Topic awaiting preservation: Speed Painting: Still Life

30 minutes, 30 days, I don't care, set up a still life and paint it. Not necessarily fruit, flowers, bread and wine, just something still, cellphone, handheld, a stack of CDs and a lump of swiss cheese maybe? Look more than you paint and it oughta be interesting.

Keep this speed painting torch burnin!

Just about everything near my desk is too ugly to paint... phones, staplers, cords, etc so I went for the typical flowers. I'll set up some other items later this week and try to get a few more pics in. Still life is my kind of painting

About 30 minutes



I tried to do a blind contour of my husband at his desk last night. It was pretty horrific. He had no neck and super squashed legs. I'm not posting it but I did give your suggestion a try

ha =D I didn't mean blind contour drawing but I do love them and wouldn't mind seein it, I love how those come out, I have some great ones scattered around the house in various books and folios. Fear n ot! Most contour drawings suck, but they suck in such a nice way.

nice colors on the flowers, was that done in Painter? Come to think of it, I like all your paintings, vibrant saturated colors appear to be a theme.

It was Photoshop, I just used the dry media brushes. Thanks for the nice comment

Yep, big splashy colour is me although it's not intentional if you can believe it. I've tried to do dark, scary paintings and I've tried dim, gray and fuzzy but I always end up adding masses of colour. It's actually a source of minor frustration as I don't know how to use colour properly in a painting - I really need an art lesson. I tend to go with a single background colour and then layer shades of light/dark on top on that, all within the same colour range. I often see people adding these wild blue and yellow highlights and I'm thinking, "wow, that looks so cool" but when I try it, it looks ugly and freakily off. It's like I'm a defective colour picker. Feel free to offer advice anyone, I'm listening!

I ditched the squashed husband unfortunately but I'll give it another go tonight. It was fun.

Does this count? I sure hope it does because I spent a little more than an hour on it .

errrr.... whats so hard to understand about the words "still life"?



No mo time fo dat. Probably 45 minuters on it... atleast. yah. WooF!

What if it was a painting of a dead person . They're still, and lifeless, inanimate.

oof... ran out of time, and skill... LOL!


______________
Is This Thing On?

Bleah...

a non-still-life and a non-painting c'mon!

Nice Wallace and Gromit! Var goot!

I agree with JKM, I have always loved your deep and lucious colour schemes in your work Amerasu.

One on the very best books that I keep close to my heart, is the Art of Color by
Johannes Itten ( from the Bauhaus School of thinking). There is a chapter which explains "subjective timber", which sheds some light on why people select certain colours according to their physical make-up.

A very expensive book, with exquisite litho prints, but well worth the purchase and read.

~edit~ here's a short intro to the book. http://www.dezignare.com/newsletter/Johannes_Itten.html

Trust me, if you want to understand colour and theory, this is the book.

carry on...

cheers
kromaZ



[This message has been edited by kromaZ (edited 02-06-2004).]

Thanks Kromaz, I've bookmarked that page and will look into getting the book this weekend if I can. It seems many people like Itten's book as I've seen a number of references to it while searching for colour info. I'll definitely check it out.

I like your Wallace & Gromit, Izzy


Amerasu

hey thanks! i am pretty happy with gromits face... I may finish this when i get some time. anywhoo...

so jas, yer all talkin about still life this, still life that... you gonna back your talk up or what?

Wallace and Gromet!

Still getting used to being back at my old desk and getting used to not having as much monitor as I used to. Gotta dive back in sometime, right?
One of my favorite coffee mugs sitting that is always sitting in front of my mousepad.
Around 10 minutes. Hey, I'm taking it slow. Once I get used to PS again, I'll get back to kicking Painter in the nuts.
speedmug.jpg

not bad at all for 10 minutes!

*gives the thread a not-so-gentle kick in the ... uh... thread, as he wanders by.*

hey hey kicky, I'm puttin in an extra hardrive over here, gimme a break.

you got next kicky, my apologies for my non-participation =\

i knew i shouldent have done that.

by the way, cut the blue wire. Not the red one.

it works, and man them Adobe folks aren't-a-kiddin on their scratch disk recommendations vroom vroom

oh yah? you mean using a different disk?

hmmm.... I *do* need another 80 gig drive... hmmm


[antique sigs are us]

yessir, different physical drive. I've never noticed a problem (pre version CS/8) so I always assumed that my single spacious drive was fine and they were just making their recommendations for the lotta folks that had a small hardrive.

Then came CS and man, epsecially after getting addicted to the handiness of the file browser, it had numerous sit and wait operations that drove me to support arenas. I decided to follow Adobe's Photoshop performance optimization recommendations to the byte and I'm not sorry I did.

Went and got another 120GB drive and split it into 40/40/20/20 and made those the 4 scratch disks. Also followed every other recommendation there and noticed an immediate and large improvement, had the file browser open all day today rummaging through 5GB folders of 2-4MB JPEGs and I was getting instant thumbs. I could hold down the arrown down key and it would fly down the list instead of pausing on each to manufacture the larger preview thumb. All this file browsing I could do while having 10 or 15 large images open at the same time. Can you tell I'm impressed?

Office Depot has a $60 rebate (30-Office Depot/30-Maxtor) offer going on 120GB/7200/133 Maxtors through tomorrow 2/28/04.

Image cache, file browser, paging file and scratch disk info in that Adobe link^ was invaluable to me, the rest in there I was doing already so can't comment on for difference.

rambled on something that prolly shouldn't have landed in a speed painting thread =\ Oh yeah, you can brush and smudge with a 300px soft brush much better when you do that^ there, that's better



[This message has been edited by JKMabry (edited 02-28-2004).]