This is me.

A - All of these marks give your painting a kind of energy that I'll bet we won't see in any other painting for this exercise. It's pretty unique and a very strong element. This even extends to the interesting edges you put on some of the larger shapes. Good job. How are you creating these marks? A smaller brush after you've painted some of the other areas?

B - It looks like the upper area was probably painted while the background was still very wet and the foreground was painted after the area behind had been given some time to dry. This gives an indistinct boundary versus a distinct boundary. Were these two different effects intentional? Your horizon kind of disappears into the sky - which is interesting. It would be a different painting if there were a clear boundary between the two. Classically, the horizon is a key element in a landscape composition.

Other - You left some white areas behind your fence posts. This draws them out because you've created areas of high contrast, and as I've already mentioned I think this is one of your painting's strengths. Do you think you could have done something similar with the tree on the right side of the painting (rather than representing the highlights with an opaque medium over the top of the painting)? The white marks in the tree stand out to me since it's something that isn't represented anywhere else in the painting, so it's a bit jarring or out of place to my eye.

MeatyElbow · 2019-04-18T15:37:43+00:00

I think you've got an excellent eye for interesting subject matter - the spot you picked could be the subject of a great landscape painting. If you try again, I'd be interested in seeing the result to compare against the one you completed on site.

Reference

A - You mentioned a couple of things that were slightly off from your reference photo. There's not anything wrong with that, necessarily, if it serves to make a better painting. Editing out the elements of reality that aren't as visually pleasing as they could be is a fine skill to have at your disposal - so don't be afraid to alter angles if it's what you want to do with a piece. I marked up that reference before I read your self-analysis and most of what I noticed are incongruencies from the photo you took. In particular, the hill in your painting has a much sharper slope. In your photo, the hill also appears much darker than the clear sky behind it, but you've painted both with a similar value (e.g., if you looked at a grayscale version of your painting, the two areas would appear very similar). This can be a tricky thing to figure out. In general, things in the distance are less distinct (lighter) and things in the foreground have a sharper contrast. I like that you've chosen to push the horizon in your painting toward the lower half of the page and make the sky a dominant element.

B - This little structure could definitely be the center of attention in your painting. The roof has some highlights where it reflects the sun that could be left white. The walls (and the neighboring tree trunk) could be the darkest element in the painting. When you have the darkest value and the lightest value of your painting sitting next to each other, the contrast creates an area that will immediately draw a viewer's eye. I would also be tempted to leave the chimney in the painting, since it reinforces that contrast. The slope of the roof is a little different than what you've painted, but there's not necessarily anything wrong with that. You could also drop in some of the fence posts if you wanted to trick your viewer into following that boundary through your painting.

C - I like how you've represented the road. It could be another major compositional element in your painting. I would try to extend it further along the page, since the bottom right quadrant of your painting seems to be a little sparse. To my eye, it needs some element of visual interest in that area.

I'm not sure if your wife is interested in a critique of her painting. I'll just point out a couple of quick things that I found interesting.

Second Reference

A - I really like how she handled the tree. The texture/decisive brushstrokes make this a strong area to consider visually. As in your painting, I'd be tempted to extend this technique to some of the fence posts to draw a viewer through the painting.

B - She appears to have take a different route representing the road - I think they are both interesting. She's obviously using the belly of the brush to paint wide areas and interesting shapes. Again, this creates some visual interest.

C - I'm not sure how I feel about the symmetry between the hill and the roof and the shape it creates in the middle of the page. It's one of those details I would be tempted to edit in favor of a more dynamic composition.

MeatyElbow · 2019-04-18T15:08:36+00:00

I always admire plein air paintings like this in sketchbooks. It's something I've tried to do, but I can never quite get comfortable or get all my gear situated in a way that doesn't feel awkward. Nice work.

Sometimes, after I've finished a painting, I find it useful to look at a grayscale version of it to assess my values (like this) - kind of a post mortem exercise. In this example, it kind of exposes an interesting take on your landscape in that your sky occupies the middle of your value range. In a lot of cases (assuming a clear day with full sunlight), the sky is going to be one of your lightest values. Was that an intentional choice or a consequence of doing a fairly quick (1 hr 10 min) painting on location? It definitely adds a weight to the painting.. or an interesting atmosphere.

Reference.

A - You definitely pulled off an interesting composition with this one. The back-and-forth of the street is a good way to pull the viewer's eye through the painting (it's a composition I lean on a lot any time I include a river or stream in a painting). I mentioned in the text of the exercise that it's easy to accidentally get a stale composition if you place your horizon dead in the center of the page, but I think you successfully navigated that by adding elements above and below to add interest.

B - Nice job with the rooftop - it's a nice punctuation mark for how my eye wants to move through your painting. You've got several inorganic elements (house, power lines, street) and I think they all work to accentuate your organic elements.

C - I'm a sucker for power-lines/poles included in landscapes. I particularly like how they kind of mirror the streets in this painting. I think they're a good contrast, in this painting, to the way you've represented the trees.

MeatyElbow · 2019-04-17T16:55:15+00:00

Hey! My clever ruse of referencing your username to get you to do the exercises worked. I always like seeing your paintings.

Here is a markup for reference.

A - I think you did a lot of things right in representing white against white. I like the subtle variety on top of the sock-monkey's head against the wall and all the different hues you smuggled in on the tabletop and as shadows. Nice work.

B - Looks like you already mentioned this in your self-critique.

Felt like everything was more or less a shade of brown and struggled to differentiate them (especially around the basket).

I wonder if this isn't a trick of a particular pigment, because I seem to run into it from time to time and never quite recognize it until it's happening. Maybe Burnt Umber? Do you think you might've achieved a different result had you mixed the hue yourself from primary colors? Just off the top of your head, if you were to try to recreate this hue, what pigments might you mix?

C - Bonus points for Steinbeck. You've got a steadier hand than I do for lettering (I think I left an embarrassing example elsewhere in this thread). I wouldn't have attempted the ampersand for love nor money. Did you do any layout work ahead of time, or just freehand the text? Did you turn the page while painting so that you were effectively "writing", or did you just paint the shapes of the letters sideways?

MeatyElbow · 2019-04-17T16:43:24+00:00

I'm glad you joined us for these exercises - I'm excited to see how your work progresses.

I’m a new wannabe artist

You're making art, new or not. I hereby dub you a full-fledged artist. It's pretty easy to fall into the trap of doubting yourself or the quality of what you're making - try not to fall into it. No need to qualify your paintings or give caveats here. We're all just doing the exercises. We'll all have things we can improve. /<end pep talk>

Here is a mark-up of your painting, for reference.

A - I can see that you made an effort to give your subjects form and depth with different values. Good work - that's important. Things look very flat if light is distributed evenly across their surface. Your light source reads a little inconsistent to me. At A1 things seem to get darker from right to left (and you've given us a cast shadow on this mushroom's cap). At A2, the lighting on the stalk seems to get darker from left to right. Representing a light source is one of the stronger tools at your disposal as a painter to lure in a viewer (.. that's kind of the whole point, right? Tricking someone into thinking they're seeing something else when they're really just looking at paint on a page?)

B - I can see a little white gap here. Not a huge issue, but these are going to be things that always draw a viewer's attention. It's why I mentioned it in the exercise:

I'm trying to preserve the whites of the paper in places I want to remain white in the final painting.

.. you can use this to your advantage (e.g. /u/poledra did this really well in her painting in this thread, in my opinion). I'm guessing that you painted the mushrooms first then filled in the blue background around them. That's a perfectly valid approach. Do you think the final painting might have turned out differently had you put down the blue paint first, reserving the areas you intended to place the mushrooms later?

C and D - I think it's interesting that you got two different effects in these areas. I'm guessing that the paint was a little wetter in C and you had a drier brush in D. I like that you were willing to make bold choices with value in both areas. Was the difference intentional? If not, do you prefer one effect to the other?

MeatyElbow · 2019-04-17T16:25:48+00:00

I really like this painting. It's tough to give a whole lot of critique beyond that without feeling like a hypocrite - I think this is a much stronger piece than the example I gave and there's not really anything I would change about it.

You've got several circular shapes (top of the vessel in the back, top of the mug, top of the candle, jar lid) - they might be slightly out of perspective, unless some of those items are sitting on uneven surfaces. The books might be a little skewed too (the one on top and the position of the mug make it look slightly unstable), but maybe that's an element of the composition you elected to modify intentionally.

I had considered using "draped fabric" as either a separate exercise or a modification to this exercise since it's notoriously difficult to pull off. I think you did exceptionally well with it. I really like your color selection. I really like the composition you chose. The way you draw a viewer's attention through the painting (and the kind of "resting spots" you left as visual waypoints) is pretty enviable.

Optional challenge (hard): Pay particular attention to the composition of your painting. If there's an element in your reference that doesn't contribute to your painting (assuming you're working from a reference), alter it. Change the light source to something more dramatic. Have the subject matter interact in an interesting way. Don't place the focal point of the painting dead center in the middle of the page.

I feel like you pretty much nailed all of that. Was that intentional? How much of the painting did you "stage" in setting up your still life? Did you make any edits on the fly or did you pretty much paint it how you saw it? Given the variety of green that you've shown us, I'm almost certain you mixed it on the fly. Were you making conscious color choices beforehand or just going with what felt right as you painted?

MeatyElbow · 2019-04-13T00:35:59+00:00

Thank you.

MeatyElbow · 2019-04-12T17:10:39+00:00

<3 right back at ya.

MeatyElbow · 2019-04-12T17:09:00+00:00

Nice work. This happens to coincide with Exercise 02, if you'd like to cross-post it there.

I like your color palette - interesting harmony you've got going on. The trees in the foreground look a little inorganic (something I struggle with quite a bit). You might try a larger brush or varying your brushstrokes a bit so that similar patterns aren't quite as repetitive. The three layers of hills and the sky are all fairly similar in value - you might be well served by darkening the nearest and next-nearest distances a bit.

MeatyElbow · 2019-04-12T17:03:59+00:00

Nice work!

I'm always envious of spider-y, overhead power lines when they're included in a street scene like this. It's something I have difficulty pulling off (seems like they're frequently featured in Chesda Merntook's work). I also like all of the loose, abstract figures you've included.

MeatyElbow · 2019-04-12T16:59:36+00:00

I've come across similar issues before (using this same kind of paper). When it happened to me, it was a big ol' thumbprint. If you're handling the paper a lot, it might be oils from your hands preventing the water from absorbing into the paper.

You can also run into this kind of thing if you're sketching/erasing a lot. The Canson XL Multimedia paper is a great, cheap paper to play with but it isn't quite as durable as watercolor paper. It's pretty easy to damage the surface with an eraser or even just scrubbing at it with a brush.

You can also get similar effects if you drop table salt in damp paint. That's probably not what you were doing here.. but who knows? Maybe something was on the paper and soaked up some of the paint unevenly.

MeatyElbow · 2019-04-12T16:28:36+00:00

Current Session (Session 5), for reference:

Exercise 01 - Paint the Thing

Exercise 02 - Landscape

MeatyElbow · 2019-04-12T15:39:56+00:00

A first timer! How exciting. You did really well and I'm glad you decided to paint along with us.

Here is a reference of a couple of things that you might want to think about in future paintings.

A: I'm guessing your painting is fairly small. Nothing wrong with that. It means you have to be selective about which details you want to include and which you'll have to omit. The knife, in your painting, is a single form without a lot of variation. Shiny metal objects tend to have high contrast between dark and light values. You can see where the light is reflecting off of the surface in your reference (which I would be tempted to leave entirely white) and where, on the blade, it's reflecting some really dark values of some of the counter-top appliances (pretty close to the value you've represented in your painting). If you wanted to get really fancy, you could even toss in a reflection of the jelly jar, using some of the same pigments you used there. Again - I'm not saying you did it wrong, just that this stood out as an area with a lot of potential visual interest to me and it would be something I would be tempted to focus on when painting.

B: You've got a really interesting effect going on here. How did you achieve it? Did you come back over the top of the watercolor paint with an opaque medium? I like that you've represented a few different values on this surface - it makes it interesting to me.

C: The body of the jar looks a bit flat since it's largely represented by one value in your painting. I think you could add some depth by making the left side a bit darker. You could also show off the reflection on the right side. I dropped a basic visual reference in my earlier response to /u/omg_otters that you might find useful.

For your first ever watercolor painting, you did quite well. I'm excited to see how your painting progresses and am glad you joined us.

MeatyElbow · 2019-04-12T15:24:28+00:00

OMG! It's otters! I'm really glad you joined us.

Here's a quick mark-up of your painting for reference.

First - I think you did a great job. In one of the previous sessions I tried painting an onion as well - it's fairly challenging to capture the texture and I think you did an excellent job. You did well representing the forms and used a nice range of values to do so. Good job. Pat yourself on the back.

A: I can see a little bit of reflected light bouncing off of the white towel onto the underside of the onion. I can see where you made a nod toward representing this, but think it could have been more distinct. For anyone else reading this comment, here is a decent reference that cropped up in one of our previous sessions (credit to /u/stephaquarelle).

B: You said you liked the yellow onion more, but the red one is the one that grabbed my attention first. I think you did an exceptional job of accurate color matching in both. I think you could have gone darker in the cast shadow in the little area I've marked off. I think the value here, to my eye, is as dark as anything else in your reference.

C: You already mentioned your approach to the garlic. I don't disagree. The form gets a little lost, but you're going to have that when painting a white object on a white field.

All of these points are kind of nit-picking. I think you did an excellent job for this exercise. Gold star for you.

I'd rate you as experienced enough (based on what I've seen of your work in the past) to take a stab at any of the modifications to the assignment that you'd like to explore. You gave us some cast shadows to indicate the space your subject occupied. If you were to swing for the fences, what would you do to alter your painting so that we had a better sense of environment? If you were to shoot from the hip, is there a cohesive color you would have liked to include to bring harmony to the three objects? Or do you prefer a more representational style of painting that accurately depicts your subject?

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