Three Days, Three Paintings

16x20 inches, acrylic

The Shelby Keefe workshop I attended at the Peninsula Art School certainly got me painting. I mostly finished three paintings in three days, and realized what a slow painter I am. This fall scene was my first attempt, and though I like the way the under-painting makes the colors vibrate, I probably will go back and make the trees look more three dimensional and the leaves look less like blobs.

I believe there probably are enough barn paintings in the world already, but I wanted to tackle my personal nemesis, architecture. If I were doing a watercolor I would have plotted this baby out on a graph and gotten it as close to right as possible, but here I eyeballed it. I looks a wee bit like paint-by-numbers, but I am satisfied enough for a class exercise. The blue peeking through the gold soybean field adds interest, and ties the bottom of the painting to other areas.

This poor woman ended up with essentially no face and an arm that appears to have been badly broken in childhood. I like the rowboat best, and again the orange and blue in the under-painting adds more interest than would have been there otherwise. This photo was a challenge for the Different Strokes From Different Folks blog, and I've wanted to try it for ages.

So, now I'm back home in my teeny studio, and am trying again. This time I have a photo from a local farm market of pre-Halloween pumpkins, and I hope the blue underneath will lend sparkle to the painting. It's certainly a different way of working for me, and I have hopes that I'll like the results.

All these paintings were done in acrylic paint. Keefe only uses acrylic for her under-paintings, then uses oils for the main part. I've always been hesitant to use oils, though I have a small selection of water mixable oils set aside. My big concerns are that they smell strong in such a small space and that I cannot figure out where I would put them to dry. Still, I want to try using them, if for no other reason than I already bought the paint.

Fiddle-dee-dee, I'll worry tomorrow.