Choosing Photos for the Next Paintings

My mind runs rampant – in between moments of, “Duh, I don’t know what I want to do,” the creative fires are screaming for me to do something. I want another landscape, but I’ve also been considering doing another floral.

I spent an hour looking through photos. Nothing is perfect, and with florals, I need to use the projector to get proper shapes and dimensions. I am not good at free handing the blossoms and getting all the intricacies.

I also have the photo of Tuli and the one of Leo which I’d printed on plain paper a couple weeks ago. Today, I printed six florals on photo paper. They’re not perfect photos, but hopefully I’ll be able to transfer them to pastel paper. I may try to combine the two magnolia photos to have two blossoms. I might do so with two of the rose of Sharon photos, too.

I’ll have to experiment and play around with creating interesting compositions. This is what I enjoy about painting -- developing vibrant, real scenes using the photos for reference, not to exactly duplicate the prints.

As for the proposed Tuli painting, this is hard because I feel guilty for not doing better when trying to paint Pele. I feel I didn’t do her justice.

I’ve talked before about the kinds of paper. For years, I used BFK Rives paper because I like the smoothness. However, I’ve been trying textured papers the last few paintings. I like the colored backgrounds, but I don’t like the texture. Texture is OK when using darker colors, but I cannot get bright color clarity with lighter shades like whites, yellows, and oranges… the dark of the paper makes a gray, bumpy underlayer to the light colors.