Give your congressman a uterus

This made my day.

The snatchel project... encourages people to knit or crochet a uterus and send it to certain members of congress, with the message: "Dear men of congress... if we knit you a uterus, will you stay out of ours?"

Yes, they have patterns.

http://www.governmentfreevjj.com/

"We are women, we are strong, we are smart. And we have a sense of humor."

Painting water that isn't blue

I did this painting last August, just hadn't gotten around to scanning and posting it. I was camping on the south McKenzie for a long enough stint that I could spend a few hours doing a real plein aire painting. I had been pondering for a while that one's programmed instinct is to depict water as blue--but the river up there isn't blue at all. It's crystal clear, and the rocks beneath the water are mostly gray-green or rust-colored, while the depths take on a green tinge. So how to paint that without it looking murky and dull? That was my experiment.

This was a good learning exercise for me in many ways. For one thing, I tend to be more interested in depicting figures than backgrounds, but in recent years I've been grappling with some concepts of color and lighting and with the desire to paint complete scenes with directional light instead of just isolated figures of interest in objective color. So a river/landscape isn't something I would normally set out to paint. I also may not have ever done 1. a complete painting (not a sketch; not a drawing) of 2. this type of outdoor scene 3. in situ (not from a photo or imagination).

(click to see the whole thing)


Given all that, I was fairly happy with how it turned out. It took me three hours. I deliberately chose to paint a section of river that didn't have any really striking features of distinctive rocks or trees; the painting would have to work in terms of my rendering of light and color, not because of dramatic composition. And I would not use any pure blue.

If anything, I went a little too far to the green side, vs. the more muted gray-green, but I really didn't want it to be murky. The rocks got a little too yellow, I didn't entirely capture the translucence, but I feel it was a good effort. I used Yarka's cheap yet wonderful semi-moist watercolors plus a little opaque white, on a cheap 7x10 watercolor tablet.

For reference, here is a photo of approximately the stretch I was looking at, though the light had changed a little, and of course I simplified the background. (I did not paint from the photo, I just took it for later comparison). The photo doesn't really convey how much movement was in the water.


And here's a closeup of the water. Not easy to paint!


This was probably also good for me in another way... I've been noticing that left to my own devices, I really don't use green much in my artwork!

Cloud light study

This was a more recent effort (February). It is definitely a study, not a finished painting. Though I don't consider it entirely successful, it did teach me some useful things.



I've been trying to solve a problem with a previous unfinished painting involving sunset clouds over an ocean. I've also been mulling around the muted yet beautiful color rendering that was prevalent in the 1910s or so (arts and crafts/ art nouveau), how it conveys the sort of color you see at dusk when the sun is still up but most of the scene is no longer directly lit. How do you create those muted colors, vs. the objects in full sun? Well, with complementary color mixing, in theory. But putting it into practice is something I need to work on more.

I've also wanted to experiment more in painting with a watercolor style using fluid acrylics, which have better archival longevity than watercolor. Since the fluid acrylics dry waterproof, you can't lift or lighten a dry layer, which has advantages (you won't accidentally smudge something by washing over it) and disadvantages (you can't wipe off paint later to lighten an area or fix a mistake). As it turns out, the fluid acrylics dry about as slowly as watercolor when used this way, but I found it harder to get really pale, dilute washes.

So one night I experimented with these mullings. I don't have many fluid acrylics, so I had a modern palette that didn't really match up with the 1910s color concept: quinacridone magenta, phthalo blue, diarylide yellow; also used a smidge of white, turquois phthalo, jenkins green. As I found, though, you can still tone it down with complementary mixes (orange + blue, etc.).

I did this study improvisationally, not planning exactly how the light would work; thus it's not entirely consistent. I was mainly exploring how to mix the colors. The basic idea is that the light is coming from the horizon, but out of the frame of the picture, while the foreground is out of the light. The overall effect doesn't satisfy me... the water got too flat and murky, for one thing; it actually looks brighter here in the scan than in the original. But in places there were some nice accidental bleeds that made pretty color minglings (though some just got murky), and some good granulation effects, just like with watercolor.

I seem to be happiest in the middle of a painting, the sweet spot, after the uncertain beginning; then it so often gets overworked or the good bits overridden. Still, there were important inklings for me here, such as how to transition from the purples to the oranges (a warm violet, overlaid on the yellow-orange, creates a warm brown)... I really liked that dusky violet. Hopefully I can apply this exercise to the stalled painting, which has been bugging me for a long time.