Daily Painting

I had a sudden epiphany the other day. If you find yourself doing as an adult what you used to do as a child - without being forced, or for a career, or any other reason or for any other person - it brings tremendous joy. Because as a child, you made uninhibited choices for pure pleasure, and you could get lost in that activity. I am now doing watercolors, and I like entering competitions to see how good I am compared to everyone else. As a child, I did watercolors with a child's paintbox and I also did a lot of other crafts on my own, borrowing books constantly from the library to learn/try/make different things [frequently borrowing books is another childhood habit that is very present now] and I used to enter artsy and writing competitions all the time. The thrill of waiting for the result gave me a bigger high than winning. Winning was a temporary good feeling but it never lasted as long as I would have expected. (I think that was because my work was never PERFECT. I always saw...

I am just starting to see how I can change the colors of what I see. It can make for a more interesting interpretation. Just as a writer, in the beginning, writes about herself because that is what she knows best, and cannot yet make up fiction, so an artist paints what she sees - almost exactly. She doesn't know how to correct the composition, change colors, improve what is in front of her. That transition happens slowly. When I started as a writer, I wrote about incidents in my life. When I was first able to write a short story I had made up entirely, it was a big moment. So, now, I feel I have progressed when I move shapes around to better the composition, change the colors - see beyond what is in front of me. Even cropping a wide expanse of inspiration to what will make a good painting - is progress. Even in front of nature, one must compose. EDGAR DEGAS I saw this building in Sunnyvale last night and it looked wonderful. I found a daytime image of it today and did thi...

I looked for images online of urban crowds and came up with a few pictures of people walking through streets. It was good practice for figures. And it is endless .... I could do this all day. Here are two that I did from those images. Feet are harder than they seem. My poor boy on the left looks like his feet are facing the viewer though he is walking away from us :-( Flesh tones are hard too. The key, I think, with any subject is to leave enough whites of the paper.