Skip to main content

Art Day—ARRGGHH Edition

ARRGGHH—Painting is so hard!!

Last week, I was visiting a woman who lives on the edge of town—she had built a modern open-concept house next door to the traditional farmhouse where she had grown up 60 years earlier, and I stood in the driveway between the two houses admiring the farmland and blue skies around me, and I decided to take some pictures of things the woman had displayed around her yard. She collects angels, and among them, I discovered some pots with artificial flowers.

I made a sketch based on the photograph:

And then I tried to paint it, and the result frustrates me to no end. There are some things I like about the texture of the pots, but I think I see my weakness—a general inability to draw. So, I think before I get anywhere with this painting thing, I'm going to have to figure out that major step. A class, maybe?

Comments

dive said…
Practice makes perfect, Robyn and you are way too hard on yourself. These are great, though I am SO glad you missed off the fake stone angels.
2:16 PM
kyle@sift said…
Painting is not hard. Trying to paint things to look like photographs is hard...technique is learned...style is handed to us...perhaps even given to us.
8:38 PM
dive said…
Good point, Kyle. I never painted from photos, Robyn. One of the first basic exercises we were given at art college was to paint the space around things (like Neetzy's painting site: Negative Space).
Try painting and drawing from life; your two eyes give a different perspective to the camera's single lens and allow you to see around the object you are painting and allow you to paint what the object actually is rather than - as with a photo - merely what the object looks like.
If you need any inspiration, head back into my archives under the "art" link and study my drawings of … er … nekkid men. Hee hee.
2:43 AM
Madame DeFarge said…
I'm just impressed that you do it at all. Why don't you go to some classes? you might discover that you're way better than everyone else.
2:32 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Happy Birthday...

to me! Update: Since you have asked, I only got one actual packaged gift, a beautiful hand-made bracelet from a friend, but both girls were home for the weekend, and we had dinner at the lake and a relaxing weekend. Thanks to all of you for your lovely wishes!
20 comments
Read more

My Sitemeter is All Bloated and Not Quite Itself

I'm tempted to let it sit on the couch with its feet curled up under a blanket, a hot cup of coffee in hand, a block of cherry almond bark Chocolove within reach, and An Affair to Remember spinning in the DVD player. I'm one of those obsessive bloggers, the kind who checks her sitemeter as often as possible throughout the day, the kind who gauges the quality of her writing by the number of readers who regularly stop by. I've become less interested in the overall number of hits and more interested in the number of repeat hits. The return visitors are the ones I long for. When my sitemeter reads forty at the end of the day, and the majority of those hits are webpals who have conversed, I'm happy. Forty may seem low to many of you, but I've only been at this since August. To me, forty is a jackpot. A few days ago, I sat down at my laptop and discovered a number somewhere in the eighties. Eighties! Yippee! Yeeha ! Hoo-rah ! I've been discovered by the webworld , o...
18 comments
Read more

Ish People

Tell an Ish person to show up around 9 a.m., and you'll see them somewhere around 9 a.m. Tell them to show up at 9ish, and you'll see them anywhere from 9:05 to 9:20. You have given them license to dilly dally, and who wouldn't take advantage of that? The other night at the big shindig dinner party, one of the drummers said the rehearsal the next morning would begin at 9ish. "I am an ish person," he says. Immediately the clanker goes off in my head--oh, good, I thought. I can deliver my daughter a little late. No Ish person is early, so if you say 9ish, that does not mean give or take 5, 10, 15 minutes. It's exclusively a taking phrase. Take an extra 10 minutes to drink your cup of coffee. We won't mind. We're Ish people. Sunday's rehearsal started at 2:00. Because it was conducted by the same people who conducted the Saturday rehearsal, my understanding was 2-ISH. My daughter is worse than I am about taking liberties with Ish time frames, so she d...
14 comments
Read more