Last weekend I took a 6 hour webinar class with Valerie Collymore: https://www.valeriecollymore.com/
She’s an oil painter, and the class was for oil painters, but she said it would be fine for me to join (I paint with acrylics)
We spent a majority of class learning about brushstrokes, composition, paint mixing, values (dark, medium, light). She provided reference photos of some of her paintings for us to paint. I chose a painting with a teapot and an apple.
I would say her technique is kind of “Van Gogh” ish in that she uses a ton of paint and does a lot of little brushstrokes. I didn’t want to have that much texture in my painting, so, I didn’t paint it quite exactly the way she did.
We started the painting during class and then received critiques during the process. One thing that is different between her technique (which I think many oil painters use) and the technique I use is that with her technique, she would use ‘old’ paint all mixed together in whatever color, and then 1) paint dots on the painting showing various important location points (like the corner of a house, or the top of a tree, for example – to ensure proper placement on the canvas), 2) paint the outlines of all the items in the painting, then 3) start filling those outlines in. The technique I usually use (but I mostly used hers for this painting) is to ‘tone’ the canvas first – that is, I do a wash of a base color on the canvas to get rid of the stark whiteness of it. I did do that this time, as you will see. Then, normally, I draw the outlines with charcoal, which is easy to paint over. This time I tried the dot and paint the outlines method. Not sure I liked it though.
Anyway, here is the painting when she first critiqued it:
It was tough showing somebody a first pass when you know they’re going to critique it, but she was gentle :-). You can see I used green to tone the canvas. Pretty rough ha ha!
We continued working on our paintings and then submitted another photo for her critique. One of the main things I worked on was the spout on the teapot – I hadn’t gotten the shape right the first time:
I really wanted to get all the toned parts painted. Not bad for a few hours time. But I wasn’t satisfied with the green color of the tablecloth, among other things.
Valerie offered to give one more critique after class, so I sent her the painting above, and she sent me some photos – the one below shows her manipulated version of my painting showing what she thought I should do, and the original photo of the teapot and apple. It actually was very helpful to see the original photo. I now understood what the white swash on the teapot was!
I kept working on it off and on this week. As you can see below, I toned down the green of the tablecloth, but still not 100% satisfied at that point.
Below are some subtle changes I made – look at the apple in particular.
Gettin’ there …
Time to add some final details – the next few each have little tweaks
As I said in a previous post, My artist avatar is Shakti so that is how I will sign my paintings from now on. I plan to auction this painting off and donate the proceeds to the Kennett Area Community Services, similar to SILO that I donated to before, only a different area. I live in-between the two.
UPDATE: I did auction the painting off and raised $150 for KACS!!
I’m probably going to start another painting today – this one will be donated to the Oxford Arts Alliance. They are collecting paintings less than 10×10 inches for a show in late November. Stay tuned, and thanks for reading!