Exciting Visiting This Labor Day Weekend

 Finally back after getting NIU Electronic Reserves ready for faculty and students. Saturday of the holiday weekend I am visiting  two Milwaukee museums: with a group from NIU.

Milwaukee Art Museum http://mam.org/    to see the China Exhibit.
Then on to Milwaukee Public Museum http://www.mpm.edu/?gclid=CJOd3NmIgKsCFQ0BQAod-UZo2g


Some pictures from my trip to the Chicago Botanic Garden August 15th.

I loved the high color.all over and found the water lilies especially exciting.

Now I have more reference pictures for future paintings to come.

"The Sunflowers Three" will be featured on my next post, soon, very soon.

"The Sunflowers Three" is making progress.

The blue sky is underpainted.

The under painting is complete with the blue sky and yellow flowers.

"The Sunflowers Three" is making progress. The under painting is complete. Now to get on with applying the glazes. I love doing this layering of color. It wakes up the painting and wonderful things begin to happen. To me this is part of the magic of art.

A glaze is a thin transparent veil of color applied over the under painting or over another glaze. The purpose is to enhance the color creating jewel like tones and it can make the colors brilliant.

A glaze can be used to tone down a color patch that is popping or too noticeable. A glaze will enhance and add depth and life to shadow areas and push colors further into the background.

Warm colors are applied to bring an element forward on the picture plain. To push a color toward the background cool tones are glazed over an area. The complementary color grays down the color beneath it. To add luminescence a veil of a transparent white is applied over a highlighted area then more color is glazed over that.

In this stage of my work there may be from 5 to 15 or more layers of glazes applied. I keep adding glazes until the effect is pleasing to my eye. After that happens I will refine the the painting, possibly adding yet more glazes. I will get the glazes resolved and take another picture to post for that stage.

Moving Right Along With Sunflowers Three

Drawing-Pencil and Watercolor Pencil Study.

The 16" x 20" canvas started.

Enlargement of watercolor pencil study.

The “Sunflowers Three” title comes from the fiddlers three in the Old King Cole song I used to sing in McHenry Choral Club. I loved that song and our bases chosen to sing the parts and dress as the fiddlers three. Nice memories. These three sunflower images remind me of those guys. Wonder if they’ll make an appearance. in the work? I haven’t gotten that far yet.

I documented the working drawings which have led me to putting the image on canvas for the first stage of the painting. The watercolor pencils were so fun to use on the study I decided to try them for my under drawing/painting. Below is the beginning of the project "Sunflowers Three" with the underpainted stems.

Next stage is to underpaint the flower petals.