Day 30 - David Bowie

After painting Marie Antoinette, I was eager to try another 5x5 watercolor using a reference photo.  I opened a picture of David Bowie in Photoshop and increased the saturation, the better to reduce glare and really look inside the shadows.  Then I printed out the photo and traced the shapes of some of the shadows on the paper, primarily to stop my eyes from going OMG DAVID BOWIE and make them break down the face into shapes, colors, negative spaces, relationships.

After that, however, I still had to make the jump.  One can do whatever one likes on a printed photograph; it's another thing altogether to take a brush to a blank white square.  I don't sketch when I do watercolors; I just go.  I took lots of deep breaths, put clean water in my jar, and jumped in.

Here's a look back at the whole challenge:

Day 29 - Marie Antoinette

After enjoying some modest success with watercolors, I decided to push myself to do a larger piece - a 5x5 of Marie Antoinette.  As a rule, I use reference photos, never an illustration or another artist's painting as my source and inspiration, but with an historical figure who predates photography, well, there's not much one can do.  So.  I decided to use one particular portrait of Marie Antoinette, treating it almost like a Master Study so that I could learn lessons about painting in general.

And here's what I noticed.  Like, immediately.  It's much easier (for me) to see shapes in paintings, rather than photographs.  That drove home for me how much I need to keep training my eyes to stop seeing cognitive units and see only the shapes they comprise.

Second - and this is big, too - the shadows all had colors.  Blue gray.  Rusty brown.  Slightly green.  How had I never thought to look for a range of colors in shadows when looking at photographs?!  (This is what happens when you're self-taught: You are always late to the damn party.)

This was super instructive, though, as I'll explain in the next entry.  Meanwhile, here's Marie, or rather "Let Them Eat Cake Doughnuts":

Days 27-28 - Mod Duo

My husband purchased some 3x4 canvases for me to help me reach the goal of completing the challenge, and after spending two and a half hours on a portrait (then pitching it in the trash can amidst a shower of swear words(, I made a decision to pare down and try a mod style, which is not anything I've ever done before:

What amazes me every time I try something new is how quickly I learn things.  Don't make big steps between values on a painting of this type.  Don't go halfway with a lean when you could go all the way with a Dutch angle.  Don't overcomplicate something, thinking that you HAVE to swear and suffer or it can't be done.  It can be.  It's cool.

Days 24-26 - Three More Small Watercolors

Again, I am writing this post after finishing painting 30, because I had neither time nor will at this point in the challenge.  I pushed ahead with small watercolors.

Days 21-23 - Three Small Watercolors

I am writing this entry after the fact, which is probably good, because after I finished the 20th canvas, I had a Serious Crisis.  With a scant few days remaining, I had to create 10 more pieces, and I didn't see how it could be done.  Literally, it did not seem possible.  Despair doesn't begin to cover how I felt.  My husband, who supports me in everything, began to talk to me in slow, quiet, funereal tones about how many more canvases I could realistically hope to finish.  Two?  Three?  I can't tell you the last time I'd felt so dark.

I decided at that point to abandon my theme.  Yes, it's great to read and do research and learn about fairy tales while painting, but there was no time. I was also tired of women being silenced and reduced to their looks.  I started painting warriors.  I wanted women with swords who could fight their own battles and slay their own foes.  I wanted to contrast soft shadows with hard power.

Then I painted Truitonne, from a fairy tale, because I wanted to paint her red trout spots. 

Doing whatever I wanted to do felt great.  Learning things about watercolors felt great.

I began to have hope.

Day 20 - Marriage Bear

It's not news that fairy tales are filled with princes and princesses who have a tendency to get married.  Over the course of this month, however, I've been frustrated that marriage seems to be the ONLY possible ending to any story involving a female human.  Indeed, it doesn't seem to matter how old the female human is; she could be described as a girl as young as 7 in the start of the story, and bam, by the end, here comes a man-Prince, and off they go to the chapel.

Okay, no one usually says a word about chapels, but the rest of that sentence remains true.

This is the canvas that comes out of my frustration.  The tale of Snow White and Rose Red is a tale in which the female characters have a sweet relationship AND get to do things, like repeatedly free an ungrateful dwarf with a penchant for getting himself stuck.  And what happens in the end?  Of course, marriage.  To a bear.  I mean, he turns out to be a Prince, of course, but still.  Couldn't we just have a damn story about girls who do cool things and outwit an ungrateful dwarf?  I bet we could.

Day 19 - Baba Yaga's House

Until a couple of years ago, I had never heard of Baba Yaga, and that is a shame.  Baba Yaga is a figure from Slavic folklore who bears some resemblance to the witch in Hansel and Gretel, in that she lives deep in the forest and doesn't mind eating stray children who happen past (ideally, after making them do a bit of gardening).  Sometimes, wicked stepmothers even send their unwanted stepchildren to Baba Yaga as a means of getting rid of them - permanently.  Baba Yaga, however, is neither all nor always bad.  Sometimes, she can even be helpful.  I still wouldn't ask her to babysit, though.  I'm not sure she has passed First Aid.

Unlike some of her Western counterparts, Baba Yaga travels through the forest in a mortar (yes, that kind of mortar) with a pestle (yes, that kind of pestle).  She lives in a "chicken house," which is to say, a hut that stands on either one or two chicken legs, depending on whom you ask, and she has a fence made of bones, with after-dark lighting provided by various skull-lanterns.  When she sleeps, she stretches all the way from one end of the hut to the other.  Some say her nose touches the ceiling, but I don't know.  I don't think it's a good idea to sneak in and find out.

For this canvas, I wanted to paint Baba Yaga's house, which I find to be a charming visual, but I knew that meant painting lots of the surrounding forest, so I decided to start there.

Hey, maybe I'll do some kind of 50s mod trees!

Oh, maybe I won't because I don't want to do a 50s mod house

This will be included in the auction that starts February 1 to raise money for the Innocence Project and the Chicago Bond Fund!  YaY!