Going Back to Drawing

Good morning,

We are still pretty much snowed in here, but as my friend Karen said to me, "It doesn't matter to you what the weather's like; you never go outside."  She's right, of course, but as I told her, "I love to LOOK outside."  So I'm enjoying how the shadow of the chinaberry tree is such a brilliant blue across the snow.  We don't get much snow here, and especially snow that lasts for days.

 I'm fortunate to have found a photo I wanted to paint on the flikr "The Commons" file.  If you don't know about the commons file, you're going to love me.  Go to flikr, go down to the bottom where you can click on "The commons."  Up will spring links to photos from the library of congress, among others just yours for the downloading.  I like the ones of the Paris Exposition of 1900 myself.  This week I found three that I liked that I hadn't seen before.

So for the first time in a while I am painting from a photo.  Painting from a photo takes me back to values.  I posterize the photo in photoshop, change it to three values.  I mean, three values.  That's black and white and black and white mixed to a middle gray.  Surely I can handle three colors, especially if I have spent most of the previous day drawing the scene on my canvas.(Using the grid system, mostly. I use vine charcoal, then I lightly dust off some of the charcoal, then I spray it with workable fixitif.)  But wait, I forgot to tell you about the cool site Tommy found for me called, I think,  I'll check on this later, blockposter.com.  They let you print your photo the width of 4 pieces of paper, so a photo would consist of 16- 8 1/2 by 11" papers if you tape them together, all of which I did so I could see this amazing photo of a glass negative from 1900.

I started with black and filled in the darkest spots.  Then I went with the middle gray. As Michelle knows, I don't apply my paint to the canvas like I was painting a wall;  rather, I fill in shapes.  And I always have either a kleenix or a paper towel in my left hand to wipe most of the paint off.

Painting from a photograph winds me up after the looseness of my more intuitive style of painting.  And I need both.  The photograph reference allows me to think about value and perspective.  It lets me play with light and shadow.  Right now I am reconstructing the church tower and have put a center line down the tower to see what about it bothers me. And I'm at the redrawing stage.  I always say I'm going to photograph each step of my painting but I never do. My camera's downstairs where I've been taking fruitless pictures of thankful birds eating #50 pounds of bird seed in three days!

I'll post my picture sometime in the next few days for you comments.

Hope you're having a creataive day.