We worked from another still life - irises in a vase, this time. I decided to focus on the actual flowers so I could draw the finer details in them, rather than take a wider view and draw the vase as well. Unfortunately, this meant that I spent about an hour and a half drawing one relatively realistic iris, by which point almost everyone else was done drawing the whole vase of them. Their irises were more abstract or less detailed, of course. I couldn’t face the idea of drawing about 4 more just like it (which would have fit on the paper), and I couldn’t do that in the remaining hour anyway. I started an entirely new picture so I could get some practice coloring in a background around the flowers and drawing the vase. I got most of the way through that before we wrapped up.
There are a lot of mixed messages in the class. On the one hand, we are to “draw what we see, and not what we think we see,” to get perspective and shapes right. However, we’re also supposed to shade and color things in such a way that they look “right” to the viewer, instead of exactly as they appear. For example, more distant objects should be darker, and objects in the foreground are lighter. That helps to show spatial relationships in a painting. So, even if the real vase of flowers has a lighter-stemmed flower in the back, you don’t actually paint it with a lighter stem. I understand the idea of painting things not as they are in order to create a better overall composition, but I’m finding it very difficult to tell when to depart from reality and when I should draw things more like they really are.
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