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Some of my artwork - feel free to post your own!
Dimmesdale
Illinois Explorer
4
Comments
I rather like the middle picture. It has an attractive solidity imparted by the limited, unified palette and strong, simplified drawing. Colored pencil?
I like seeing the outlines and then shaded and colored in for the bottom two. These are colored pencils drawings?
Thank you. I know very little about art/criticism, but it's good to know I "hit upon" something well and good... Yeah this is colored pencil, pretty much the only medium I know.
Yes, all colored pencil. I kind of like the non-colored version better but I thought it'd be nice to show both.
thumbs up.i like the last two.i like creatures.wonderful!
A couple of mine... I’ve been experimenting with working with photo’s
They're really nice "watercolours", @Kerome ...
kerome, the first one has an impressionist style. thumbs up.
johnathan,great sharp lines and strong contrast .love batman also goku in the action figure genre.
fosdick,love the flow of the tree branches.wonderful tribute to the one ear man,van gough.
love seeing art.it lights the color of our humanity.
Yeah I like it a lot also @fosdick, the lines and the texture make it a very interesting piece.
Thanks @paulyso, thanks @Kerome. I worked on that painting off and on for 15 years before giving up on it. There is not a living being on this forum who could not have done a better job in 5.
Challenge accepted!
Gave it 5 mins of filtering ...
Oh I iz wikid!
Sheee-it! Er, I mean ... you took the bait!
What makes you unhappy about the original @fosdick? I mean making art is always a process of taking courage and making a sudden substantial alteration which destroys what is there and allows something new to come into being, which I personally find quite difficult. But somewhere along the line you must have stopped and said, now it’s done... I think the result is excellent myself, it’s a lovely style.
Few things please me more than an invitation to blather on.
Nothing makes me unhappy about that painting. It is what it is. If experience had not taught that this is an unrealistic expectation, the disappointing thing would be that it has failed to become the thing itself.
Aside from that, it has a number of weaknesses. The transparency and depth of color fall short of what is possible in the medium (egg tempera). This quality cannot be seen in a reproduction of any kind, digital or otherwise, but it is highly developed and can be sensed to some degree in the works of Andrew Wyeth and Robert Vickery, among others.
The bird's feet and the birds in flight are poorly rendered, partly as a result of the small size of the painting. The tree trunks are rather shallowly realized, being based on a distant memory rather than on anything more present and substantial. Same could be said of the bird, except my memory of birds is a little sharper.
Many other things, I'm sure. I would be greatly obliged to anyone wishing to pick this painting apart.
A painting is a living thing for as long as the artist works on it. Like other living things, it starts off strong, grows, reaches maturity and then starts to decline. It is a valuable thing to be able to pick the high point and stop working. Then the painting becomes a thing, frozen in time. Would any of us wish such a fate? Yet clinging to self is a grasping at just that.
If the artist is very skilled, that dead thing can live again in the viewer. @paulyso mentions Van Gogh, who was very, very good at painting in a way that his work could almost instantly live again in the viewer.
You yourself have some skill at brushwork. I'd be very interested to see anything else you care to post.
fosdick, i feel you.one of my painting sat there for years.then,there is that magic moment driven by inspiration.where you just do it.it can be called the artist instinct,like dao zen ,the element,of ease in flow and concentration.
but in general the creative process takes work.there will be hard days.so i leave it alone.let time inspire.yes there is such thing as in the zone for artist,sudden or gradual.
Feel free! After all that is what the forum is for.
That is a very beautiful attitude, I have known a few good artists and they are hardly ever very happy with their work. So I applaud any painter who can let go of their art and let it fly in the world.
I didn’t know Andrew Wyeth worked in that way, very interesting, I’ve never read up on him but always admired the style of his paintings. But it’s very highly detailed and not something I would be comfortable doing, i pay attention to “painting with light” and have gotten used to working on my iPad where I have an undo and a redo!
The main thing that jumps out at me is the colour similarity between the background mountain and the back of the bird. It seems to cry out for more contrast, to allow the bird as a whole to stand out more vividly against the backdrop, now the eye gets lost a little.
Nicely expressed. But humans don’t have that choice, the hand of time keeps painting on our canvas until in the end the work falls apart. In a way being able to capture one or more points along the journey and call the work finished and sign it is a pleasure, it’s why we have photo albums.
Ajahn Chah...
Wonderful @Fosdick
Is it an American Kestrel? I saw one of these at a show on the Isle of Wight, the cutest little bird I think I’ve ever seen!
Yes, a male. The females are little less colorful, rusty on the shoulders, more banded markings on the breast and tail. They were quite common where I grew up, and I had a number of them as temporary dependents when I was a teenager - back in the days when they were still called Sparrow Hawks. Fed them on grasshoppers in season, and had my mother's freezer stuffed with frozen grasshoppers to use in the wintertime.
Yeah, a common condition, not limited to artists. A craving for full control coupled with the delusion that perfection exists and can be realized. Yet to do the work at all, one must believe that one can do better, so it's unavoidable. I only put it aside when my energy levels sank too low to support it.
You might also be interested to know that Wyeth considered himself to be an abstractionist. This is hard to understand when looking at a small reproduction, but if you were ever fortunate enough to see one of his originals, you could see what he was talking about.
If you want to paint with light, literally, that's surely the way to do it. I never got into that - I'm not willing to give up the dimension of surface and the subtleties of translucency, texture, tactility and depth that come with it.
Yeah, your right - definitely a fault. Not accurate either - the color is about right for the bird, but the cliffs should be more varied in tonality and paler in color. Ought to be cooler in tone, since they are meant to be in shadow.
That's deliberate, to some degree. Seeing birds in nature, one is often straining to distinguish bird from background, and very sharp, detailed bird paintings look unnatural to me, though they are useful in illustrations intended to aid in identification.
Always compromises.
Yes indeed, for the theist it seems to be a case of a God who just can't tell when to stop.
For the Buddhist, maybe it's a little different?
Have you ever painted in oils, or worked with media that depend on reflected light?
A cute meme I cooked up. Maybe someone understands it.
Enjoy!