Paint Nite (afternoon) 7: lavender fields w windmill + 2 unrelated tidbits
I've been eyeing this one for a little while, and decided to do it this afternoon. Of course, that was before I knew we were going to have a cat crisis, but thankfully I wasn't needed between 2-4p so it turned out ok.
This was the model from the website:
What primarily attracted me, of course, was the windmill, which always makes me think of Holland and my family. :)
Two things that were unusual about this session, at least compared to my six whole prior experiences. 1) It being the middle of the afternoon for the East Coast and even earlier for everywhere else in the US, it was sparsely attended. In fact ... I was the lone student. The teacher initially mentioned waiting for one more person, but they never showed up. So. She taught as if she was still teaching a full-on class, but I was literally the only person there. And 2) she assumed her students possessed more than just the usual arsenal of red/blue/yellow/white/black. Normally, if you need, say, green, you mix some yourself with blue and yellow. But she just assumed I had green and brown already - which I did, as it turned out. But that's not a given (I have some very small tubes of several colors left over from a art kit that Two used to have and the brown, as I said for the Hedgehog painting, was from a completely unrelated craft project). If I'd been a beginner, I would have struggled to know how to create those things on my own, or at least in the desired tones. She did have us mix our own purple with red and blue (I did have some pre-mixed purple, but more of a plum, too red, so I didn't use it - although as you'll see in a minute, the purple I mixed ended up being too red anyway).
So, first we painted white above the horizon line, then mixed up a light blue and brushed that on fairly high up in the sky (but not the top) and blended that down into the blue. Next we mixed up a medium blue and painted that at the top, then blended that down into the light blue. In preparation for the rows of flowers, the teacher suggested we (I) could draw faint chalk lines to have a sense of how the perspective was going to go, so those are the faint orange lines you see below the horizon.
Next we used an equal blend of red and blue to make three puddles of purple, adding a little white into one, more white into the next, and a LOT of white into the last one to make a darker-medium, medium and light purple. Because at the time I was debating painting multiclored flowers as the top layer, as if they were tulips (and not lavender), I refrained from mixing white into the would-be light-purple puddle, and let it just stay dark-dark purple.
After painting the rows in dark purple, I accidentally got a little purple on my hand, which I then smudged into the sky, so I had to paint over that part. And because my binder clip was to the left, I ended up putting my hand at the top of the paper to hold it still at once point, resulting in a thumbprint in the top of the sky. :P. Repainted that, too. If you look, you'll see that the top of the sky is now darker than it was in the first pic, lol.
Next we added the clouds, light-medium blue hills in the distance, and greenery on the nearer horizon. Her clouds were much puffier - I'd only ever done the wispier-sorts of clouds up until now and couldn't quite get the hang of the poofy ones, but I'm still pretty pleased with the clouds.
We added a coat of brown to the white spaces between the rows. I was kind of baffled by this, as there's pretty much zero brown in the model, but apparently you're supposed to have dirt showing between the rows, even if you only get tiny glimpses of it here and there. So, ok. You'll note the purple rows also changed color - that's because we painted over the medium-dark purple with the medium-light purple, dabbing it on, rather than in paint-strokes, so that the darker color peeked out here and there. And, holy cow: from this point on, the painting got REALLY tedious, because everything that had to be done had to be done one row at a time, for allll those rows across, over. and over. and over. Definitely the most boring painting I've done so far, at least as far as the actual act of painting went.
Next we used a fine brush to put little stems of light purple (I just added some white to a portion of the medium purple - I was running low on white by this point so I needed to use less) all over the medium purple - keep in mind they had to be bigger and more plentiful up front, and lighter/smaller/shorter in the back. And then repeated with dark purple stems - which is what I used the undiluted purple for. Then we dabbed ("stamped") with the point of the fine brush little clusters of dots as to look like the knobbly little lavender heads - again in dark, medium and light purple, first one, then the next, then the next. Did I mention this painting was tedious?
The final step was the windmill, which was done in a light gray (tiny bit of black mixed with white) to make the building, the medium purple for shadows, and dark gray for the actual sails of the windmill. The teacher confessed the easiest way to get them to come out was to cheat and use a pen, but she went ahead and had us paint it today (which I would've chosen to do anyway). And, sure enough, my sails look kind of wonky. What bothers me more is you can really tell my purple had too much red in it - I wish she hadn't said to use equal amounts of red and blue because it really should have been blue dominated for the proper shades of lavender. Also, I'm pretty sure my fields are kind of a hot mess, lol. But I tried. I'd think about doing it over again on my own, with better colors, but I'm not sure I want to do all the tedious steps again!
Two final things I forgot to mention in my previous post:
a) A newly discovered snake has been named after Salazar Slytherin. :D
b) The high school principal proudly announced last night that our high school had made the U.S. News and World Report's annual list of Top US High Schools (public schools). We ranked ... 3000th! *eyeroll* (Ok, we're not 3000th on the nose, but it's right around there.) Of course, that's out of about 18K high schools in the nation, which means we're at the 1/6th mark, which is about 17% which means we're in the top 20th %ile, which is actually somewhat reasonable. But it sounds a lot less impressive to say "Wow, we're 3000th in the nation!" Um. Yay? Compare that to the school hamsterwoman's kids go/went to, which is ranked 68th in the nation. Quite a bit better than 3000th! (On the other hand, the school my kids would have gone to, if we'd stayed in PA is at ~10,600th, and my former high school in CA has sunk down to 12,600th. >_< )
This was the model from the website:
What primarily attracted me, of course, was the windmill, which always makes me think of Holland and my family. :)
Two things that were unusual about this session, at least compared to my six whole prior experiences. 1) It being the middle of the afternoon for the East Coast and even earlier for everywhere else in the US, it was sparsely attended. In fact ... I was the lone student. The teacher initially mentioned waiting for one more person, but they never showed up. So. She taught as if she was still teaching a full-on class, but I was literally the only person there. And 2) she assumed her students possessed more than just the usual arsenal of red/blue/yellow/white/black. Normally, if you need, say, green, you mix some yourself with blue and yellow. But she just assumed I had green and brown already - which I did, as it turned out. But that's not a given (I have some very small tubes of several colors left over from a art kit that Two used to have and the brown, as I said for the Hedgehog painting, was from a completely unrelated craft project). If I'd been a beginner, I would have struggled to know how to create those things on my own, or at least in the desired tones. She did have us mix our own purple with red and blue (I did have some pre-mixed purple, but more of a plum, too red, so I didn't use it - although as you'll see in a minute, the purple I mixed ended up being too red anyway).
So, first we painted white above the horizon line, then mixed up a light blue and brushed that on fairly high up in the sky (but not the top) and blended that down into the blue. Next we mixed up a medium blue and painted that at the top, then blended that down into the light blue. In preparation for the rows of flowers, the teacher suggested we (I) could draw faint chalk lines to have a sense of how the perspective was going to go, so those are the faint orange lines you see below the horizon.
Next we used an equal blend of red and blue to make three puddles of purple, adding a little white into one, more white into the next, and a LOT of white into the last one to make a darker-medium, medium and light purple. Because at the time I was debating painting multiclored flowers as the top layer, as if they were tulips (and not lavender), I refrained from mixing white into the would-be light-purple puddle, and let it just stay dark-dark purple.
After painting the rows in dark purple, I accidentally got a little purple on my hand, which I then smudged into the sky, so I had to paint over that part. And because my binder clip was to the left, I ended up putting my hand at the top of the paper to hold it still at once point, resulting in a thumbprint in the top of the sky. :P. Repainted that, too. If you look, you'll see that the top of the sky is now darker than it was in the first pic, lol.
Next we added the clouds, light-medium blue hills in the distance, and greenery on the nearer horizon. Her clouds were much puffier - I'd only ever done the wispier-sorts of clouds up until now and couldn't quite get the hang of the poofy ones, but I'm still pretty pleased with the clouds.
We added a coat of brown to the white spaces between the rows. I was kind of baffled by this, as there's pretty much zero brown in the model, but apparently you're supposed to have dirt showing between the rows, even if you only get tiny glimpses of it here and there. So, ok. You'll note the purple rows also changed color - that's because we painted over the medium-dark purple with the medium-light purple, dabbing it on, rather than in paint-strokes, so that the darker color peeked out here and there. And, holy cow: from this point on, the painting got REALLY tedious, because everything that had to be done had to be done one row at a time, for allll those rows across, over. and over. and over. Definitely the most boring painting I've done so far, at least as far as the actual act of painting went.
Next we used a fine brush to put little stems of light purple (I just added some white to a portion of the medium purple - I was running low on white by this point so I needed to use less) all over the medium purple - keep in mind they had to be bigger and more plentiful up front, and lighter/smaller/shorter in the back. And then repeated with dark purple stems - which is what I used the undiluted purple for. Then we dabbed ("stamped") with the point of the fine brush little clusters of dots as to look like the knobbly little lavender heads - again in dark, medium and light purple, first one, then the next, then the next. Did I mention this painting was tedious?
The final step was the windmill, which was done in a light gray (tiny bit of black mixed with white) to make the building, the medium purple for shadows, and dark gray for the actual sails of the windmill. The teacher confessed the easiest way to get them to come out was to cheat and use a pen, but she went ahead and had us paint it today (which I would've chosen to do anyway). And, sure enough, my sails look kind of wonky. What bothers me more is you can really tell my purple had too much red in it - I wish she hadn't said to use equal amounts of red and blue because it really should have been blue dominated for the proper shades of lavender. Also, I'm pretty sure my fields are kind of a hot mess, lol. But I tried. I'd think about doing it over again on my own, with better colors, but I'm not sure I want to do all the tedious steps again!
Two final things I forgot to mention in my previous post:
a) A newly discovered snake has been named after Salazar Slytherin. :D
b) The high school principal proudly announced last night that our high school had made the U.S. News and World Report's annual list of Top US High Schools (public schools). We ranked ... 3000th! *eyeroll* (Ok, we're not 3000th on the nose, but it's right around there.) Of course, that's out of about 18K high schools in the nation, which means we're at the 1/6th mark, which is about 17% which means we're in the top 20th %ile, which is actually somewhat reasonable. But it sounds a lot less impressive to say "Wow, we're 3000th in the nation!" Um. Yay? Compare that to the school hamsterwoman's kids go/went to, which is ranked 68th in the nation. Quite a bit better than 3000th! (On the other hand, the school my kids would have gone to, if we'd stayed in PA is at ~10,600th, and my former high school in CA has sunk down to 12,600th. >_< )