Hot Air Balloons

This past weekend was the Adirondack Hot Air Balloon Festival out at the local airport. Wasn't sure we were going to make it as I've been working a lot, but we did and it was just wonderful! I hope to squeeze in a few paintings of these huge bulbous balloons in the next few days. So much color is inspiring!

The kites were terrific this year too - so many of them and also soooo colorful -
Hasta Manana -

Ideas Beget Ideas

Ideas Beget Ideas:

From ideas come other ideas. This may sound simple and obvious, but I've recently rediscovered this beautiful simple fact.

Take an idea you have and go with it - you just simply Do Not know where you will wind up, even if you think you do. It's surprising and delightful! Think of a maze, or a mountain trail you're hiking for the first time. You have ideas about where you're going, but until you turn that corner, you yourself in person actually there in that spot, you cannot truly imagine what you will see, will find, will feel. The experience of it, of the discovery, of the working through is priceless and you can't get to the unexpected and interesting in any other way. Just thinking about things is great, but doesn't bring you to a different, refreshed, place in the same way "doing" does.

Typing or - again - thinking, is not as effective as writing with a pencil - paragraphs of stuff pouring out of me or you - understandings and uncoverings of revelations that change the course of our ideas and actions. Akin to drawing, the flow from brain through arm to pencil is a direct taping-into of we artists, the "filter" that is us, our core creativity that truly cannot be got at any other way.

So get with that composition book and those ideas and dig into them deep, work hard in them - you'll be thrilled and find yourself some place good you didn't expect to be - I guarantee!

Pouncing Instructions for Color Theory Studies

Alrighty then.... As I mentioned a few days ago, here are instructions for making pounces - a truly wonderful thing for artists to know.

You will need:

• Your design, simply drawn with a pencil.
• A piece of homosote or a soft piece of pine board to press into with the wheel.
• Powdered Charcoal.
• A piece of loosely woven cloth about a foot square.
• A piece of string about 10 inches.
• A small cup or jar to store your pounce bag in.
• A pounce wheel.
• A Sharpy Marker.

So, the first thing you are going to do is make your pounce bag. Take your cloth and lay it out flat on a piece of scrap paper that you can throw away. If it is too loosely woven, like cheesecloth, you may need two layers, or more depending. You don't want clouds of charcoal poofing through, so experiment a bit.

Dump about a half a cup of the charcoal right in the middle of the cloth and gather the corners and the sides to make a bag and tie it up tight with the string. I use a bow so I can easily untie it to put more charcoal in. This should last you your whole life, except of course for adding more charcoal. Be sure you have a yogurt cup or a suitable container to store it in - no lid necessary.

See picture below:


Next, you'll "pounce" your design with your pounce wheel. Grifhold makes a terrific set of four aluminum wheels. These are great if you work with small designs - I use them often. If you work very large, like I also often do, then you'll need a beefier wheel. I get mine from a wonderful company - Atlas Levy Sewing Machine Co. It was less than five dollars for the wheel and the shipping and it's a really nice one. A great deal can still be found! That is the one pictured below.


Now take your design and place it on your homosote (available in most hardware stores) or pine board. Don't tape it down because you'll be turning it. Now push the wheel into the lines on your drawing and just roll it and follow your pattern. This will poke holes in your paper - and your fingers so be careful. Sometimes it's useful to use the larger wheels on the straighter lines and the smaller ones in the tight curves. Hold your paper up to the light when you think you're finished to see if you've missed anything. If you goof, just cover the holes you don't want to show with masking tape.

Next, take your pounced drawing and place it on your canvas, (lying flat on a table or floor), Do tape it down this time. Now gently tap your pounce bag on your drawing until there is visible charcoal puffing out, but just a bit. Then rub it over the area with the bottom of the bag. Continue patting and rubbing with the bag until you have covered the whole surface. Very carefully lift a corner to be sure you've got just enough of the design visible as dots. When you are finished, lift off the paper with the drawing on it.

Lastly - take a pencil or sharpy marker, depending on what you're doing and carefully go over the lines. Watch that you don't brush off the drawing as you work. For one of my color study pounces I just put masking tape down against the charcoal-dot grid - no pencil involved. After you've traced the whole thing, blow off the charcoal. I find I need to use a good sized stiff brush to get it off a heavily textured canvas, but no big deal.

And - presto - you have your grid all ready. Once you've made it, it's super quick to make a bunch of grids, like the ones you see below to make color studies with. Leaves the time for the fun thinking about color instead of measuring out every time.

Now - I do this all the time and even though I've proof-read, please let me know if I've missed something of if you have any questions -


Happy Painting........ : 0 )

Oil Study on Grid

This is the beginning of one use for these simple grids. It is really a color circle, just each color painted randomly in a square. Below each grid I make the best "burnt sienna" and "burnt umber" that I can from that set of primaries. The paint was wet when I photographed it, so the color isn't that great here. Will scan it when it's dry and replace this one...

You can pretty easily pick out the primaries. This one is Winsor Red Deep, Phthalo Blue and Cad. Yellow Med. I'll do it again with a different set of primaries like Alizarin Crimson, French Ultramarine, and Cad. Lemon.

Once a few of these are done with different primaries, you can compare them and see a difference in the color "flavor" so to speak. Then it's fun to choose which color set best suits your needs for a particular light situation.

There will be more color study and and a tutorial on pounces in the posts to follow.

Happy Painting! : 0 )

Making Color Study Layouts Easier

I make pounces for my color study layouts. This is a really old method of transfer - used by Michelangelo, DaVinci and many others hundreds of years ago.

This is not very practical for every day fine art painting, but really speeds things up for these simple color studies. I'll explain the process in a future post - so stay tuned..... : 0 )

A very simple, but effective grid is seen here with the beginning of a watercolor study in my sketchbook.

Color Studies

I've been spending some of the bit of extra time I have on my hands these days revisiting color studies.

The study and drive for an increased color understanding is a life-long pursuit! It - thankfully - never ends. I've been working on my own version of Mr. Schmid's color charts as you see on the left, as well as other exercises which I'll explain....

Though I've done studies similar to this before, at this point in time it is helping me to recharge my brain on the possibilities of color mixtures and to simplify my pallet. I'm thinking this is both coloristically and economically a great move. So now I have several versions of the primaries and then what I call adjectival colors, for when I need an anomalous color or am just being too lazy to mix, or for quick sketches. My rules for paring down include not compromising on the saturation of any color - if that means adding another tube of something - fine. Also permanence, clarity, transparency, etc. My pallet consists of primarily Old Holland and Winsor & Newton with a couple of colors in Sennelier and Holbein.

This Last Week -

Hi All -

Been spending this last week getting our boy's homeschooling set up. It is just awesome! What a fantastic experience! My husband is teaching most of it, but I get to teach music, art- yea - and Spanish. We built big desks for them and set up a great classroom space.

Also been working on a large painting of gords and squash - no limited palette. I sometimes just need to use every color I can - get a good dose! Will post that asap.

Also working on some color studies - never enough time to explore color. May post some of those too. --- and some small still life work.

It's getting chilly here - the cooler temps are beginning to bring out the fall colors... just gorgeous. Our humming bird feeders are very busy with the thermometer dropping - that little lady above is one of our residents.