samtrainaart: January 2014

Welcome Back

Glad you're here.
After quite a month plus of staying mainly indoors except for painting in my backyard and surrounding acreage, its time to get rolling again with more paintings and workshops.

All 4 workshops in 1999 were awesome. Great artists and great works done. My two 2020 workshops have been great also but the main thing is I've seen so much improvement in all my workshop artists. Many have been attending for 4 and 5 years but I saw major steps forward on this last one.

Its important to remember that its easy to get discouraged when the brush and paint wont do what you want them to do. However, you are in control. You hold the brush, you take it into the paint, you mix the paint, you apply it. So if you have to blame someone or something go ahead and blame the items you use to paint. They wont take any offence to it and you can unload. Yep-get it all out of your system as best you can. Then return with brush, paints, and canvas and before you begin do some serious planning and thinking. Sketch out your scene on paper. Not once but a few times. Study the live scene or photo and see what you can take out or move to a better position in your composition. Think over all the things we talk about at the workshop. Maybe don't even start painting that day and just sketch. Get to know your subject better before you try and nail it down. Look at your sketches the next day and slowly and introspectively analyze. What's different that you see today that you didn't notice yesterday? Can you try to improve it? Sure you can. Go for it after all its only paper. One thing I do is take a cell phone photo of each sketch in case I later erase sections of the original sketches and make a change. I might decide that it was better the first way and I have the photo to revert back to. Happy paintings-

samtrainaart

Saturday, January 25, 2014

Red Barns