Regarding the creative process

Margie (http://www.margiesartstudio.blogspot.com/) asked on everydaymatters@yahoogroups.com how everyone goes about the creative process--do you paint from your imagination? Only from life? Only from references? I thought that was a good question to illustrate with a painting (and a back story).

I have to have references. I am so envious of people who can paint from imagination (like Margie--look at her characters on her blog!). But I don't seem to be able to paint from within my head--or at any rate, very badly.

Frequently, however, I decide the subject of what I want to feature and then go looking for things to assemble, and they can be in-person, photos from Google Images, whatever. Here is a painting I did as a final assignment.The semester-long assignment from the watercolor class I was taking (from Carol Bishop at Los Angeles Valley College, a great teacher and mentor!) was to choose an object (mine was a blue teapot) and paint it every single week for an entire semester, looking at other artists' work and taking something from them to express in your rendition of the object: color palette, brush technique, theme, whatever. And the final assignment was to take everything you had learned and do a painting in your own style.

I soon got really bored with painting the damn teapot, so I kept trying to think of creative ways to use it. It featured in various paintings as an animated character, the moon, a teensy prop in the background, a wallpaper design...somewhere the teapot was there, but rarely the main event after the second or third assignment.

This painting included a back view of one of my "yard" cats from a window that I sketched really quickly one day, the blue teapot (from my kitchen), a mouse I found from a rodents and marsupials book in the library, trees/forest ditto from a botany book, and I also looked on the internet for a photo of Cinderella's carriage and the glass slipper to get good references from which to paint. I assembled them all, and figured out how to put them into perspective with each other, then combined them into this one picture. It's a plodding way to work, but my imagination seems to be limited to ideas ABOUT the painting rather than the visualization of the actual contents. It's called "Bereft of Cinderella."

Work-related again

Somebody on this list does wonderful paintings of books she is reading, and it inspired me. My middle school book clubs read The Mortal Instruments series (City of Bones,  City of Ashes, City of Glass) by Cassandra Clare over the summer, and we will be discussing them at our first meeting, so I did a quick re-read to be prepared, and then a quick painting just for fun. This isn't quite all of it, but I didn't feel like doing the patch job with the scanner like I did on the sunflowers! (All that's really cut off is the rest of the metal bookend and some background--

nothing essential.)

322 Continued

Here's another sign. This one didn't work out so well--I think I'm going to have to do a lighter/warmer color for the backgrounds and a darker/cooler color for the lettering, for these to work. Next, I want to try some with INK.

Challenge 322--something related to what you do

Everyone (including me) seems to be concluding that sentence with "for a living." I work as a teen librarian, and I am in the process of sprucing up my teen area, including new paint, furniture and decor. (I won a grant from the state library to finance the project.) I bought an area rug chosen by the teens, and am using it as the color scheme, keying everything off of it. Here is a picture of the rug:

The furniture will all be pale wood, with chrome legs, but the seats of the chairs will be teal, purple, and lime green (seven chairs in teal, seven in purple, and seven in lime green) (they're biodegradable linoleum!) and I plan to follow through with the paisley theme of the rug by stenciling paisleys in various sizes, in those three colors plus orange, on the back wall, which is now painted pale aqua. (Our whole library is in teals and purples, so I had to stick with the theme somewhat, but I'm going for brighter and more teen-friendly.) I need some signage to indicate a couple of sections, and am toying with the idea of doing some in watercolor, to put on the ends of the bookshelves. Here is one I tried out; I'm going to do a few versions, and then when I'm happy with it, I will do three or four signs like this for "Teen Fiction," "Manga and Graphic Novels" and so on.

Here are the chairs:

And here are some of our ancient but sturdy bookshelves:

More to come...

#76 Draw some flowers

I picked up these sunflowers at Trader Joe's this weekend, mostly because I had never seen sunflowers with a pale center before--only the ones with the dark brown center. I have to say, though, that it was impossible (at least for me) to satisfactorily capture the way the centers looked--a green depressed center with tiny yellow/orange/green filaments surrounding it--in watercolor. If I were a colored pencil person (and had a lot more patience than I possess), it would have been a lot easier. As it is, I worked it and worked it and finally decided it was done.

One thing I did figure out on this picture: The sunflowers persisted in looking flat, even though I added in some darks and shadows, until I finally decided to introduce a random color (alizarin crimson) and it suddenly gave them more depth and life. They still don't have the same three-dimensional feel that the vase--which I barely painted--has. Well, that's what these paintings are about--practice! (And no, it's not your imagination--I painted this 11x15 and had to scan it on my 8.5x11 flatbed scanner, so I put together four scans and you can see some seam lines. I guess I could take these out with Photoshop, but...I'd rather be painting!)

Cheating?

When I started this blog, I decided I would only post new art. I had a period of major creativity back a few years when I was working from home and taking watercolor classes at the local community college (and also it helped that I had a weekly assignment!), and I have relied too much on showing things from that period instead of continuing to produce new work, so this blog was a fresh start after a long period of inactivity. (And the EDM weekly assignment is helping!)

But! My cat Beatrice has been sick off and on for more than two years, and I finally bit the bullet and took her to a specialist for a bunch of very expensive tests, and everything was good news. I got two kinds of meds for her, her problems have all cleared up, and she is back to her old cranky feisty crazed self. So in honor of Beatrice, and because I came across it the other day and had a good laugh, I'm posting this picture. I called it "Princess Bea and the Pea." I'd like to have done Bea herself over, because I got all messy with my colors and lifted and reapplied once too often, but the expression on her face is dead on (you are staring at me WHY? while I'm sleeping?), and I have to admit I was pretty pleased with those pillows. (And no, I don't own the world's only purple cat--she's black, but my teacher proscribed the use of black, so I went for COLOR.)

Something I'd give away

#320

Fruit! Do you ever get the "right" amount from the tree? My apricot tree gives me 10 if I'm lucky, while I have HUNDREDS of lemons, and I take bags of these little green figs to work with me for weeks every summer. Not complaining about the figs, though--they're yummy.

I started this painting last night at 7:00 when I got home from work, and ran out of light at 8:15, so I finished it up this morning--thus some confusion about where the shadows should have fallen. My biggest challenge with watercolor (well maybe second biggest--biggest is not overworking) is introducing true darks. They look dark--and then they dry and they're medium. Hmmm.

Didn't really plan to go so elaborate with the dish towel, but I needed something besides that white picnic table to put under the fruit, and all my fabric swatches had little flowers and things. In retrospect, probably easier to deal with than the dish towel! Anyway, here it is--fruit to give away. (Though I must confess I ate the figs for breakfast.)