Orange You Glad?

After taking a class from Frank Webb last week, I decided to use one of his compositional techniques for this painting. It gradates from left to right -- darker to lighter. It is a rarely used, good compositional technique according to Frank. I found that I had to make the one flower on the right (seond one in on the bottom) a much darker red to balance the painting. Before I did that, it looked like two different paintings -- one soft on the right and one bold on the left.

These poppies were in a side yard of a house that I used to walk past on my daily walks in my neighborhood in Rochester, MN. I took the photo three years ago and decided it would work for this side gradation technique.

The title comes from that corny joke we used to say as kids -- "Orange you glad I didn't say banana?" Orange dominates and I think it is a happy painting.

My First Oil

I took a class in water soluble oils from Cathy Futral this week. I painted this in class in less than 2 hours. (You can click to enlarge.)




I found it hard to get the fine detail lines with oil. It seemed kind of gloppy to me. I missed the flow of the water I guess. But the painting does look richer.


Also, it is going to take over a month to dry!! I would definitely need a studio if I used this medium. I don't have enough space in my apartment to have drying art laying all over the place. Right now it is taking up a seat on my porch and I'm hoping there are no major storms.