Shown below is a 9×12 painted plein air last month in New York City.   I will  paint the same scene, and use the same set up and materials (so that you can see how I work plein air with the acrylics). The painting will be larger  (11×14).  The demonstration will use both this study,  photos, and drawings as reference material.

Come and chat, watch, and learn.  Five artists will be demonstrating as part of the Longmont Art Walk.

Please forward this to anyone who might be interested.  Thanks.

acrylic plein air painting study, Lillian Kennedy, Central Park

What: Longmont art walk acrylic painting demonstration.

Where: On the street in front of the Old Town Marketplace at 332 Main St. in Longmont, Colorado

When: 6:30 – 9 pm Friday May 18.

For more information on the cake painting supplies used in this lesson, please see How to Make an Artsy New Year’s Toast .

easy cake painting - step #1

The quickest way to present a special personalized cake for any occasion:

This cake  and the edible gel paints are from the supermarket.

A sharp knife lifts the carrot decorations.  The orange and green stains from the colored frosting can be integrated into the design with a “whatever” attitude.

how to paint cakes - step #2

A page from The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady by Edith Holden (shown in photo) became the point of departure for this design.  You can choose anything – let your imagination have at it!

Get Well edible matzah card

Lightly sketching into the frosting  with a toothpick  will leave  an incised line and give you a feel for the placement of things.  Smooth with a knife to erase.

If you want to practice on another surface to hone your skills,  matzah makes great little practice canvases.

The paints can be squeezed onto any surface, and used just as you would use other paint.  Vodka (or another clear drinkable alcohol) is used to thin the paints to a consistency that you like – just as you use turps with oil paint or water with acrylics.  This media most resembles watercolor because  the white of the frosting shines through the colors when they are thinned.

step #3 Click on all images to enlarge to see details.

Tisha Wood on her birthday

Don’t worry about little mistakes and errors, you and I will both get better as we do more  projects.  It’s really about doing something special for a friend.

Please share your questions or experiences in the comments section.

BERNARD P HUANG photo of Lillian Kennedy in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden with her Mother-in-law, Magda Feuerstein. click on this / all photos to enlarge

I want to share this, and this, and that, and oh my, this over here too!  I think about you all a lot, but I don’t publish on time because I haven’t learned to simplify in writing the way I have in painting.

Everything glitters, catches my attention, and  begs to be included. It all seems important and relevant.  I start out including too much in one post.  But each lesson needs to focus on one thing.  It can be so overwhelming that nothing gets published  because of the complexity.

acrylic plein air landscape painting, Lillian Kennedy, Brooklyn Botanic Garden, NYC, April, 2012

Doesn’t this sound like painting?  Too much information is NOT a good thing.

You finally choose one thing, but that thing can be broken down into an infinite number of things – and so on.

It’s not about narrowing your field of vision.   It’s about creating a WHOLE through subtle adjustments and holding onto your chosen vision.

Assignment: Go out into nature with your art supplies.  Sit, look, and  do studies.

9x12 acrylic plein air landscape painting, Lillian Kennedy, Dogwood in Alley Pond Park, Queens, NYC April, 2012

Stay in this stage until you can see your  composition as one beautiful whole that rhythmically moves you around and lets you rest at your focal point.  See the scene as one great space.  Not a collection of parts – a unified whole.  Let this happen organically through your contemplation, studies, feelings, and thinking.
You won’t get your painting /drawing to be perceived as a whole if you haven’t first really felt the scene as a whole.  All things are connected.  The same atmosphere and light envelops  the multitude.  Choose  that one thing is that you really want to express and let the other fascinating glittering areas  be subordinated – and don’t let that focal point fracture “the whole”.  Let me know how it goes.  It is natural to want to put in everything.

As an example of this kind of subordination, enlarge the paintings here and note the people in each one.  These paintings are not about any particular Joe or Susie, they are about the dogwood and cherry trees. Too much information about the people would be distracting, especially at this scale for plein air work.  And with this post – I decided not to stew over the fact that the images of these paintings are “off” in terms of color harmonies.  My color is not the point of the lesson.

Simplification is actually very complicated.

Ken Auster demonstrating at the Plein Air Convention. From the get-go he uses lots of gray.

“Artists don’t use black”  Daddy said, and the black crayola stayed in the box.

But there I was, in sin city, watching Ken Auster squeeze  black right out of the tube in front of hundreds of fans.  As I watched, the lust grew stronger – I was falling  in love with gray.  His grays are  downright beautiful, and most of them are the spawn of tubed black.

The impressionists didn’t use black.    And there I was, craving it.  I FELT A PASSIONATE NEED FOR GRAYS!

I had mistakenly thought that  gray was boring – a necessary neutral to be used (if used at all) as an area of rest and recovery in a busy painting. That seemed about as exciting as nap time, gray’s equivalent,  seems to children.  And even less interesting than a discussion on which way to spell it. (Gray is a color and grey is a colour. Do you live in the US or the UK?)

Assignment: Spell it either way, but play with gray.  If you don’t have black, you can easily mix it with burnt umber and ultramarine blue. Add a little white.

Add tiny bits of other colors to the gray and study the effects.

We pondered gray in Artful Greens and Malarkey   when I described Irish days as “dove, slate, burnished pewter, silver, slate, nickel, and gull feather.”  Leave a comment about your experience.

Chrysanthemum buds opening - If you buy a potted plant, you can see all the stages at once. I bought one at the supermarket today and broke off a few buds to study.

how to draw flowers part ll - feeling the relationship between the stem and the blossom

gerber daisies to study - double click to enlarge.

As a flower pushes up from the ground, its stem become longer, stronger, and wider.  All the food and drink it needs is carried through this growing stem. If all goes well, the tiny bud that begins to show at its tip will enlarge and open bit by bit revealing the mature flower in all its glory.

All that dynamism can be (over) simplified with the concept of  a stick stuck to the middle of an ellipse.

If you get that part right, you will have a believable flower. And once you get that part, you can make each flower unique and expressive.

It helps to draw the areas that you can’t see (note the diagram above).  Work as if the flower was transparent.  If you draw the stem right up through the middle  of the blossom, you are more likely to connect the two the right way.  You can always erase those lines later.  Completing the movement of a line by drawing as if things were transparent while you position them will create a strong sense of form, and both you and your  viewers will be able to feel the life force that moves up and through the plant.

Assignment:

1. Watch the video below (made by Vladimir Vorobyov from  Astana city, Kazakhstan).

2. Draw Gerber daisies (can’t miss their ellipses!).

Ellipses becoming daisies

SPRING  has me wrapped around her little finger; I have a bad case of her fever.  How about you?

I thought so.  So let’s be like bees and head for the flowers.

Ready?

1. Review the last lesson on  ellipses (circles in perspective)

2. Draw a series of ellipses.  Don’t fuss over them. Do this free hand and don’t worry about perfection  (note the  irregular ellipses in the example below).  Mark the center of each ellipse  with a smaller ellipse.

3. Make several copies. If you don’t have a home copier, trace your ellipses by placing your drawing against a window.

The same set of ellipses have become gerber daisies.

Once again, the same set of ellipses - but this time as daffodils!

4.  Turn one ellipse into a flower (daisies are easiest) by making a series of loops for petals coming out of the central ellipse.

5. Flowers face forwards and backwards.  They face left and right.  If one ellipse overlaps another, choose which will be in front.  Turn them all into flowers.

6. Represent different flowers facing in different directions on each of your copies.

7. Watch these videos for more ideas: 1. Daffodil painting and the ellipse

2. more about daffodils and ellipses

8. Have fun!
Cat did – below is her colored pencil work sent from Satellite Beach. Florida.

Cat followed the lesson for "steps in a process" Don't forget to click to enlarge.

Spring is here!

Happy St. Patty’s Day.  Two holiday posts:(video) Mixing Ireland’s Forty Shades of Green  Artful Greens and Malarkey

                    Daffodils are blooming and all sorts of life is pushing its way out of the dirt.  Intending to do a seasonally correct series on How to Draw Flowers, I thought that I should begin with the ellipse because this understanding will make such a difference with every flower.  That decision opened a can of worms big enough to fatten all the spring robins.  It’s taken me a week to sort it all out and decide that the best way to simplify the ellipse is to begin with How to Draw a Glass. Sounds like more malarkey, but it’s St. Patty’s day, and I’ve kissed the Blarney stone, but wait, to bring this full circle you need to know that an ellipse is a full circle – seen in perspective – and if you learn to draw your ellipses with elegant ease, your artwork will have  greater beauty and strength of form.  Maybe you’re regretting my kiss and the questionable gift of eloquence that it gave me. Back to business:

Ellipses are easily studied if you use a drinking glass.

Hold a drinking glass in front of your face with the rim at the level of your eyes.  (To understand eye level see linear perspective part I.)  You KNOW that it is circular, but you SEE a straight line.  When drawing or painting your knowledge of what the shape “really” is  gets in the way of your actual  perception.  This trait has helped us survive as a species, but it has messed with our artwork. We need to sip out of that straight line and to do that we need to know that the straight line is “really” round.   In your artwork, sorry to say, even minor mistakes along this line will make work look amateurish.

It’s not just moving above of below eye level that changes the ellipse.  Rotation of the glass has the same effect.  Play with a real glass until you have this firmly in your mind.

as you rotate the glass horizontally, think about bicycle wheels, etc.

Look at the photos of the glasses.  Click on them to enlarge them and then trace the ellipses with your finger to get a feel for drawing them with smooth curves all the way around.

Now go back to the photo of the daffodils and  trace your finger around the obvious ellipses of the trumpet.  Then trace the less obvious ellipses by connecting the larger petals.  They will not all perfectly conform, but your structure will be stronger if the petal lengths fall into a basic ellipse that is in the same perspective as the trumpet.  It really can’t be otherwise.

For more about daffodils and their ellipses, see these two videos:Daffodil painting and the ellipse
more about daffodils and ellipses

Please share your ideas and responses in the comment section by clicking below.

Mini acrylic landscape paintings as class exercise. artist: Connie Carlberg

Three paintings in thirty minutes?  What, am I crazy?  Well, maybe, but not about this.

This week in class we did this quick exercise in landscape painting using my photos from Burgundy, France.

 How to do the exercise:

• Hold a shuffled stack of photos bottom side up so that you can’t see what you are choosing.

• Select three and keep them turned down until the timer is set.
• Tape the edges of small pieces of scrap canvas.  Get yourself all set up and ready.
  

students doing mini landscape paintings in acrylic: ten minutes per painting

• Set a timer for thirty minutes and turn over the photos.
•  There is no need to do one painting of each or to include all of the image.  Quickly find three compositions that interest you.
• No hemming and hawing.  You are learning to quickly select good compositions.  Go for a strong design.
• Break the composition down into three or four massed areas / basic shapes.
• Don’t fret over color choices and mixing, but try to get the values (lights and darks) of your big shapes to stay together.

  • 

    Ann Hayes focused on the abstract shapes in her miniature landscape paintings

  • Select a minimal number of details that express that you really want and put those in with a small brush.  Leave the other details out. Go for the essence of the landscape.
  • Let go of perfectionism  – you don’t have a choice with the amount of time you have – that’s one of the things that makes this exercise so helpful.
  • It’s okay to go back and work on your paintings after the timer goes off as long as you stop at thirty minutes to take a break and study what you have done. It’s a thirty minute exercise.  Know that you will stop after that brief amount of time.  Return to your little landscape paintings only if you are inspired.  Connie (top) doesn’t paint landscapes, but found the subject so interesting that she continued after the timer went off.
  • Take the tape off.  This is my favorite moment as the work looks so much better framed by white edges.

Quick and lovely: acrylic landscape painting studies by Tisha Balesi Wood

You may be a studio painter who likes to spend months on one piece, but you will benefit from these “sprint” paintings.

There’s nothing to lose and much to be gained by trying this exercise.  It would really improve your painting fast if you did it every day.  Please share your thoughts in the comments section.

BREADWORKS Exhibit of art inspired by the 2011 NYC Painting and Museum Workshop (Photo: Josh Nelson)

Photos in this post are from New York City in Spring on exhibit at Breadworks in Boulder through March 10. 

It is always shocking how much work (both physical and emotional) it is to have a show, and yet I keep setting up opportunities for my students to go through the process. 

Q. Why do I do this to them, and why do I keep hounding you to do it too?

A. Because, as Alyson Stanfield (art marketing guru at Art Biz Blog)  wrote in a recent post: “Exhibiting your art is good for you”…

“Art is a form of communication. You might think you make art as a form of self-expression, but you know that your work is incomplete until people see it and respond to it. You understand the synergy that erupts when you are in a room full of people looking at and talking about your art.
Nothing in the artist’s experience compares.
Exhibiting your art provides a space and a time frame for people to appreciate the true colors, lines, textures, patterns, and scale. Art takes on richness in this environment that it doesn’t have when it’s sitting in your studio.
Perhaps more importantly, exhibiting your art allows you to have a dialogue with people about the work. You can’t help but learn and grow from these experiences.”

Having a show is pretty much guaranteed to take a lot out of you,

Elsy Wilkin's painting of Lillian Kennedy painting (5" x 7") on exhibit at Breadworks.

but there are rewards that you can only get if you put your work out there.  Have you been putting your work out and having it seen?

In his book Fearless Creating (get it if you don’t have it), Eric Maisel tells us that artists feel the desire and pressure to show their work  from the moment they begin to create.  He explains that artists often feel an equal or greater pressure to NOT show (hence all the turmoil).  He offers insights and tips for getting past the resistance.

The NYC in Spring  exhibit shows work created during and inspired by the 2011 workshop.  Can you join us for this year’s NYC WORKSHOP (April 26 – 29)  ? Registration is now open and spaces are filling.

Proceeding with Imperfections:   Subscribers received a version of this post with gobbledegook instead of words because I accidentally published when I meant to save a draft.   When starting a post, I  run my fingers on the keyboard to create stand-in  lines of type.   Then I place the photos.  That is the point when I  must have pressed publish.

My embarrassment inspired a change in concept for this lesson; we all make mistakes and fear big mistakes. Occasionally we need to contemplate our perfectionism.  Of course we want to do our very best, but perfectionism is a great crippler of creative expression… you can’t express yourself if you are obsessed with having things perfect.

Lillian Kennedy's sketchbook on the theme of "In Ten Minutes"

The Sketchbook Project!  got people around the world creating and thinking about creating.  Knowing that our books would travel for a year and then be archived at the Brooklyn Art Library made all of us need to consider our level of  perfectionism.

We will visit the Sketchbook Show in April as part of The Spring New York City Plein Air Painting and Museum trip

Participants could select from a list of themes or have a theme randomly chosen for them.  I chose “In Ten Minutes” thinking that this theme would be a possible antidote to my issues with perfectionism.  If you suffer from perfectionism, look for ways to have the system help you function – this theme allowed me to imagine a casual response.  Having a deadline and not starting too early led me to be productive with my time and to give up fussing about small things.

Breathtaking sketchbooks are already in the collection.   My goal became to hold the faith and see the project through doing my best without driving myself crazy.  I didn’t set my sights on “breathtaking”; the bar seemed high enough just to get the book sent in by the deadline.

Click on any illustration to enlarge it.

Coffee shop sketches embrace the movements of the people. They aren't meant to be the ultimate art.

In Ten Minutes we can all look a bit more closely at something wherever we happen to be.

The paper in the books was so thin that even a firm pencil mark could show through to the other side.  Many people replaced the pages.  Some people turned the whole thing into elaborate pop-up books, I kid you not.   I decided to enjoy the thin crinkly paper – it helped to reduce  tension / perfectionism.  What could be expected in ten minutes on low grade paper?  My book became a series of ideas to inspire others to create by using cheap paper and ten minute blocks of time.  It evolved as I went.  I wanted to communicate that you can USE a sketchbook and not make it precious.  Embrace coffee stains, try out ideas… explore and express.

Margaret Bobb  created Moose the Goose, an illustrated children’s book, to carry her chosen theme, “Travel With Me”.  Margaret is interested in this field and used the project as an opportunity to

Margaret Bobb, Moose the Goose, sketchbook project, "Travel with Me"

practice her skills and get used to having her books seen by the world.  Her sketchbook became a mock up of a finished book.   As she coped with the paper quality and time constraints, she adjusted her level of polish always staying reasonable.

Margaret Bobb, Moose the goose meets Goose the Moose

Tisha Wood’s theme “Underground” was randomly selected for her.   A few days before the deadline and still holding a blank sketchbook, she stopped considering all the possibilities and returned to what had been her first instinctive response.

In the oblique “don’t ask, don’t tell” manner of existing by expressing through riddles, she tackled the issue of patriotic gay men and women who serve in the military but must remain hidden.

Tisha Wood, sketchbook project, "Underground"

Tisha Wood, sketchbook project, "Underground"

She selected a  style that confuses and masks and thereby resembles the underground state of these service people. This style also contained built in allowances for imperfections.

YOU can join this project  next year!  It is an opportunity to develop and share your passion (note how in the three featured books each artist had a completely different passion to communicate).

Does perfectionism stop you?  Leave a comment.

If you want to see the complete books, they will be scanned and available online in the future through the Brooklyn Art Library.