting. We cover value, color, proportion, line and color mixing. Some of the students have paints at home and they work on projects between sessions. Those are the people who do some good work.

One of the most important aspects of the class is mutual encouragement. We all paint a little differently and there is no right or wrong way because marks and style are very personal. The truly wonderful thing about this group is they all make a point of building one another up.

They prefer to paint landscapes, and those kind of subjects are more forgiving for beginners. Here are a couple of the paintings we did from the last two weeks.

Row Boats

Last week my adult painting class met for the third week and they painted row boats. The catch here was that they were allowed to change the color of the rowboat if the wished. Or they could stick to the relatively neutral sepia colored boat I gave them for a reference.

It was jun to watch their creativity come into play. As always, no two paintings are the same. They're not even close! Tomorrow is our final class in the session and I think they have all learned a little bit about color mixing and brush strokes.

Class Update

A few of the students taking my painting class tell me they are checking my blog for updates and are wondering if they are going to see their paintings posted here. To those folks I say-- yes! Unfortunately, we had five people in class last week and I only got pictures of four of the paintings. Someone had to rush away a bit early.

It's worth noting that they struggled with the same issues for the most part.
1) tree limbs are segments and they vary in width and length, becoming narrower as they grow away from the trunk.
2) a little green beside the orange will go a long way toward making the orange look brighter- without having to resort to using so much bright color.

Overall they had some good work to show and I know they learned a few things about color and had the experience of using a preprimed gray canvas board.

Things I Learn from Teaching Workshops

I like to look at every experience as an opportunity to learn something new, even when I'm the teacher! It keeps my eyes open to new ways of seeing and my mind thinking about new ways to do things. Last week I taught another workshop on painting animals. Since it was a week-long class I decided to start with a drawing lesson first. I truly believe that you can't be a good painter until you've mastered drawing. Many people take one of my classes and come in with no drawing experience, and they're able to turn out some nice generic landscapes. However, to actually learn and understand how to model three dimensional objects drawing skills are a must.

We started with a cat and learned an easy way to get proportions right by using one standard unit of measure, in this instance the distance from the outside of the cat's left eye to the outside of it's right eye. Then we used that measurement to judge the proportions of everything else when we put our marks down. Even the 12 year olds (the youngest I allowed in the class) seemed to understand this.

We started our acrylic paintings the next day. Everyone tried to paint my little Gold Retriever puppy with the rose, and most of them were successful. A few students wanted to branch out on their own projects and that was OK with me too.

Two people in the class had been creating art for many, many years and to my great surprise these students were the slowest to grasp the concepts I was teaching. I do not think this was a case of not being able to teach an old dog new tricks. I've never believed that anyway. Dogs are smart and they can learn a new trick at any age. What I do believe is that these artists had been doing things in a different way for so many years that they actually BLINDED themselves to the possibility of doing it another way. At some point in their artistic journey their minds had become closed to the possibilities. I don't believe this was intentional. I think it happens whenever you become too focused on the process instead of the results. I have noticed that a lot of artists can tell me what they want to do: paint looser, forget the detail etc.. I'm not sure these artists have every tried to do this on their own though. They wait for someone to come along and SHOW them how, when they should be figuring out on their own how to achieve this, putting in some practice time and then ironing out the details at a workshop. Instead they expect to master the whole concept in one week. It can't be done.

On the other hand, the students who had no idea how to proceed were able to follow along more easily as they had no preconceptions about HOW to achieve the result they wanted. I've included a few pictures of the participants and some of the student's work here. It was an acrylic painting class but I admit to taking my dog home and doctoring him up with my oil paints. :)

Acrylic Painting Class in Bryan

I'm doing a four week painting class in Bryan and we started off all painting the same thing. I did a Powerpoint presentation showing the painting step-by-step and gave them some info on color and how to block in and we were off an running. Next week they get to choose from flowers or a landscape. I like to have them all do the same thing the first night so I can get an idea of how much experience they have. The subject was a rowboat with Ocracoke Lighthouse int he background. Everyone did quite well!

My version of the painting we did is below.

Composition and Simple Subjects

I teach a few art classes and workshops every year so I am always trying to come up with "easy" ways to approach simple subjects. I use these exercises for the first class to give everyone a bit of confidence. It's my firm opinion that a painter with confidence and a big brush will create a better painting than a hesitant painter with a small brush (or any size brush).

Fruits and other organic subjects are deceptively simple subjects. I still have these pears because we haven't munched our way through them yet and I never get tired of doing still life paintings. So I set up another composition using my favorite fruit and did a quick 45 minute study this morning. It was important to be able to paint this quickly because I want the students to be able to start and finish their piece in one 2 hour session. I usually give them a photograph of the finished painting so they can see how my version turned out and a choice of photographs of the still life set up. I begin the class with a 15 minute demonstration on how to approach the painting, leaving them with a couple hours to do their piece.

The first class in this session starts Tuesday, October 2 at the Bryan Community Center on Buffalo Road in Bryan, Ohio. Classes will be held from 6-8:30 PM for four consecutive Tuesdays. Contact Cindy Rau at crau@cityofbryan.net to register for the classes or obtain more information. This is an oil or acrylic class and there is a $30 supply fee payable to me the first night of class.

Perfect Pears

6" x 6"

Sometimes I will check the composition using the "THRESHOLD" function

in Photoshop, which reduces the values to black and white and creates a simulated ink drawing.

If the black areas match my initial block in I know I have

remained faithful to the initial concept. I was pretty close with this one.

Painting for Dollars

Wow - that title sounds like it would make a good game show! Unfortunately, it's the state of the economy for this painter right now. I haven't sold anything in a couple weeks and my prices continue to be very affordable, so I am almost certain it's the economy. I think this recession (is it a depression?) is gong to last awhile, and while it's a good time to buy art because it has never been this low priced, you could say that about a lot of things. Houses are going for much less than they were a year ago. Car dealers are running sales because the cars are piling up! So it only makes sense that if people aren't working they aren't going to have money to buy art. I am just driven to paint though so I'll keep producing and store them in my basement if they don't sell. I also have work hanging in a couple gift shops (one in Archbold and one in Waterville) now so that's another venue. Sports oriented prints continue to sell pretty well at the Jobst Tower (three this past week!)

I have been lax in the month of May about posting, although I have been really productive with my painting! So here are a few to catch up. These two models posed for my weekly portrait group; Tim the Samurai guy in April/May and the little girl, Dana, in June.

My Acrylic and Oil Painting Class

I have been meaning to post some pictures from this class for awhile. We meet at Main Street Art & Glass, Delta, Ohio on Tuesday evenings from 6-8:30 pm through the first week of May. Here they are hard at work. I am proud of my students. The ones who stick with it have become really good painters.