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.

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Chore Day Sep 7, 2019 -- Arteza Gouache Color Swatches

Besides my usual chores (cooking for my furry friends), I went to the Coop for onions, garlic, kale, and vegetable broth. There are times when I feel disbelief that I now eat only plants. But, I do, and I’m happy with what I eat.

Besides thinking about food I made some color swatches for the Arteza gouache kit I bought a few weeks ago. There are 60 colors, most of them are convenience colors. Here are the first 20. There’s no telling when I’ll do the other 40 — I find doing the color swatches to be tedious and frustrating. I usually screw them up with misspellings, putting the wrong label on a color, irregular lettering, and so on. When I see Youtubers with Youtube smiles on their face doing elaborate and perfect color swatches, I assume they couldn’t think of anything important to talk about, so, hey!, why not do another set of color swatches using some gouache/watercolors they would never use in their own art.

Here’s my contribution to color swatches. You can see that some of the colors are transparent or semi-transparent. The Peach Red is a neon color and difficult to capture in a photograph or scan. The “Pearl” colors are mica-based to give them a shimmer, which also cannot be captured in a photo or scan.