October Pumpkins

In Hanover County, Virginia,  where I now live, fall is particularly lovely. The profusion of green has given way to warm rich tones of gold, red and orange. October is pumpkin season, and you don't have to drive too far around here to find a roadside stand where you can pick up some  pumpkins to decorate the front stoop. If you are feeling adventurous you can even take the kids to a pumpkin patch so they can pick their very own.  Myself, I rather like leaving them put and painting them right where they are growing (in this case, the pumpkins, not the kids!). 

"October Pumpkins, Hanover" Oil on Panel, 8x10" ©Jennifer Young

This painting came about after getting a call from a painter friend of mine. She'd made arrangements to paint at the Hanover Vegetable Farm on one of the last days in October, and invited me to come along. I drive past this farm from time to time and I'd been eyeing those pumpkins for a couple of weeks. But for whatever reason, I hadn't gotten around to calling the proprietor up about painting there. So when the chance arose, I jumped on it. We got there around 8 a.m. The sun was low and the moon was still up. And of course, there were all of those cute round pumpkins gathering round the dirt path and echoing the shape of the waning moon. 

While I have really loved painting with my water soluble oil paints in the studio lately, I painted this piece solvent free using traditional oils. I used a little bit of Gamblin's Solvent Free Gel for my medium, and cleaned my brushes with walnut oil. I'm happy to report that it worked out just fine. I am so glad to leave that messy can of toxic solvent  out of the picture and just pack a little bottle of walnut oil and a small jar to swish my brushes in for cleaning. 

It's been raining around here for the last couple of days and I am anxious to see if the foliage will hold up until the sun comes back out. It would be great to get out a few more times before we have to say farewell to all of this gorgeous autumn color. We will see....

La Barchetta Rossa

I had such fun with this little painting that I am thinking of doing it again as a larger piece. My goal in the execution was to keep it loose and not get bogged down in too many details that can happen so often when approaching architectural scenes; especially when working from photo references. 

"La Barchetta Rossa", Oil on linen, 12x9", ©Jennifer Young

As with plein air painting, sometimes giving yourself a handicap can be very helpful. Squinting, for instance, allows one to reduce visual information down to shapes, patterns, and values. These days taking off my glasses serves a similar purpose (*SIGH*). Another method that I experimented  with here was to "blur it up"  using one of the artistic filters in Photoshop. This has the effect of removing the detail while still providing the shapes and values. I used my blurry image for most of the painting, and then referenced the detailed photo at the end to see what I may have missed and add the finishing touches. What was interesting is that I liked the freshness of my initial round so much that I found very little I wanted to add or adjust once I referenced the detailed photo. I have often used Photoshop to adjust shadows and highlights in my photo references, or to crop for ideas on composition, but this was the first time I have used it to remove detail. I really liked this method and will likely do it again, especially for complicated scenes like architecture where it can really be helpful to turn down the visual "noise".

A new look and a new painting!

There were times this week when I really doubted that this announcement would come, but I finally have my new website up. Hurray! There were a few glitches along the way (and there still may be some kinks to work out yet) but overall I am pretty happy with the fresh new look.

Speaking of fresh and new, I'll also share a newly finished painting.

"Daytrippers, Lake Como, Cobra Oils on linen,  20x24" ©Jennifer E Young

I actually blogged about the start of this piece a while ago but I got to a point where I just had to take it off of the easel for a while and let it marinate. Sometimes the best way to approach a problem is to do something completely different for a while , so that's exactly what I did. When I was ready to return I could look at it with new eyes (albeit bloodshot ones from staying up late trying to get my website up and running) and bring it to a satisfactory conclusion.

Little Mermaids

Sometimes a study acts as a jumping off point for a larger painting. And sometimes, as in this new piece, it's the other way around. If this painting looks familiar to you it is because it was inspired by another painting I posted a few weeks ago. I had such enjoyment in painting those two little girls basking in the sun and waves, that I knew I would want to revisit the subject again.

"Little Mermaids", Oil on linen, 12x9" ©Jennifer Young

To me they epitomize what childhood is all about--frolicking, free, but fully focused on the present moment at the same time. 

Plein air at the Botanical Gardens (and the importance of planning)

It has been so dark and rainy the last week it’s been impossible to photograph any artwork, but soon I will post an update on my latest studio painting. Meanwhile, finally, we are seeing the sun! Yay! To celebrate the occasion, I did a little plein air painting at the Lewis Ginter Botanical Gardens.

There is so much to paint at these beautiful gardens that it is really hard to narrow the choices down sometimes. But with limited time before the school bell rang,  I motored straight over to the Grace Arents Victorian Gardens in front of the Bloemendaal House. I had eyed these gardens a couple of weeks prior when I took my daughter and niece to see the butterfly exhibit and play in the Children’s Garden, and I was hoping and praying it still looked as beautiful as it had then and that the rain hadn’t washed all of the flowers off.

I was in luck. It was still gorgeous. Summer blooms lingered but the foliage in the trees was tinged with autumn. Here is my setup, with my new Coulter paint box:

You might notice I have a little notebook propped up that I’m going to reference as I work. This is a VERY quick notan sketch that doesn’t look like much to anyone but me. But it’s basically a short hand way to map out my design and quickly separate my lights from darks:

 The very fine painter (and terrific teacher) Kevin Macpherson more correctly identifies these broadly defined values as the ”light family” and the “shadow family”.  The idea is to lay down in broad strokes (I used a fat sharpie) everything in the shadow family with the dark value, and leaving everything in the light family as the white of the paper. It is so, so easy to succumb to the desire to jump into a painting without much prior planning, especially out in the field when the light is changing and the pressure’s on. But when I take the time to do these notans,  I find that the approach helps me to solidify in my mind no only how the painting will hold together conceptually, but also how I can stick with my plan to the end, even when the light changes.

Now that I have my plans, I sketch in a crude design in a very quick and general way again, but this time on my canvas using burnt sienna:

Once this quick sketch is down, I set about blocking in, starting with the shadow family:

I steer away from local color at this point. At the early stage I lay in the dark values focusing on the color temperatures I see in the shadows. Generally (but not always) the shadow colors are on the cool side on a bright sunny day, especially as the scene recedes.

And here, above, I’ve fleshed out the shadows a bit more and I begin addressing the light family. At this stage to two families are coming together a bit like puzzle pieces.  I keep things fairly broad for as long as I can, and restrain myself from getting bogged down in detail and refinements until the end stages of the game.

At this point I pause and take a snapshot of my palette. I needed a scrape down to make some more room for fresh paint, but I took this shot around the time of the stage above, for the purpose of showing the “two families” as I mixed.

 I am working hard at paying better attention to the way I organize my mixtures on my palette. While I’m still not perfect at this, (you can see a couple of stray darks sneaking in around the lower edges), organizing my palette by separating the mixtures in the shadow family from those in the light family helps me to organize those same families on the canvas. Again I must credit Kevin Macpherson for this concept.   Note, this is a very broad range of color for me, as for a very long time I stuck with a limited palette of red, yellow, and blue (plus white). But I am having a good time experimenting with color and some of the tertiary colors, while not imperative, serve as “convenience colors” for me when I know I am not going to have much plein air time. (Which is pretty much all the time these days.)

Okay, this is a far as I got with my step-by-step. At this point in the process I recall looking at the time and realizing that I needed to “bring it home” if I had any hope of finishing before I had to pick up my daughter from school. So without further ado, here is the final painting:

“A Change of Season”, Oil on linen, 8×10″ ©Jennifer Young