What a long, strange trip it has been

Well, I made it.  I completed 50 paintings in the month of November.  I learned a lot from this project, and I am really excited at how far I have come in terms of painting skill. Here is one of the last paintings I did:

Blue Teacup

See you next year.

Done!

I painted my 50th painting earlier this evening.  I'll post scans later -- for now, I am savoring my done-ness.

Real objects

The good news is that I am progressing in my lessons and learning a lot.  I have moved on to painting real objects and giving them form and dimensionality.  The silly part is that I have been painting toilet paper.

In my defense, that is the lesson in the book.  And it makes a certain amount of sense -- it is in a natural progression from the shaded cylinders I had been painting recently. I just feel kind of silly doing it.

Nevertheless, I pursued the lesson and have painted several rolls of toilet paper.  This is my most recent one, and the one I am most satisfied with:

the best of several iterations

On to spheres

I'm working on spheres now.  They are harder than cylinders, since the shading needs to be just so.  Here are a couple of my more successful efforts:

This one looks oddly lumpy.

I need to extend the shading, I think.

I'm going to keep working on this until I get it right.

Now in 3D!

So the next lesson involves placing shadows and shade so that a form looks like it has dimensionality.  I did a couple of other "practice runs", but this is the one that came out the best:

Blue Pencil Holder

I'm still not sure of my shading -- I'll clearly have to practice a bit, but this looks much more dimensional than what I have been doing

Creating different shades: Yellow

The next exercise was to take a color and create darker shades of it, first using black, then using its complement.  I did this with red, blue and yellow, but the only two in this post are the two I did with yellow.  I may post the other four later.

Darkened with black

Darkened with purple

Color Wheels

So the next exercise in the book was to paint color wheels of the primary, secondary and tertiary colors.  Mine ended up a little sloppy, shape-wise, but I'm satisfied with the colors (I'm not sure when my wheels became triangles, but whatever).  Here they are:

Primary Colors

Secondary Colors

Tertiary Colors

Paintings

The first painting was sort of a study for the second one, which (IMHO) is much better.  They are both paintings of the Coronado Bridge in the evening.  The third one is a sort of abstracted view of the moonrise over the ocean.  I was really captivated by the colors, so I focused on those more than on forms.

Study

Coronado Bridge

Moonrise

Only one painting

I managed only one painting last night, but I'm still up to date on my "word count".  Since I have a four-day weekend coming up, I'm looking forward to being able to paint more -- and hopefully building up a cushion for when I go out of town for Thanksgiving.

Tomorrow, I'll scan the paintings from yesterday and the day before.

Three paintings

I finished three paintings tonight, bringing my "word count" to 14,000.  I'll post images tomorrow, once the paint has dried.