Pasta Dinner still life - post critique changes

As the title says, these are post-critique edits! I can't recall if I made a post for pre-critique (50% and before turn-in), but I think for this painting , I completely forgot to take photos after the step, or before I began working on the next. I tend to do that for my digital work too...

Final edit was to include the shadow of the fork under, in the bowl. (That was some confusing wording.) I missed it originally since I was too overwhelmed by the pasta, and thought critique meant there was a shadow over the pasta from the fork, which, with this lighting, wasn't possible. It didn't help that my photo reference nearly lost that shadow! (Or perhaps the shadow was so close in value to the value of the bowl in shadow, that it got lost.)

Guest Speaker Claire Wendling and illustrations since last big post

I'll be honest, I didn't know much about Claire Wendling's work until recently but I must say her animals (or half human animals) anatomy are amazing! I got a couple of takeaways from her presentation as well, which is always a bonus from guest speakers' presentation in my book.

I'm paraphrasing a bit but 'Add water to everything, see what happens' and her method of using references. Instead of the way I've been using my references, by having them side by side, something I've made a habit of since making reference sheets for drawings, Claire Wendling looks at the references first, gets whatever she can into her visual library , with graphic notes if need be, and then draw from what she recalls from the visual library. Then she goes back to those reference images if things look off in her drawing. I feel like her method really does sound like something I should try out, though as she mentioned, figure drawing would need live models it seems like.

High Key painting! And next week's is low key, which I personally want to see how I do with low key.

This week, bird's eye view, blog questions and guest speaker Pascal Champion

 

Truth be told, that's not the actual color of the plate. I was feeling sleepy in the beginning of the class, and I completely forgot about using orange to mix with the cerulean blue to create the gray blue I was trying to accomplish, for realism sake. In the  end it worked out though, as the green-blue of the plate popped the red of the apple. 

In other news, aside from my work, I was told to treat my blog less like a diary (or art diary in this sense) and more of sharing other people's work and/or blog post. To other artists using blogger, is this true? From the  people I follow, most, if not all, the blog look to be their work or related to their work, rather than 30% their work, 70% other people I was told to follow. But the person brought a point, with a blog dating from 2012, why haven't there been comments?

I'm at a loss of how much to take of this person's advice. I suppose it varies for person to person but still, what is an art blog then? How much of your blog is suppose to be your stuff? I know for other social media, like Facebook pages, it's a good idea to share other pages' posts to share audience. And I believe this holds true to Tumblr as well, though sharing is, as far as I know, pretty common in the Tumblr community. But Blogger? 

#whatisblogging 

In a weird connection to this, Pascal Champion came as a guest speaker at my university tonight, and for him, he just shares his work and companies/work comes to him. Most professionals I follow seem to just share their work, without the sharing of other peoples' posts, which I believe sounds to be a method of networking on social media. On another note, I was able to takeaway a few things from his presentation, such as you don't necessarily need to be good at every foundation (possibly) such as color, but if for example your lighting or values is good, you've got a chance. 

I suppose for me personally, I know I need to get better at my drawing skills but I'm always improving each semester so this is a start for me. 

Refresher after spring break Still life painting

Yikes, mouthful of a title, but as title says, it's a refresher from coming back from spring break. There's no glass but it recovers reflective metal and patterns. Ah, and of course value and colors. 

Tea themed still life painting WIP 2

Oil painting still life - Story Theme: Tea. 

with reflective metal and glass. 

 

Slightly farther shot of painting and easel.

I up-ed the saturation on everything from WIP 1, then went back and toned down the saturation on the boxes to push them back a bit. If you look boxes in the glass versus the actual boxes, there's a difference, I hope.

Still life painting - Patterns

As the title says, this week we painted patterned objects, though most were glass/ porcelain.

Metal and glass Still Life (WIP)

 

 (This is a partial shot of  the painting since I goofed and forgot to take a photo of it while it was on the easel, and had to take it while it was in the drying rack, after I had already cleaned up.)

Our assignment was to paint a still life with 3-5 objects, 2 of them should be glass and reflective metal.

Still life limited palette #2

This is from 3 weeks ago I believe. 

 

It's not quite as limited as the first  painting but it's still pretty limited. If I recall, we had only titanium white, ivory black, yellow ochre, cad yellow, ultramarine blue ( unless it was another blue, or both temperatures) and terra rosa. 

Still life - Metal reflection

 

I'm improving pretty quickly according to my instructor and I believe him! This week's focus is on metal reflective items. 

Things learned, reflected items are darker than their actual color, and to keep things 3-D, things need to wrap. 

I'll be uploading WIPs for our next homework painting, which will include glass and metal. My original items , while worked composition-wise, lacked a story cohesion. Right now, I think my new items will be glass cup, filled with some water possibly, spoon, unopened tea bag packet and 2 boxes of different tea boxes. 

Still life painting - Learning to paint Glass

So this week's in class painting, we started on how to paint glass objects. My group selected a lightbulb as our glass objects.

Apologies , the top left corner is so blown out , I couldn't get a good lighting even with hitting the light side to keep it balanced. This week 's was almost more contained in terms of time with only 3 hours since our latter half of class was focused on our 1st homework critique. 

Last week's in class painting wasn't posted on my blog so I'm including it in this post rather than making a new one. 

Studies - Metal mug and plastic bottle

 

Done in SAI; my metal mug and  plastic water bottle.