September Challenge, The Perfect Pair or Pear

The challenge for September is to produce the perfect pair or pear. Hmmm....

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How Carol met the challenge

I have painted many, many pears in the last 25 years.  There is something that draws me to them, and their slightly feminine shape.  

This is my favorite attempt, although I would never call it perfect.

Carol Schiff

www.CarolASchiff.com

www.CarolSchiffStudio.etsy.com

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How Carmen met the challenge

Pair of Pears, Watercolor

I really challenged myself and did this one as a watercolor. I was inspired by a watercolor demo last week. It's quite a departure for me, because I seldom do watercolor except in my sketch journal. 

Carmen Beecher

https://carmenbeecher.com
https://carmensart.etsy.com

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How Donna met the challenge

I really, really like painting pears and I have done many over the years. 

This painting was one of my first.  A friend wanted some voluptuous fruit which of course included pears.

But, I think my favorite was a collage I did for a Christmas quilt show.  This is my version of a Partridge in a Pear Tree.

This collage of colored papers and feathers is on a neutral acrylic background.  The pears are of course the pear tree and the feathers on the bottom represent the partridge.  I found some unusual papers for the feathers and tree then created the pears using a lot of really colorful papers.

Partridge in a Pear Tree

18x24 mixed media

www.donnavinesart.Etsy.com

www.donnavinesart.blogspot.com

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How Cindy met the challenge

A quick colored pencil execution of a pear with friend (the perfect pair) as I dash off to another adventure...a week of making mosaics at Wild Acres, NC!

How Kathy met the challenge

I love doing pears! I'm still working on my challenge pears, this time in watercolor.

If I don't get them done, below is my stand in for "the perfect pear," one of my favorites back when I was teaching myself a new version of Adobe Illustrator. 

How Denette met the challenge

I painted this for our PO8 member Cindy Micheau several years ago when she had a pear fetish.  Now it's living in my kitchen so I can enjoy it every day.  Thanks Cindy!

Jean looked at "pair" a bit differently

How about a watercolor of a pair of slippers?
I painted this in color, but converted it to black and white so I could see my value range.
Color tends to hide value, so it's a good exercise to do this from time to time.

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Last, but ....
Fay met the challenge with another homage to Georgia O'Keeffe.

Bosc Pear 

using Georgia O'Keeffe's
Green Oak Leaves, 1923
Oil on canvas. 12 x 9

You can't blame me this time. My friend and fellow Pieces member gave me a vintage address book of high quality O'Keeffe reproductions. I thought the painting pictured above would make a perfect background for my collage of a pear. As I continued to look through the pictures, I realized  the curves O'Keeffe's used in paintings of the hills close to her home resembled the curves of a pear. Et voila! The perfect medium for the collage. The pear above was cut from the print of It Was Red and Pink, 1959, a large canvas of 30x40, also done in oils, whose colors pleased me the most.  I had a hard time finding an intact reproduction after I destroyed the print making my collage.

      The original abstract is on the left. The flipped version which seems to reveal the sky, the hills and the earth is on the right.

                                                                                           

Our Challenge for April, Complementary Colors

For April, we were challenged to produce art using opposite colors on the color wheel (plus white if needed). Click on any image to enlarge it.

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Carmen's response to the challenge:

I chose red-purple and yellow-green. A mix of those colors plus white produced the neutral color in the background.

Butterfly Tree

 Carmen Beecher

www.carmensart.etsy.com

www.carmenbeecher.com

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Kathy's response to the challenge.

I gave this three tries.
My first was a 10x10 watercolor in purple and yellow using a game I like to play for inspiration. 

My second effort, a tiny 6x6 inch watercolor in blue and orange.

Still in progress a large 20x23 inch acrylic in a blue chosen to complement Pantone's new coral.

A Snail Fantasy (20x23 acrylic on watercolor paper)

Kathy Garvey

etsy.com/shop/snailflower

spoonflower.com/profiles/kgarvey

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Donna's response to the challenge:

This challenge to me seemed made for Cezanne, Gauguin or Matisse.  For some reason I think of pure straight color when I think of them.  To really experiment I decided to do a copy of a famous painting I had done before, Madame Matisse.  I just loved the simple use of color. 

Below on the left is Madame Matisse in Blue and Orange with a little white. (On the right is my prior rendition.) I made her eyes and mouth a little bigger this time to show off the color differences.  I was really surprised when what seemed to be a simple use of color was much more complex. Scary isn't she!!

Donna Vines

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Mary's Response to the challenge:

Red and green are traditional complementary colors - opposite each other on the color wheel. I experimented with some others, such as blue-violet and and yellow-orange (opposite tertiary colors), but I liked the radishes best.

Radishes (in progress) by Mary Warnick

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At last, I am posting for the April challenge. I was recently introduced to Alex Katz, an self defined post abstract artist who is all the rage in Paris right now. Lectures, exhibits, interviews. I saw his work in the Orangerie and at the Louis Vuitton Fondation. His Homage to Monet 2009 inspired my response to this month's challenge. 

 Alex Katz, Homage to Monet, 2009

After Alex Katz, Silver Birch in Spring, 2019

Fay Picardi

The August Challenge, Paint on Black

The challenge this month is more simple than previous ones: 

do a piece of art on a black background.

I actually love painting on black and wonder why I do not do so more often. There is a bit of an adjustment as any color will be heightened in intensity when used on a black background.  But the good news is that you have a "magic eraser" - a tube of black paint.  I start my black art with acrylic and finish with oil.

Mint Tea, 10 x 10, sold

Sweet Tea, 7 x 5, available

It's fun to see how many places you can leave the black canvas as part of the painting...maybe that is the "magic brush" part.  Cindy Michaud   -  questions? art@cindymichaud.com

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One of my favorite paintings is Van Gogh's The Starry Night. Not a unique choice, but certainly an explosive one. When I originally saw time lapse photos of the Perseid Meteor Shower,  I could not erase Van Gogh's painting from my mind.

The Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh 1889

My Inspiration: A Perseid Meteor Shower

Time Lapse Photo 

 

Perseid: Homage to Van Gogh

Mixed media collage on black paper 5x8

I had fun with this challenge. After I was happy with my composition, I played around with the photo and increased the contrast before I posted it. 

Fay Picardi

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I almost always paint on a black surface.  At first, I had difficulty starting with such a dark support, but it is now second nature to me.

SOLD

Purchase here

There are always tiny areas of black, showing through the other colors, which helps to intensify
the hues.

Carol Schiff
www.CarolASchiff.com
www.CarolSchiffStudio.etsy.com

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I so enjoyed the "half-face" challenge that I used the same technique that I used on that one to paint my picture on black.

 #Me Too

This is my homage to the #MeToo Movement. Her experience has broken her into little pieces and given her a haunted look, but she will gather strength from knowing that she is not alone. The sheer force and energy of her fellow victims are bringing about change. Predators, beware!

Carmen

www.carmenbeecher.blogspot.com

www.carmensart.etsy.com

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Doing this challenge reminded me that I had not painted on black for awhile, just for a change.  I had almost forgotten how dramatic the effect could be and how much your colors were affected by such a dark background. 

Even though this is not a photo of an overcast day, I could not seem to get the sky or ocean light enough.  If I really wanted to be as light as the photo I would have had to use a pallet knife to add layers of lighter color.
This was a painting I did about a year ago.  Look at how thick the paint is to add lighter color and highlights.

www.donnavinesart.blogspot.com
www.donnavinesart.etsy.com

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BLACK BIRD
By Jean Thomas

I created a gel print on black paper a month or so, ago. This uses a gel plate and you roll acrylic paint on it and add shapes or draw into it. Then you lay a sheet of paper on it. It is like a mono-print without the press.(Look up gel prints on YouTube to see the technique.)  I was going through the prints and this one grabbed my attention. It had potential, but it needed something. Added the blackbird and a bit more color. Voila! 

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POPPY ON BLACK

When Denette suggested painting on black for the August Challenge, I remembered a one day workshop I attended several years ago with the delightful and talented Kaye Shannon on painting with watercolor crayons on black canvas.  Her paintings were beautiful and I tried her methods for awhile, then moved on to other things.  Well, time to try again.  It was more difficult than I remembered, but I kept going.

I was having trouble getting what I wanted with the crayons alone, so I added some watercolor inks and Arches liquid watercolor paper.

Mary Warnick

 Pink and Palm

 

I made a lot of mistakes when I painted this. I put black oil rather than acrylic for the background so it took forever to dry. Then I had to put a heavy layer of pink and green oil colors and then let it dry. A week later I started to add to the rest of the colors. I like it. However, the surface is bumpy, which I don't like. Oh well. 

Denette Schweikert

 

http://denette.net/

 

Kathy Garvey

I love to paint on black, but this month I have a little too much on my plate so the 12 x 16 inch acrylic I started on a gallery wrapped canvas is still not finished. I'm posting it below at it's current stage and if I magically get it painted before the deadline, I'll update this entry.



July Challenge, The Half-Face Makeover

This month we were challenged to cut out half of a face, glue it to a support, then do the other half in a creative technique of our choice.

The Cheeky Chick

When I first saw the photo of this young woman, I thought Angles, Angles, Angles. Just look at the parallelogram formed by the sides and bottom of the cheekbones and the chin. And that ain't all, baby. There are obtuse rectangles everywhere! 

So I started cutting out shapes. Angled shapes. And things just feel into place.

I had meant to create a futuristic looking face, using metals and angular shapes. But as I look at her,

 I see images of the Byzantine Madonnas or Modigliani's women. Iconic. What fun!

Fay Picardi

I have long been fascinated with Matisse and in particular with his portrait of Madame Matisse.  Why did he paint her in colors? Was that how he saw her or was she a woman of many moods.  Was she young or middle aged when he painted this?  It always reminded me of the Picture of Dorian Grey.  How he never changed but his picture did.  Is that what was happening?
When I came across this beautiful photo of Joan Crawford, yes Joan Crawford minus eyebrows and big shoulders.  I thought about how lovely and innocent she looked when she was young and for some reason it made me think of Madame Matisse.  
I glued half of the photo of Joan onto a support and painted the other half as Matisse painted his wife.  I thought how wonderful it would be if all that had happened to her showed in the painting and she could be the same inside.

Madame Matisse

Joan Crawford

Picture of Joan

Donnavinesart.blogspot.com

Donnavinesart.Etsy.com

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by Kathy Garvey

Once is never enough. Since faces are totally out of my realm, first I had to experiment in my sketchbook to see if I could work with the idea.

Then I had to try it out on my inexpensive 6x9 watercolor pad.

Only after that did I attempt it on a good piece of watercolor paper.

I'm not going to do anything with it as it is because I find the contrast between magazine paper and watercolor a little jarring. But, I did have fun softening that into the version below in Photoshop. 

 

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I did the challenge in oils, pasting the photo half to canvas and finishing the other side in blocks of color.

Color My World, 8x10

I notice that everyone else so far has done the right side of the face. My theory is that right-handed people tend to do that. I'm not left-handed, but my reason for creating the left side of the face is quite simple; it was the side with shadows, which made it easier to create different values defining the face.

This technique was so much fun that I think I'll do a whole face this way next. 

Carmen Beecher

carmenbeecher.blogspot.com

carmenbeecher.com

The first challenge was to find an interesting face that the view was straight on. Here's an ad with a pouty girl. Her expression caught my eye. So I folded it in half, and decided to see what happened when I tried to match it in watercolor.

It was pretty dark with not much detail, so I had to elaborate.
I worked on this while in the Keys, so I was inspired by a sea turtle we saw while out in the boat.
That's the fun of being an artist. Everything is dependent upon interpretation!
Jean Thomas
Pieces of Eight

"Symmetrical"

 

 

Denette Schweikert