Teaching a SLOW Student!

Have you ever tried to teach anyone something?  It can be difficult!  Its even more difficult if the student you are teaching is just NOT getting it, now imagine you are doing all that, WHILE you are trying to teach something you don't know!

That is the struggle of the self taught artist, trial, and error, and more error.

Lots of error.  I am trying to get the sky in a painting just right, that is how I am seeing it in my mind, it is taking a lot of error.

Here are some of my practice sheets where I practiced different techniques to try to get the results I wanted:

Real quality art there, right?

But its all part of learning without a teacher.

Eventually I moved back onto my canvas, and its not perfect yet, but I feel like I know what needs happen now, its just that the paint I already put down needs to dry before I can do more, otherwise my colors will mix and I will end up with a green sky.  I also keep reminding myself that it won't just be a sky, there will be land and a bridge, and water, the sky will end up being only a backdrop for everything else.  I keep telling myself that, but I want to get the sky perfect anyway. It is getting close to what I see in my head, and I think I'll be able to bring it around to that point in t the next painting session.

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I'll Let You in on a Secret

As an artist I have a secret.  It haunts me with every landscape painting I do.  I don't know how to paint clouds.  I mean, yeah, I try... but they never come out realistic enough for me.  I do acceptably with small wispy white clouds in a blue sky, but big puffy clouds, or storm clouds I'm just never happy with.  I've gotten lucky on  a few paintings and had reasonably satisfying results, but usually its a wrestling match to get there.

For example, my recent work in progress.  I first painted the whole canvas blue, because it is going to have water and sky.  I wasn't really concerned with coating the entire canvas evenly, because I had in my minds eye some spectacular clouds that would cover most of the sky portion.So here is what it looked like after that first coat of paint:

Well, I proceeded to try to produce my vision of these clouds, and I came very close.

This was almost exactly what I wanted, I was thoroughly pleased with the lower left section of sky, but moving away from that area, I felt it looked worse and worse, until finally up in the right hand corner I felt I was looking at blue camo rather than clouds. I posted it to my facebook page, and to several art groups asking for advice, and was assured by everyone the clouds looked fine, but I couldn't shake the impression of looking at blue camo.

Maybe I should have listened to everyone, but NO, not Mrs. Perfectionist Vicki!

I tried to fix it, but only made it worse, and finally, in frustration, I did this:

So, I spent most yesterday evening painting, and the net result so far is a blue canvas.  NICE!

Some day, I'm going to figure this cloud thing out.  I think I should start practicing on paper for a bit, until I get it, so I don't have to paint over a canvas.

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Thank you for reading! If you liked what you see, please consider following this blog with Google Friend connect, or follow me on Google+, or if you prefer, you can follow by email and get notified each time the blog is updated. See the right hand column to follow in any of these ways! I welcome your suggestions on how to make this blog more interesting to you!

Fine Art America is the place to go for Prints of all my Paintings.

 

My etsy shop is the place to go to buy my originals and request commissioned work. A few select prints are available here as well!