This week the peonies went from this:
... to another permutation I won’t even show you, then to this ...
... and then I gave up. Whatever I am trying to do, I’m not ready yet. I painted over it with white. Picture a white rectangle below.
Let’s look at the original and laugh:
The glazed peony went from this:
... to this:
... because I decided one of the many things I did wrong with the pink peonies (many many things) was that I went all sketchy and vague with the pre-paint drawing. This drawing is more exact. That way I won’t need to decide on shape and color at the same time. It will be more like paint-by-numbers.
So discouraging to take a step back after the success of the sunflowers. Clearly, because I bought a grownup easel, now the gods must slap me down for my hubris.
I think it's more "when you paint weird and unintuitive shapes by feel/intuition, you end up with really weird results" but that's just my opinion.
Posted by: KC | December 10, 2020 at 01:20 PM
KC - probably true. I was thinking that painting nature would grant me a lot of forgiveness, but not enough for peonies.
Posted by: TheQueen | December 10, 2020 at 08:57 PM
Peony petals do curvy things that... don't make a lot of sense. Generally, yes, nature = some things will be wonky = your painting can be a bit wonky. But when you're dealing with how light/shadow interact on petals that are curved like that: there's not a lot of margin before it just looks *wrong* and at any given stage, if it's something you can't either analyze or intuit reasonably easily, then you don't know whether it looks wrong because of the stage or whether it looks wrong because it will always look wrong because something *is* wrong with the light/shadow, so... maybe no peonies yet.
Posted by: KC | December 11, 2020 at 01:33 PM
KC - well the glazed project is all peonies, but a close-up.
Posted by: TheQueen | December 12, 2020 at 09:17 PM
May the close-up-ness give you enough to work from that you can "see" in enough ways to have confidence and to fix glitches! Good luck!
Posted by: KC | December 13, 2020 at 01:18 AM
KC - I tell myself that’s what happens, sometimes. The path of learning is not always straight.
Posted by: TheQueen | December 14, 2020 at 07:57 PM