Chore Day, December 12, 2020: Yard work, Laundry, Vacuuming, and Cooking Flatbread

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Doodling with Rebelle 3, while awaiting Rebelle 4

Today was a busy day, The yard work was especially arduous. I raked what seemed like tons of wet leaves. In our little town we have yard waste pickup every two weeks. Fair weather or foul, every second Saturday I hustle to fill the big green yard debris bin with the leaves that our arboreal friends dump in our yard. With the wet weather, the leaves seemed to be channeling heavy gravity. I struggled to drag the bin up the slope to the street.

In less weighty news, I made a fresh batch of purple sweet potato flatbread. I used oat flour instead of the usual buckwheat flour. Oats make for a smooth texture, and the buckwheat is gritty, which I prefer.

On the laundry front, I watched two episodes of Community. It’s a show that correctly depicts the people I met in my community college years, which were a thousand times more educational than my Big Prestigious College years.

When I wasn’t watching Community, I watched another video from Mark Carder. His Draw Mix Paint Youtube channel is a great oil painting resource. I’ll be working through his free oil painting course after I complete Isis Sousa’s course.

Lesson 5 - Landscape with Oil Pastels

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Today I completed lesson 5 of Isis Sousa’s digital painting course. The assignment was to paint a landscape using an oil pastel style brush. The painting proceeds in five layers: sky, mountains,lake, green pastures, wheat field, and foreground flowers. I painted this on one layer with one brush, the Corel Oily Water brush that’s in the Sargent collection.

My painting is an impressionistic rendition of the original photograph (below). The only part of the painting that I would repaint is the cute little mountain at the left of the picture — it’s too smooth and blended. Other than that, I’m happy with the painting.

Lesson 6 reference photo courtesy of Isis Sousa

Lesson 6 reference photo courtesy of Isis Sousa

Lesson Four -- Decaying Leaves

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Painted on one layer using a modified Speckle Grainy Hard Dip brush in the Corel Painter Sargent collection.

Today’s I completed lesson 4 of Isis Sousa’s helpful Corel Painter course. This lesson emphasized simplifying a complex scene (rotting leaves on a gravel background), analyzing value, determining colors correctly, and working on edges. My painting vaguely resembles the reference photo, and my colors are unique to my brain, but the painting is a success. I immensely enjoy painting on one layer.

I had trouble modifying the brush for this assignment. The goal was to change the Speckle Grainy Hard Dip brush so that it would behave like the Sargent brush, with low opacity at the beginning of the stroke and high opacity at the end. My brush turned out just the opposite; it laid on the paint thick at the beginning and faded away at the end. It worked out okay because of a happy accident — when the brush stopped painting, it started smudging and pulling paint around like a champion. Corel Painter brush setting are crazy complex.

Lesson Three -- Begonias and A Mystery Flower

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Today’s painting lesson, number three from Isis Sousa, was to paint a garden scene while acknowledging the different planes, working from back plane to front plane: the fence, the tree, the red begonias, the foliage, and the mysterious purple and white flowers. I painted the picture on one layer with the Corel Painter Sargent brush. It’s a tricky brush that I have a hard time controlling.

We’re not supposed to use the color picker to select colors. Even without using the picker, I got the colors relatively close.