Joe “The Artist” Paints & Sketches

How did you decide to do that?

Not every work-in-progress is a success, but if learning occurs, then the things you throw away, are just practice. Planning is an important part of the artist’s day. One of our famous forefathers’ said: “If you fail to plan, then you are planning to fail.” So, in this vein, some of my day is spent in looking through (and throwing out) pictures that I have picked out of magazines, photos that I took, the web, and other sources, that “really grabbed my attention.” I look at them from several directions (rotating them) and think about the thoughts that went through my mind at the time.

Some of the more impressive pictures merited a note of what I might plan to do with that picture and I put a “post-it” note on the photo before committing it to the “look over” folder. Because I have been doing a lot of practice using negative painting, it was now time to incorporate the exercises into a mixed method (negative and positive.) The figure below shows that I first did a drawing of the general shape of the flower, left this area white (the paper), and then proceeded to incorporate the shapes around the flowers, using the negative painting techniques described in earlier articles. After several glazings (a thin wash) in which more and more pigment is used and the color is varied yields shapes whose tones and colors casue then to recede into the background, creating depth. I generally use a mixture of the compliment of the first color (in this case the first color was pthalo green – a bluish green) which in this case is an orange-red (remember our rule for the compliment of a less than pure color: blue’s compliment is orange; green’s compliment is red.)

There is more to be done, but what I am doing here is establishing the darks and the muted colors, so that I can “punch out the pure colors” in the foreground.