Stacy Weitz Minch

Well, happy holidays! I took a break from the internet and social media train for a couple days over the weekend, and that was nice. Started working on this portrait copy...and it's not going too well, ha. There are a lot of balls to juggle here. I probably should have drawn this thing out more carefully before just throwing paint up on the canvas, but I didn't (I drew with the paint--I'd like to be able to paint people from life, and get it right. But maybe I still need a little scaffolding ;). So I'm trying to correct the drawing (let's see how many errors you find in this drawing? fun game!) at the same time as trying to mix those  flesh tones (also not going too well, ha).  What a mess. I feel like this blog is becoming a series of unfortunate attempts. Sorry, readers. I'm definitely not sticking to my comfort zones lately. Oh well. I remember the first time I tried to paint a landscape, I immediately decided I couldn't paint landscapes (and did...

I feel like I'm having a harder time getting the proportions/shapes right lately (it must be that I'm missing that Bargue!). Though I say it in jest, it's probably true. And I haven't been doing much of that kind of practice at home either. There are some proportion issues, and as usual, I've drawn her several times, but I always have a really hard time capturing this particular model's likeness. She's very pretty. But I tend to exaggerate features, and somehow the way her features are situated just isn't so amenable to being exaggerated (and again, she's quite lovely! I promise. It's just me). Also, I didn't have any lighter paper ripped as I was running out the door, so I grabbed the darker stuff, and I was having a harder time seeing my drawing on it (draw darker, Stacy! darker), which probably contributed to the proportion issues. But in the last 5 minutes I threw some white on there because, well, I had the chalk, and what did I hav...

I don't know why I torture myself--painting is so stupid hard :P This was a quick 30ish minute sketch, which was repeatedly interrupted by quite the collection of 5-year-old fiascos. So, fail. Maybe a ghost pumpkin wasn't the best choice for my white practice today. This is just an enormous mess on every front. So I'll just hope the next one is a little better, ha (this one is getting wiped off the panel asap--but, of course, not before I share it with the world ;)!

Don't you hate it when you discover something you're really terrible at? I do :P But I also don't--it gives me some direction and purpose in where I focus my energy. I've recently discovered that I'm pretty bad at seeing the correct values and colors in white objects. So I'm going to paint them like crazy until I don't feel so deficient. But in the meantime, check out these bad paintings! They'll get better, I promise. The first one I started in full color, which I quickly decided was a bad idea ;) So I'm down to black and white, and just trying to see all those subtle grays. It's not easy, which I guess is why I'm doing it. The drawing is pretty bad on these bowls. I've been focusing a lot more on the value, but I'm finding that when the drawing is off, it throws me off all over the place. So I just have to find a way to juggle all those different things. Practice, practice, practice :P

7x5", oil on linen panel Ha, well, plein air painting is hard. Painting flowers in plein air, harder. Painting YELLOW flowers in plein air, impossible (at least if you're me). I think I went way too dark on the background. The shadows seemed really dark out there in the sunshine, but I overdid it.  Sometimes I get to a certain point and just don't know how to move forward from there... soooo I don't. This is looking like a very rudimentary underpainting, and I froze at this point.  The light had changed pretty drastically (dappled shade) by the time I got here, so it seemed that if I tried to make it more complete I would have to change it completely. On the positive side, I don't think the drawing of the flower was really all that bad. Those petals all fit together pretty much how they should have, so that's something anyway ;) But I apologize if you come here looking for pretty pictures. It's not always pretty here.

Well, my babies and I were wandering through the grocery store yesterday morning in search of some sundry items when this beautiful yellow rose caught my eye. Now I haven't been too successful at painting yellow flowers in the past. But for some strange reason, my past failures just make me want to paint them all the more (I don't know why I like to torture myself, but I sure do ;). What I've concluded today is that the subtlety of a yellow flower is probably just a little beyond what my eye can currently accurately see. Or maybe a little beyond what I can successfully translate into paint (clearly). But then again, I'm not going to get any better at seeing the yellows if I just avoid them. Most of the torture of painting something difficult like this isn't in the actual struggle of finding the right colors and values--it's in battling the inner voice that makes me want to just quit trying when things get tough. The mind can be a vicious place, but al...

4x6, water mixable oil on linen panel Ha, well, here I go again ;) If I made any improvements here, they are subtle (just like the value and temperature differences in that horrid yellow). I took one piece of Brock's advice (see comments on previous post--one step at a time ;) and tried mixing the complement for the shaded parts of the yellow. I think it helped, but the values are still off. I may have been looking into the color too much. Part of the problem is probably just in the drawing, too. These lilies look totally strange if the drawing is a little off. And maybe it's not even that the drawing is all that off--maybe it's something akin to how a prominent nose looks ever more prominent when you  try to translate it into definitive lines in two dimensions (I know this all too well ;). Sargent eventually made it work with good ol' Madame X, but he's Sargent (compare Sargent's Mme Gautreau with Gustave Courtois'--that nose). Maybe because ...

  6x6, 6x6, and 6x4" I've been trying to paint this poor yellow lily for the past few days--I'm not doing it justice. I've decided that yellow is just the most difficult color to paint. It's the shaded part of the petals that gets me... what  is  that color? Greenish? orangish? brownish? nothing-ish? Whatever that shaded stuff is, I'm not getting it. When you add black to yellow, it turns green. Blue, it turns green. Red, it turns orange/brown. So what is it? Probably something in between (or maybe a little of both). I'd like to figure this out, but today apparently isn't the day ;) On the first two, I had a white background, and on the third one went for a gray for contrast (and actually tried to paint it sight size--teeny tiny--thinking it might help me simplify all that yellow. and maybe it did. but still...). I've read it takes miles of canvas to make a good painter, and I certainly haven't filled miles yet, so it's fine. Mayb...

  My sister Jackie gave me a very cool plein air umbrella for Christmas, and this was the first time I've had the chance to use it. It was a beautiful day and the umbrella was awesome! But my plein air skills are, well, let's just say they're not where I'd like them to be ;) Getting the values right outdoors is tricky.  Jackie says my mountain looks like a melting ice cream cone. Ha, she's right--slight room for improvement here (oh, the possibilities! ;) Maybe I need a little more than an hour... or a smaller panel... or a thousand more hours of practice. If at first you don't succeed...  Also, I don't know what the deal was with my paint, but it felt like I was painting with honey! It's been sitting in a backpack in the house for 5-6 months or so, but it was really really hard to handle. Maybe it was the cooler weather? Or my palette/canvas were sucking up the moisture? And let's just not get started on the drawing and colors, ha. ...

I gave it one last shot, but there lies my poor nephew's image in the garbage can. I'm not sure how many times I will have to attempt to paint something in shades of white (aka gray in all its minute variations) before realizing that they are SO much more difficult than they initially look. And then there's that squishy newborn head... ;)  I'm sure it wasn't effort wasted. Every time I get out a paintbrush is worth the while. But I've found it's much better to just toss something out rather than continue laboring over a painting that will just never work. I used to have a harder time with this (I think because I used to paint or draw so much less frequently). Now I don't mind it so much because I'm determined to keep doing this for a while. There will be plenty of opportunities for a redo in the future :) Two steps forward, one step back--or something like that...