Well, I figured it out. Now for the daily practice.
I painted this over a month ago. It is small. Only 4x5. So I was able to finish it quickly. The tricky part was the light. The baseball was lying on our deck and the sun was bright. Most of us never pay much attention but the earth rotates pretty fast. When you paint in the sun the most frustrating thing is the light is constantly changing. The shadows change form. The quality of the light, the actual colors it produces, shift from one shade to another until there are an entirely different set of colors. So for the outdoors there really is no such thing as still life.
3 comments:
Nice to see you on-line.
-t
Your comment about "still" life is true, and I never painted very fast. I started taking pictures of things I was painting so I could refer back to them for lights and shadows. It was a big help for me, though not something everyone cares to do.
I am willing to use photos for drawing purposes for some subjects such as children and animals. I find that the camera lens distorts the image, however, and what makes a suitable composition for a photo may be less so for a painting. I guess it is a creative choice for parts of the composition that are blurry in a photo and how to reinvent them in painting. Addtionally, the human eye sees more color than any camera can. So I could have taken a photo of the baseball and then the lines of the shadows could have stayed in place. But the quality of light still shifts, the colors it produces change, sometimes drastically moment to moment. I guess that's why Impressionism is still a powerful influence on realist painting today over a hundred years later.
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