Have you tried it?



Have you been to the Virtual Paintout blog [Virtual Paintout] yet? I am hooked on the concept, but haven't submitted anything so far.   Blogger Bill Guffey hosts the site and challenges artists to use the Street View of Google Maps to locate a "site" and do a virtual plein aire image of what the artists find in the designated city of the month.

The current city is Cape Town South Africa, and Bill has a Google map on his site on which to clack and get the Street View.  I toyed with the function for a while, and found lots of suburban streets, some highways, etc, and one or two terrific views of the ocean.  What I really wanted to find was people, and indeed I did.  Remarkable.  I "went" to the City Center, and and found some shopping streets, and just roamed the streets to find some local color.  I did find some wonderful images, and THOUGHT I lifted them correctly, downloaded them into Photoshop to tweak and rotate, retaining the street info, etc., and thought about how I might paint them.  Then, I went back to the Virtual Paintout to review the protocols.   I found out that I didn't identify the images correctly, so I can't use the ones I lifted to submit.  I now know what to do to use an image for the paintout, but can't find the original images again!  Oh well, I WILL do it correctly soon, and I still may paint the ones I found.

Even though I may missed painting something for the blog, I had a lovely virtual visit to Cape Town, and can't wait for what's next!  So far, there are some marvelous paintings done by artists who have figured it all out.  Wouldn't it be fun to join them?   

Fun with my Irises

Am more of a painter than a gardener, but these irises indeed were in my garden this spring.  I think of irises as hardy yet vulnerable and "feminine" and frilly, sort of a reflection of who I sometimes think I am. 

In any case, I like them and paint them each spring, always with mixed and different results.  This year, I painted the first image in a quick sort of traditional way, adding the finishing touches with my new favorite brush, the lizard lick that Myrna Wacknov introduced me to.

I have been fiddling with Photoshop, experimenting with several of the "artistic" filters, and color enhancements, and came up with the following.  Of course, it's fun to fiddle, but the benefit to my painting is it opens my mind to trying different color schemes, compositions, and ways to paint outside the box.

The unadulterated chickadees

I decided to upload the chickadees that weren't tweeked in Photoshop.  Still not great, but it may be more pleasing to the eye.  The "real" colors are somewhere between this post and the last one.

Another experiment

I took a class on Saturday in which everyone was using the same reference to paint chickadees, so of course, I wanted to do something different.  I changed a photo of some chickadees and painted the birds in the style the instructor was teaching.  My little chickadees were HORRIBLE! 

When I get to that place that I give up on a painting, I figure, what the hell, and start "playing."  I pulled out the foam stamp we made in Myrna Wachnov's workshop, and imprinted my little chickadees with the block.  Interesting, yes.  But worth resurrecting, I don't think so.  Still, it was a fun way to "blot" out my mini-disaster.

I Photoshopped to sharpen the contrast, and tweeked the green a little, because my disaster IS greener than the photo turned out.  I know, not my best, but it was a fun!  Maybe I shouldn't have posted this one.  Oh well.