Al Fresco Art Club Challenge for Oct 13, 2019: Paint a Common Object in Gouache
/This week’s challenge continued in our tradition of painting common objects (still life) in one hour. I chose to paint a class Penguin paperback published in 1984. For the past month I’ve been having trouble completing my paintings, so I chose a book because the shape is easy to paint, and I made a conscious decision to avoid details. I intentionally forced myself just to block out the large shapes and then just let go of it.
Penguin has a wonderful graphic style: white text (looks like Helvetica) on a black background, illustrated with a painting from the period covered by the book. In this case, Maupassant’s “Selected Short Stories” were written from 1880 on. The fitting illustration for this collection of stories is a detail from Edgar Degas’ painting named “After the bath”. Degas liked this topic and made many paintings on this theme.
Here’s my version.
