I need oil painting help (very bad) *pics*

[Zesty]

I thought today was gonna be a good day for paintin', but I was definitely wrong :( This is only my 2nd time trying a "from life" still life.

I tried to make it easy to start with.. just 2 simple veggies (To tell the truth, i have no idea what the hell they are.. they were just in our fridge. Beats?) and a white cloth with a dark cloth backdrop.

Well, that was a miserable failure. I even wiped the canvas clean (except for the two veggies because i thought they were halfway decent). It still ended up very shitty and frusterated the hell out of me. I was about to pull the ol' hemingway solution .. hello darkness my old friend. :trouble: no.. not really but i felt like shjit.

SOrry for the rambling. Here are the things that were most difficult for me.

1. Colors, obviously.. every color on this painting sucks balls. I tried comparing warm and cool like richard schmid states, but to no avail.
2. the most difficult thing out of everything for me was the shadows on the white cloth... i kept mixing stuff that was way too light in value.. but when id mix something darker, it owuld look way to saturated or colorful.. not grey enough. But when i would attempt to make it more neutral.. it would just fuck it up and then it would look like mud and now a shadow. I STILL dont know what the hell the color of the cloth shadows were.. or the shadows under the (beats? large radishes?) for example..

Here are some pictures of the still life, and then my painting.

Please be harsh and tell me everything you see wrong. But mainly what im focusing on now is color..


http://www.gitrdone.net/zaphod/pos2.jpg


http://www.gitrdone.net/zaphod/pos1.jpg


http://www.gitrdone.net/zaphod/pos3.jpg

[H.Evans]

Yeah the "f**k" and the "hopeless" really brings alot to it... sets a particular mood quite deep and metaphorical... :D

wiping out areas of a painting that aren't working is a good thing to do... my profs really encouraged it. Travis, you need to relax, kiddo. You need to be more patient with yourself and your work. accuracy is a great thing to try for when youre drawing or painting, but keep in mind also that since you just took a photo of the subject to put in this post, why then you you need to paint another photo of it? Sometimes paintings are more interesting when you can intentionally tweek aspects of them away from reality. Try thinking of it this way: A painting, like a movie, is not real! anything can happen in a painting. yes art is hard, but i think you really make it harder for yourself than it has to be. Have fun with it for a change.

-Hillary

[BlueMech]

lol at first i thought the photo was your painting and I was wondering what the fuck you were calling bad!

I'm not a pianter(yet) so icant help much... sorry :/

[Zesty]

Well, instead of just complaining and being a whiny bitch about the situation, i decided to actually do something about it. I tried to recreate it from the photograph using Photoshop. I learned that even though a lot of the shadows looked cool, they were almost all warm except the blue at the very bottom. Even the "S" shape at the top which has a spec that looks blue, its actually red. Anyway, I think that really helped. Hopefully I'll try again.

Also I have to add, sorry for the lame "fuck" and "hopeless" comments. I know that's childish, but I get so frusterated when i paint sometimes instead of just messing something else up i have to do that. after this though, im hoping i learned a bit more and became a ilttle more mature ;)
http://www.gitrdone.net/zaphod/wacom/study1.jpg

[H.Evans]

there ya go... now youre getting the idea :btu:

[Zesty]

Well here's another ill attempt.

I completed the wine jar and i was like :clapping1 yehhhh look at my skinny arms. but then i tried doing the candlestick (crystal or soemthing.) and that was really god damn difficult to tell the truth. I couldn't even really simplify it... it was just so sporadic. Like dots. The other thing is i realize the edges arent good, I was waiting the entire time (3-4 hours) so that i could get done and take a dry soft brush and go over the edges, but i guess i didnt paint thick enough or something becuase dragging a brush over it just fucked everything up.. so i didnt bother with those. And lastly i'm not pleased with the background.. i dunno, jus tmakes it look like a painting you'd buy at a flea market.

at least they get progressively better lol. remember, be harsh or whatever when youre telling me critiques, i need ot learn!

ps. el coro ( :god: ), you said i should paint 4 paintings today. well this number one took half the day. how you did 4+ i have no idea... thats insane.

doh.. i forgot the link. wheres my drink?

http://www.gitrdone.net/zaphod/painting/wine.jpg

[Zesty]

Well tonight I just got back from a 2.5 hour workshop.. unofortunately it was only a 50 min workshop because the sandy vagina model didn't feel well and left. (she complained that my paint thinner made her sick.. well considering that i used turpentoid and you can't even smell that if you TRY, it was probably her cancer stick she had to smoke at every break). I was dissapointed though because this was my first attempt at a portrait from life, so i just winged (wung?) it. My goal was a Richard Schmid approach, and for the 40 minutes I started it I thought it was doing pretty well :/

Oh well, it's all good.

It cracks me up because I remember when I FIRST did a person I was asking people how exactly do i make flesh tones, and then I'd write down what paint they used and step by step what they did. i guess it just shows how much you learn and how much you suck balls when you start :fruit:

This is dramtically incomplete, obviously

http://www.gitrdone.net/zaphod/painting/7_portrait.jpg

[one2hit]

holy shat! These are harsh to look at. I'm color blind and no painter, but my advice would be to sketch out the image you see before you color it. Block in the shapes, because the accuracy of the placement in the first image is WAY off. It will be easier to copy the colors you see in an accurate manner if you have an accurate line template to work with. I am seeing a lot of shades on your cloth and stuff, but the shades aren't laying on any blocked in wrinkles. They are just swimming around. I think it would be hard as f*ck >__< to paint anything from life without sketching it out on canvas first.

[Zesty]

holy shat! These are harsh to look at. I'm color blind and no painter, but my advice would be to sketch out the image you see before you color it. Block in the shapes, because the accuracy of the placement in the first image is WAY off. It will be easier to copy the colors you see in an accurate manner if you have an accurate line template to work with. I am seeing a lot of shades on your cloth and stuff, but the shades aren't laying on any blocked in wrinkles. They are just swimming around. I think it would be hard as f*ck >__< to paint anything from life without sketching it out on canvas first.

.. uh thanks .

Well, I see what your saying but first of all I did sketch everything in, and second, the perspective is quite right, but you have to remember I took the picture from a completely different angle from how I was looking at it from my easel.

[one2hit]

it's not that far from where you took the picture from. Both are almost straight on views. I'm not talking about perspective, I'm talking about scale. There are parts of the cloth (like at the top) that are bigger in scale than they should be to the rest of the items. None of your wrinkles are blocked in, they are just floating around all over the place. If you look at the image, or...the set up you've placed for yourself, you'll notice that the wrinkles form actual polygons, they are 3 dimensional shapes that go back into the z axis plane. What you are doing, is blocking in the colors, and not the shapes...so we see a flat image, and not a 3 dimensional realistic one.

[Zesty]

I tried to do a monochrome painting today (its very small one) but it looks corny and lame i think. I think that's because it's so small though and i couldn't do a lot of detail. Oh well, i guess I'll keep doing these :hmm:

http://www.gitrdone.net/zaphod/painting/monochrome1.jpg

[pender]

I actually like the last one...it has what the other painting didn't have...clear value pattern, I can see what is in shadow and what is in light. In the onion piece, it's hard to tell the light from dark on them. I like the bottle and glass candle holder as well...its a good start...you just need to get better laying the paint down, which will come over time.