FLEURS

Little have I posted in recent weeks about any of my feeble attempts to become an artist! I always have a painting in progress. I feel somewhat lost if my drafting table or easel sits free of paints or pastels. At the very least, I want a sketch completed and ready for the stroke of a brush or a pastel. (Although, I sometimes do not sketch anything before painting.)

 

Anyway, I had previously written about my experience in the one-day pastels class I took in June. Even though it is a messy medium, I like it. I decided to do a couple more paintings using it, so I would not lose what I recalled from the class. The sunflower I began in the workshop and completed at home. The other two I have since done. Yes, I even had them matted and framed. All three of them. It does not mean I think they are really good enough to spend that kind of money to have professionally framed, but I was getting a fair amount of heat from family and friends to start framing my work. Eh, I have certainly seen far better by others.

 

What interests me the most is how people respond to each painting. Of the three pastels, it seems quite varied as to which each person prefers the most. The various people who were involved with the matting and framing at the shop all had their particular favorite. There is one painting I actually intensely dislike. Yet, it was the favorite of two of the frame shop's employees and also my son. Funny how people see or are attracted to different aspects of a painting. It can be the color, the subject matter, the shading, or any number of things that pull them to one specific painting that makes them say, "Yes, this one is my favorite."

 

Here they are, poorly photographed (dang glare) and in the order of when I painted them.

Ewwww, the one makes me cringe. It is ugly to my eyes. Very ugly. Figures it is the one four people have told me is their favorite.

 

Since I finished the rose, I decided to put away the pastels for a time and bring out my acrylics. I had taken a photograph of my daughter a couple of years ago that I have always liked. I was taking pictures of my daisies out in the large flower bed in my back yard. They butt up to some pine trees I had planted, too. My daughter came over to see if the daisies had a scent, and she leaned down to smell one. ::smile:: I know they have virtually no fragrance, yet I still find myself doing the very same thing. I snapped the picture at the moment she began to breathe in. It is a challenge for me to see if I can paint that photograph using acrylics. It is very far from being finished. I did a rough sketch of her on the canvas, but left the rest empty. I have never done a portrait with acrylics, and I am struggling (and wishing I had instead chosen to do this using watercolors). I really need to take at least one class in the use of acrylics.

 

Anywhoooo, here is the early stage of that painting. Still very much incomplete and in need of details, shading, leaves, stems, and the like.

And that's what the simple folk do in their spare time. ::smile::

 

"Happy are the painters, for they shall not be lonely. Light and colour, peace and hope, will keep them company to the end of the day." ~Winston Churchill