A New Approach At OrbisPlanis Art Blog

Today's Image
My Reference Photo

I don’t know if any of you are also bloggers. I hope you are, and if so, please let me know so I can follow your blogs.

I use Google’s Blogger and Blogspot as my blogging site and service. There are many others, such as WordPress, that bloggers can also use.

Blogger recently changed their upload tool; that is, the interface one uses to upload and/or write the content. I’m sure the software engineers and designers feel it’s an improvement and will make it easier for users.

However, I wish there had been a little notice to the change and, perhaps, maybe an email with the new features or a tutorial on the changes or something. If there were, I didn’t receive any (notification of it), and out of the blue one day in the last two weeks users had to figure out how to use the new tools.

It was fairly intuitive, but I’m still not sure I’m doing it correctly. For example, any .jpg image now has to be sync’d with Picasa web albums before it can be loaded. Previously you just selected your .jpg image from wherever you had it on your hard drive and clicked upload, so it’s an additional step. By the way, Google also runs the Picasa tool, which I like very much.

Anyhoo enough with the technical, the point of all of this is that with this change, I have decided I’m going to try to blog in a different way. "Change is good, " I was told.

Instead of blogging about a general art subject as I usually do twice a week, I’m going to blog about whatever I’m actually doing--artwise--that day or that week.

What does this mean? Well, I hope it will give viewers and readers a better look into what it’s like to pursue artwork in real-life. By that I mean, I will blog about my everyday pursuit of art for lack of a better description. The blogs may be shorter, or not, and may be more frequent, or not. It will depend on “where I’m at” in the moment with my art so to speak.

I hope it will draw additional viewers and readers who feel a kinship and camaraderie as aspiring and inspired artists. I would like to hear from other artists who are on their own art journey.

I do appreciate your continued viewership and hope you like this new approach! So, here goes.

Last week I was given a 10 x 15 in (41 x 51 cm) masonite board from an artist friend. He had made several of these for his art “students” so we could try out a new support other than paper or canvas. He cut the boards from a larger sheet of masonite, which you can buy at your hardware store. He was nice enough to gesso and sand them twice before giving them to us.

You may recall I even blogged about using masonite as your painting support on March 30.

I had never tried painting on a board, wood, panel or any rigid surface, but hey, I am a pretty adventurous artist and couldn’t wait to try it. I have also been wanting to paint again with my acrylics after almost of year of painting almost exclusively with watercolors. Sometimes you just need a change, you know what I mean?

I really like the smooth, smooth surface you get with gesso’d masonite as compared to canvas. As much as I love painting with acrylics, the paint does tend to drag on canvas, especially if it’s coarse, and your acrylic paint begins to dry out (which it does almost immediately).

I spent a couple of days painting a landscape from a reference photo shown above. It’s a rather bucolic, some might say boring, view of a road curving over a gently rolling hill.

Anyway I am relatively happy with my painting. However, as an artist who is never quite satisfied with his work, I need to go over it again. I think it needs a little more contrast in the grassy areas. In the reference photo the grass, both in the foreground and in the far-away background, is a brighter green with more chroma than it is in my painting. So I will continue to work on it.

Next blog I’ll talk about the style of my artwork, which I tried to use on this painting, and which I would like to become better at.

Cheers!