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I found this "welcoming committee" (hence the title Welcome") at the doorstep of my neighbors -- a pretty arrangement of rusty pots and flowers that caught my eye. I could paint it from the comfort of my own open studio window, which I found to be very neat.

The ironwork of the table was so complicated that I took a photo and then made a grid on the canvas, in order to get the drawing right. The rest is drawn by hand.

I'm in the process of testing water soluble/mixable oils, and have bought only a few colors. A warm cad red, a cool rose red; a cad yellow and a lemon yellow; one magenta; plus french ultramarine, cobalt blue, and cerulean blue.  All other colors are mixed from these, plus zink white and titanium white.

To get a rusty orange, I mixed lemon yellow and magenta, and added tiny bits of other colors to get the exact nuance I wanted, for example. The objects and the doorstep all overlap each other in succession, which also helps create depth.

The structure of the painting

The idea was to make the objects stand out against the pale background in shadow as well as in light, almost as if the objects were silhouetted against the wall.

As usual, I started with an underpainting of pure colors. Following the fat on lean rule, I mixed the paint with a bit of water. The next day, I found that the underpainting had dried almost completely, and so it was easy to apply thicker paint on top of it. Below you see clearly where there is only underpainting, and where I have built up color (the wall and the door):

The challenge with the background was to make the pale blue of the wall different from the white of the door. For their shadow aspects I chose ultramarine for the blue wall, and cobalt blue for the door. In reality, these colors are optically mixed with strokes of violets, greens, and desaturated rusts too. Then I chose paler and warmer versions for the light areas.

In the next image, I have completed all the larger areas, having worked on depth and 3D. The next phase will be handling details, and adding flowers.

At this point, I notice that I have made an irritating mistake. The line of the table meets up with the cast shadow on the door, and together they form a long line that leads the eye out of the painting:

It took until the last stage of the painting to notice the mistake. It is funny how the brain works, as I know all too well that having lines line up is a no-no. I simply didn't see it, but I'm glad I caught it in time. So I fixed that and proceeded with flowers and details. The legs and scrolls of the table got different colors for what is nearer and what is further away. More blue and pale for what is in (an admittedly small) distance, and more red and contrast for what is nearer to the viewer. My point is that even when the depth in the painting is shallow, one can use the tricks for creating distance in an landscape to make a still life seem more 3D.

I use color first to create an illusion of roundness of objects, and value and chroma second. Take the watering can for example:

It started as two flat shapes showing light and shadow. In the middle image it is still flat, but I have adjusted the colors a bit, in preparation for the layers of paint that will give it the 3D look of the rightmost image. I put the warmest most intense red in the half-light (where shadow and light transition) in order to give the illusion of a rounded cylinder-shape.

The watering can was as intensely pinkish red as the flowers (and is meant to balance the flowers). However, when I mixed the reds, I was not satisfied with the result. To the right of the image below are the reds mixed with white zink white, and as you see they become greyed and rather dull:

The solution was to use a transparent painting medium, which allowed the color full chroma in thin glazed layers (left above). These were used for both the can and the flowers.

Below is the progress of the whole painting:

Click here to see a large version of the finished painting.

One would think one would learn from ones mistakes... but oh no, I repeated the mistake from Red of using a too small piece of paper for this pastel painting. So at one point I got fed up with how small the objects were in the painting, and simply stopped painting, and abandoned this effort:

The things I did right was to use objects of different opacity and different yellows (having learned the lesson from Red). However, the set-up was boring, and got too small.

I realized that what I really wanted to do was to paint something that was not an outdoor still life. Mentally, I had already finished my project. I told myself sternly to persevere, and actually finish Yellow, the very last painting in my color study series, before embarking on a new project.

The odd glass bottle was a particular challenge:

It is transparent but frosted glass, and the shape is odd. It takes some effort and time to get right in a painting, so for time reasons I chose the easy way of turning it so it looks straight. Then I visually zoomed in on the objects, chose the yellow bell pepper to be the star of the show, and did a new painting on top of the erased first effort:

As my heart wasn't really in it any longer, so Yellow will probably also go into the pile of paintings to recycle. The goal is accomplished, and every painting will not be a masterpiece -- even if all artists want each one to be just that. I have heard that a very famous artist who does fantastic work claims that only every 20th painting he or she does is good enough. Man, that's high standards, and probably very wise.

There are nearly no red objects in my home, so I chose a bell pepper and some tomatoes for Red.

I learned two lessons doing this one:

1) Size does matter

The painting was simply too small for my comfort. (8x8 inches, 20x20 cm) The tomatoes are merely suggested because of that.

2) Plan even a simple study, or else

The vegetables/fruits were too similar in color and the light travelled through them to a similar extent. The white plate added odd reflections. Result: Too few color variations.

At this point, I'm really longing to paint something else. I do like to paint still lifes, and I do like to paint outdoors, but I'm starting to feel a bit "overfed" with the experience. I crave variety, which is why I have chosen to paint in a certain way that some call 'style', instead of painting the same types of motifs.

This study Red will be erased, and the expensive artist's sanded paper will get a new painting.

When I finished, I had my models for lunch:

Doing color studies might be said to be a bit like when a musician rehearses scales. But in my mind, I suspect that painting "scales" is much more fun, as each painting is, if not a symphony, at least a tune with variations.

In this painting I chose as my main subject the light shining through the orange slices with a deep rich glow.

When painting objects against a background of their complementary color, it is prudent to use a bit of blue in the orange objects, and a bit of orange in the blue background. Before I added the orange to the blue cloth, it looked out of place, wrong. Now it harmonizes much better.

I'm nearing the end of this effort to paint objects of certain colors. Only red and yellow remains, and they're coming soon.

Really simple still lifes are best for quick color studies. I thought this one was simple, but hadn't taken into account the shiny surface of the large flowerpot. The tea mug has a matte surface, and was much easier. The oval bowl is of some semi opaque stone, with a sheen rather than a shine, so it wasn't too complicated either.

In short, the task I set myself was to render different manmade objects, with different shapes, and different surfaces.

I'm trying to make the most of this gorgeous warm unseasonal weather we have, and paint as much as I can. The lilacs are currently in full bloom, so I arranged a very simple still life with some of them. Lilacs are hard to paint, as they consist of many tiny flowers on one main stem. 

This day was extra windy, and it lifted the lilacs right out of the vase and scattered them on the table. After the fifth time, I put a stone at the top of the vase at the back of it, in order to keep the flowers in place:

Whatever works is a good solution.

I was slapping on the pastel dust, trying to keep up with the sun. My thoughts as I painted were "this will never work, it will look unreal". When I brought it indoors, I was surprised at how "lilac-y" it looked. Surprised, even though I know intellectually that the outline of a tree, or a flower, does tell most of the story. But as I tend towards lovingly rendering detail, this quick painting felt unfinished.

Painting is both heart and brain. Sometimes they don't agree. I've noticed that emotion is often more right than the critical verbal brain which nags and complains.

When painting, the artist is close to the painting. I had forgotten to step way back and see the painting as a whole. Instead I saw details, parts and bits of it:

Lesson re-learned: Step back and view the whole painting -- often!

As the great sunny weather continues, I also continue to paint and going back to basics. Some day, I'll do a carefully arranged still life with this teapot that looks like Aladdin's lamp. For now, I simply put it down on the cloths and added two other blue and gold objects, as what I'm really studying is the effect sunlight has on color. And in this case, the effect on shiny surfaces.

There is a lot of finely drawn pattern on the actual coffee cup, but when we paint, suggestion is often quite enough. Here's an enlarged closeup of the cup and the patterns:

As you see, I simply made some scribbles which serve the purpose of indicating pattern. Your brain recognizes those scribbles, and happily concludes that there is a pattern there.

Here is a larger picture of the whole study. It is painted outdoors, from start to finish.

A simple still life, but the colors make me happy when I look at it. I want the paintings in my home to be positive and happy.

Recently I wrote a blog post about my Plein Air painting Black -- What went wrong and how I fixed it.

The painting was lying around, and it started to irritate me. After a few days I discovered why, and found it needed more fixing.

Picture A below is the painting that had aspects that were as irritating as a grain of sand in a shoe. My eye jumped between the highlight inside the bowl, and the small triangle of light just to the right of it. I felt it all looked like there was a hole in the bowl and one could see the table's surface through it. But why was that?

In picture B I have indicated the problems. Both those offending areas are of the same shape (triangular) and of nearly the same color and value (green arrows in B point to color samples digitally painted onto the shadow side of the case). But as that wasn't enough, I found that they also lined up, and also lined up with the cast shadow (red line). And there was an implied (2 sides, see red arrow) nearly identical triangle where that shadow met the one of the bowl! No wonder it bothered me.

And, the top of the blocky object had gotten a bit too dark, and was too similar in value to the background (green arrow).

Image C is how I fixed the problem. I extended the shadow between the objects, and intensified the light of the reflection in the bowl so it differs in color and value and no longer looks like the top of the table behind it. A2 shows painting A in simplified greyscale, while C2 is the similar greyscale of painting C. In C2 it is easy to see how the top of the block is different from the background.

I't is such a relief to shake this visual grain of sand out of the artistic shoe!

I'm getting back to basics. Meaning, I'm painting a series of outdoor still lifes in bright sunshine, in the impressionist manner I was taught. After a long winter painting indoors in artificial light, and painting in oils and in a slightly different manner, I feel the need to set myself tasks. I've already painted Black. Then I chose the opposite of black, and that is this painting White. (I know, really innovative titles...)

Both black and white are not really considered as colors by many artists. The challenge is to really see the color of light that is reflected off the objects, and paint what I truly see. I may exaggerate just a tiny bit, to show how beautiful the colors are, and to make it easier for the viewer to see these colors. I'm, after all, trained to perceive them, but the colors can't be too subtle in a painting -- they have to be visible to the average spectator.

The most obvious difficulty when painting outdoors -- even if it is in the comfort of my own back yard -- is the fact that the earth turns around its own axis. The visual effect is that the sun appears to move, which in its turn means that I only have about a maximum of two hours to paint before the light has moved and changed too much to continue.

My white objects all consist of different materials with different surfaces. The vase is of semi opaque glass, while the mug is white plastic with a dull surface. And the flat bottomed bowl is of shiny ceramics, with a high gloss from the glaze. For both the mug and the vase, light is shining through them, creating more difficulties in rendering them true.

I start with a sketchy scribble, to place the objects within the edges of the paper. Then I use a different color for the drawing of the outlines. Note that I draw the whole object, even if it is behind something. All this is done as quickly as possible, as the sun is inexorably moving.

Then I build up a solid base of color by first filling in the shadows, and then adding the lights. This underpainting sets the color of the light. 

The next step (above) is to render the average true color that I see on top of the underpainting. No details, no variations, simply the average. At this point, the shadows are locked in. Even though they move, I will not chase them and change things every 15 minutes.

Then I start to give volume to the objects, and dimension to the flat planes (below left). When I'm happy with that, I move on to reflections and details, corrections and edges, and finish the painting (below right). This phase is astonishing, as what is a rough messy painting suddenly transform into such a semblance of reality that people ask me if I painted it from a photo (that is, copied a photo). While I only painted what my eyes saw, and quickly at that.

The difficulty here was to keep the shadows on the translucent objects dark enough, so the shadow part would be distinct from the blue cloth in light.

Here is my very simple workstation (exposed for shadows, so the sunlit parts whiten out):

The next project is already on its way, and that will be Blue. I knew I was setting myself a task which is a bit too difficult, but I did want a challenge. We'll see what happens.

Black is black, isn't it? Or, is it deep glowing colours? No, I have not used any black att all. What seems black is a very deep violet, admittedly a near black, but a colorful black.

I'm getting back to basics, and am doing a series of studies of color. I've got white (forthcoming) and this still life composed of black objects. A lacquered metal bowl (glossy), a ceramic ashtray (between shiny and matte), and a leather case for eye glasses (a different type of matte and shiny). They sit on top of a grey table. 

Painting outdoors is  always a challenge, as the sun moves. I started with a drawing, and then changed my mind of the placement of the rectangular ashtray (image A below) -- after I had started to block in its color.

As I couldn't erase the original drawing, I simply redrew and painted over it. In image B above, you can see how I moved the ashtray closer to the bowl. I applied a near white pastel to the part of the dark green that was going to be in light, and continued painting. As you see in B, there is no trace left of the change. 

C shows how I modify the initial statements, with more variations shown in D.

Then the painting had progressed to its finishing stage, but as the sun has moved too much, I had to wait until the next day to bring it to conclusion.

Problems

Image E above shows how I've started the finishing touches, but as you can see in the identical image F, there are some issues. The bright yellow arrow points to where the far edge of the case is similar to the background both in color (hue) and value. The top of the case (orange arrow) isn't congruent with the rest of the case. The bowl is unfinished both outside and inside (pink arrows). The green arrow points to the ashtray, where the reflected light bouncing up from the table top is too weak. And then I discover that while the peachy color of the near part of the table is very pleasing in itself to me, it is not consistent with the far part of the table (violet arrows).

Solutions

I darken the background grass-in-shadow so the lit side of the case stands out more. I did not want to lighten the case, as it is, after all, black. The top of the case gets darkened slightly.

The bowl gets its variations, which are mostly what the shiny surface reflects from what is surrounding it.

The reflected light on the side of the ashtray is strengthened.

The top of the grey table is warmish in the bright sunlight, but as I let my eye scan the scene, I discover that I need to cool the color down, which I do by applying pink and violet to the near part. Now the front and the back of the table looks more like it is the same continous surface, receding in space.

Black can be beautifully colorful, as the below detail shows:

Edit: I found more to fix after a few days, and I wrote about it here.

Every painting has to be some sort of challenge, to me at least. So I change things, do them in a different way, or try something I've never attempted before. Sometimes the paintings are successes, and at other times they are not. That makes for a more interesting life...

I recently did 3 paintings in order to test the difference between painting with a knife and painting with brushes.

Peonies and Crystal (to the right) was painted with a painting knife. That is the way I was taught, and there are two advantages to that: 1) No cleaning of brushes, just wipe off the knife on a paper towel. Colors stay very clean this way. 2) It is easy to paint wet-in-wet without mixing the colors too much. As I work with paint straight from the tubes, in layers of color spots, this is definitely a plus.

Geraniums and Chair (middle) was created by using the same technique of color, but with brushes. One brush for the darker and cooler colors, and one for the lighter and warmer ones. That way, I didn't have to clean the brushes until the painting session was over. But (there is always a but, isn't there?) the bristle brushes tended to disturb previous layers of color, so I had to let areas dry before working over them. (That led to a discovery, which will be revealed in the next episode on this blog.)

Cornflowers (left) got the use of brushes, but in a manner where I mixed the colors on the palette as  well as on the canvas. I quite like this manner of painting, as I don't loose the luminosity, and the process is somewhat faster, as there is less drying time needed because I layer less. Now, Cornflowers is less intense in color, and that is intentional and has nothing to do with the way it was painted. I simply felt I wanted a different light effect. One can love colors and their impact, and now and then balance it with less.

Keeping the luminosity of colors is important to me, as I've fallen in love with the glow of Monet's paintings. 

The Husband was surprised when I combined flowers (pretty) with onions (food, not pretty) in the same still life. But I had my reasons.

I like showing the beauty of mundane objects. Onions are organic spheroids which in a tactile sense combine satiny smoothness with density, and suckulent hidden layers, without which cooked and raw food would not be the same. (OK, I luuuv onions and how they elevate a simple fare.)

Dalias can be somewhat spheroid too, but consist of many soft petals which can take surprising shapes. These ones are what I call spiky, a contrast to the smoothness of the onions.

Complementaries are colours on the opposite of each other on the colour wheel. They contrast most with each other, huewise, and are used to tone down each other in mixes, or to enhance each other by juxtaposing or placing masses adjacent to each other. But in an actual painting, I prefer to not to be limited in my colour choices. The way I do complementaries is to choose objects and backgrounds which contrast in hue -- and then I paint them with the full spectrum of pigments in order to capture the light and the mood.

This painting is based on the yellow/violet complementary pair. Red violets in the flowers and one onion, and muted yellows of brass and onions. More blue violet in the shadows behind, balanced by some orange yellows in the sunlit areas.

The trick is to get something exciting into a "boring" still life. Contrast, of textures and objects and of colours, adds that something that makes the eye linger and explore the scene.