Category: hydrangea

Just Not Feeling It, So I Plod

Here’s a look at the hydrangea painting as I plod along on it.  What is it about working from my own photos that just brings me down?  I seem to like the photo more than I do the painting.

Maybe that’s the trick.  My eye sees what it needs to see while composing the photograph.  Is it then not meant to be a painting afterwards?  I just see too much in the photo and my brain tries hard to replicate the details in paint.

I’m starting to get annoyed with this thing.  The colors I’m using are annoying, the way I’m applying the paint is annoying, the composition is annoying.  There’s nothing I am happy about with this piece.  That’s happened to me before so I keep plugging at it.

I did a watercolor in the spring of the daisies in my garden.  Yes, I painted it from life not a photograph.  Anyway, I wasn’t thrilled with the result, but I kept thinking in my head “It’s the process.”  I was going to ignore the result and move on to the next thing.  Well my DIL, Gorgeous, loved it and wanted it for the baby’s room.  That cemented the idea that maybe I don’t know beans about my own work.  So I plod through this watercolor too.  Push to finish it and think about what’s next.

Fighting resistance every step of the way with this painting, I plod.

Painting in the Wild vs the Studio

This new computer stuff is just taking up alot of time that I could be doing other things.  I visited the Apple Store yesterday and asked a few questions about the iphoto thing.  The wacky salesman, yes he was wacky and all over the place..very upbeat, high energy guy, went to a computer station and tried a few things.  He said he really wasn’t that informed about specifics with iphoto.  I watched in rapt awe as he brought up a photo and per my thoughts, resized it.  Amazing.

At the time of purchase our sales person asked if we wanted to add lessons.  I didn’t think it would be something I’d have time for so we opted out.  Of course, Son #2 has it all down already. Kids!  Now I’m thinking maybe lessons would have been a good idea.  But when?  I’ve got enough on my plate as it is, but then, if I knew what I was doing all this wouldn’t take all the time I do have.

It’s a dilemma.

I came home and tried to copy what the high energy crazy salesman did in the store and I did figure it out.  It just took me a while.  So maybe that’s what it will take, a while.

Later on I visited the watercolor of the hydrangea on my desk and got to work on it.  I don’t know how I feel about it.  Painting from life at the beach is so different from painting in the studio.  I think I like the life painting better.  I can’t be sure what it is about the out-of-studio painting.  It could be that I’m outside.  It could be that I’m working live and don’t have all day so I have to be quick. Maybe it’s that working from life leaves out the possibility of going into too much detail.  If I work from my photographs I see too much detail and paint too tight.  Working in the ‘wild’ I paint more freely, only adding enough detail to tell the story.  We’ve been down this road before, I know, I know.

Maybe it’s good to have different styles of painting?  Maybe I should just paint and keep quiet?

If I find that I’m really a plein air painter, winter is going to be a tough time!  I can’t even think about it from now.  Back to the easel!

Moving On To The Next Thing

After I had my lovely beach day a little while back, right now it feels as if it was a year ago, I decided to look over some of the photos I took in my garden and elsewhere.  Some of those photos stand on their own as photographs.  Did I really need to work them up as paintings?  Some of them just didn’t feel right at that moment.  None of the landscapes were pulling me in.

Then I printed out the hydrangea photos I took in the summer when they were at the height of deep blue color.  I even flipped the photos upside down to see if a spark would come.  Well, I did feel something click and I sketched out the big petals into some kind of composition.

I lightly painted in some shadows on the petals and went in darker with the background.  I’m still using the MaimeriBlu watercolor paints and not so sure I’m that thrilled with them.  The colors are not the same as the Windsor & Newton paints I have used in the past.  So I can’t even tell you which blues I dipped my brush into.  I’m just going on instinct and mixing and applying to the paper, which I’m enjoying working with.  Thanks to my artist/blogger friends’ suggestions, the Arches paper is making a difference in my work, but I haven’t been able to get going on this piece.

Shall I rant about now?  Why not.

The new baby excitement has calmed down and all is well in that area.  OK.  The idiot light in my studio went out a while back and hasn’t turned on again since.  Has it finally decided to quit?  Just watch when I call the electrician to fix it, the thing will light.  Isn’t that how it always is?

There’s my issue with the watercolor paints, as I mentioned above.  Not that happy with them, but spent the money and now I have to use them up.  When I think about it I feel discouraged.  Move on!

Then there’s the technology thing.  On the old PC I knew how to change the size of my photos, enhance the colors, etc.  Now with this iMac things are a little different and it just takes me longer to get what I want out of the photos, and from the computer.  Cut/paste, new tabs, skipping around looking for help, more to learn.  It’s tiring.

Rant over.  Time to get on with it.

Word for Wednesday is Wow

So, with the idea to tweak these photos from a lovely commenter from yesterday’s post, here they are.  This is the way the hydrangeas were meant to be seen!  And yes the word is WOW! 

I forgot all about the image adjusting program on the computer and was relying on the camera.  I guess I just felt like ranting.  Sometimes I think my monitor is not calibrated correctly and my photos might be too dark.  But hey, who cares?  Right now I am in heaven looking at the color of these petals!  Yes, sir.  This is how they’re supposed to look. 

Ideas are running through my head now.  Which to paint first?  Yippee!

Fun with Photos, Not

There he is again.  The yellow goldfinch that likes to come by my pink coneflowers, or echinacea, flew in yesterday afternoon to eat some seeds.  These birds are so skittish they won’t let me peek at them from my kitchen door.  I grabbed my camera soon as I saw this one and snapped this picture from the kitchen window, through the screen.  It’s the best I could do to capture the bird.  The Mr. gets so excited to hear these birds were here.  He raises finches and canaries, but this one is special.  What a beautiful color he is!
Yesterday I had to clip these huge hydrangea because some animal must have fallen on the branches and many were broken.  I gathered some and arranged then in a vase on my patio table.  They are stunning.  This morning as I was writing my Morning Pages, yes I’m still doing that, don’t ask anything else, I had the impulse to take a couple of photos to remember the deep blue color.  The edges of the petals were trimmed in a teal green and were very striking.
This photo looks nothing like the flowers!  I couldn’t get the camera to darken so the true blue could show.  Nope, nothing I do would allow me to capture the colors of these flowers.  Ok, whatever.  I tried every angle and the automatic camera kept lightening the picture.  Thanks alot.

This is not what the hydrangea look like at all.  I guess it’s going to be a fun day so far if this is how my morning started out.

Thinking of Painting and Don’t Ask About Dinner

Back to Monday, my favorite day of the week.  I apologize to those of you who hate Mondays, but I need Mondays like you need that first taste of coffee in the morning.  It’s like that.  Okay, I won’t bore you with the “gory” details of Monday morning, I know I’ve been there before and dragged you along.  Yeah, I know, you know, we all know!  Like Jerry Seinfeld used to say, “Yadda yadda.”  But I like to say BlahBlahBlah.

So, anyway, a nice quiet weekend at home was spent.  My family came for dinner, we ate, we laughed, we talked.  Was just lovely.  Calm and quiet morning, the Mr. took a ride on his bicycle, Son #2 in LaLaLand sleeping the morning away, and I had coffee and the Morning Pages on my lounge chair in the garden.

The Mr. raises birds.  Canaries, finches, other kinds I can’t remember, and hangs them outside our patio room and in the tree where they chirp and sing.  For a while it’s nice to hear the birds in the morning.  It feels like a far away forest escape until a few hours go by and the chirping/tweeting doesn’t stop from the five or six birds hanging out there and my head feels like it’s going to explode if those darn birds don’t shut up already! Ugh.

Ahem.  Sorry I almost lost it there.  Anyway.. After a long while they do calm down and so do I.  You know, chirping birds can get just as annoying as kids who don’t just play and talk but scream and run around in circles.  Cute and nice at first, bloody murder afterward.

No, I didn’t paint this weekend.  That’s why I like Monday.  Monday I get back to work too, except I’m already at the job site and everyone else leaves.  On the weekend too many people are around.  I don’t mind people looking over my shoulder as I work.  On the contrary, it’s nice and social.  But the family has demands.  They need things only I can do.  Yes, only me.  And if I’m painting, it seems to them I’m not really doing anything.  So they talk to me, ask me questions about other things, like what’s for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and where’s their socks.  Yes, a lovely conversation.  Uh, nope.

Back in the garden.  When my son and now daughter-in-law were planning their wedding, she wanted white hydrangea for her bridal bouquet.  I started looking at this flower differently after that.  I never really liked the bloom heads, all droopy and huge.  After the wedding I found these white hydrangea on sale, barely alive, and practically dried up at the local Home Depot.  I was compelled to rescue it.  Now two years later they are growing and blooming beautifully.  It’s called Blushing Bride and bloom all summer long.  Lucky me!

When I look at these flowers I think of my gorgeous daughter-in-law and it makes me so happy.  All weekend I spied this hydrangea thinking of how to paint it.  That’s how I spent my time in the garden with no one around.  Observing, thinking, planning, daydreaming, making mental notes.  It’s a lot of work, but looks like I’m idle and inactive.  With iced coffee in hand, lounging in the chair in the midst of the blooms I’m painting, but no one is the wiser.