Al Fresco Art Club Challenge, Sunday, Nov 3, 2109

I painted another clock today. This clock is a decades-old Radio Shack alarm clock. I bought this little sweetheart after my Braun alarm clock died. I know that the name “Radio Shack” doesn’t have the panache that Braun has, but panache doesn’t mean everything, or, in some cases, it doesn’t mean anything. With alarm clocks, they just have to work. Score: Radio Shack 1, Braun 0.


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.

Al Fresco Art Club Challenge, Sep 8, 2019 -- Maneki-neko in Gouache

Today’s Al Fresco Art Club challenge was to do a still life in one hour. I chose to paint one of my maneki-nekos, a shiny black marvel with lots of highlights and reflections. I started with a sketch using a water soluble graphite pencil, then painted in the local color: black, then blocked in the other gold and green areas. By the time I had done that, my hour was almost up, so I painted some rushed highlights to give it a little more interest.

Sunday Al Fresco Art Club Challenge, Aug 4, 2019 -- Gamut Mapping

This week’s Al Fresco Art Club challenge was to use a restricted color palette to paint a masterpiece. I chose to repaint “Farmhouses near Bellevue” by Paul Cézanne. I painted this masterpiece two weeks ago, but Artrage failed to save my work. Or maybe I failed to save it. I really don’t know.

This restricted palette challenge was inspired by the “Creating Gamut Masks” chapter in James Gurney’s Color and Light. I created a gamut mask in Artrage with the aid of Aaron Rutten’s Gamut Masking Tool, which he explains in his Youtube video Color Gamut Masking Tool for Artists. Aaron is a cool guy —- I love artists who freely share their knowledge.

Here’s the gamut mask I created using Aaron’s tool. I examined Cézanne’s painting and picked the predominant colors. However, for the sake of experimentation, I intentionally chose to limit blues. Neutral gray serves as blue in this color scheme.

Getting this palette into Artrage was a pain — Artrage for iOS can’t import PSD files. To work around this, I created the gamut mask in Procreate, which does handle PSD files perfectly, then exported a PNG to the iOS Photos app, then imported the “photo” into Artrage. File handling is a tragic affair on the iPad. The idea of using an iPad as a general purpose computer is a joke.

Here’s my attempt to repaint a Cézanne masterpiece. The five swatches at the top of the painting were picked from the color gamut and used for all of the colors in this painting. I did adjust the value of some colors to get some darks into the painting. Overall, I like the mix of colors, a lot.