Last week I painted a background of yellow ochre and the shadow. On Sunday, I painted the radish and added some color to the shadows and some more darkness to the background. I’ve been trying hard lately to not fiddle so much over details. It’s nice to fiddle sometimes, but other times, it’s nice not to.

With this in mind I also worked on a tomato and garlic, but it needs another pass over, so I will post that another day.

Before I move on to the sketches, here are some daffodils from my back yard the other day. They seem to come up around my birthday every year, which is a nice treat. However they always seem to get a cold shock and  whither quickly. I like the focus in this photo on just one flower thanks to my amazing 50mm prime lens I got for xmas.

Now on to the figure drawing sketches. Sorry about the really heavy shadows. That’s what you get for taking photos in the evening while standing on a chair. I couldn’t be bothered to re-do them though.

Session three

15mn with a focus on the knee

30mn with a focus on the midsection

Session four

15mn cropped to focus

30mn focus on shadows

It was fun all the same and I got a few other neat photos.

In case you are wondering, the answer is yes, the saturation and color has been boosted on this lot. It added some neat blues to the tree bark among other things : )

I’m not completely done with it. This was my first painting on my new linen boards. I am really liking them. I am considering buying some 3m sticky spray and sticking them to cardboard while I’m working on them. I would get the adjustable stuff.

Also, this figure drawing class is encouraging me to do some more sketching in my spare time. I couldn’t sleep a few days ago, so I did the following little sketch at about 3am.

I have my figure drawing class again tonight. I am looking forward to it despite feeling like I might have a cold coming on.

The other week I felt inspired to paint some pistachios. Not sure if I’m done with the painting yet, but it’s been a while, so I thought I would post my progress. If I work on them some more, I will probably post the revision. But I didn’t really intend this 5×7 to be a drawn out process. Pistachios have an amazing range of color and at the time, the sun was hitting them in an interesting way.

Also, I’ve been struggling lately about what the optimal surface to oil paint on is. So far my favorite is gessoed watercolor paper. But the prep time involved is somewhat undesired and I don’t like the flimsiness. I experimented with canvas paper for the pistachios and just hated the surface. I have ordered some oil primed linen panels to try out, and I have high hopes for them. So far the texture seems right on and I like the firmness of board and being able to use a regular frame. I don’t like stretched canvas for almost any reason these days…although I realize that at large sizes it might be the best choice.

Secondly, I registered for another class at the Durham Art Center. So far this is my second class there and I love them both. Last time I took Intermediate Painting and it was great. I plan to take it again but I can really only do one at a time. This session I decided I wanted to focus on drawing. Not regular drawing though, that’s too tame. This time I decided I needed to take figure drawing for a number of reasons:

1. I have no experience drawing the human figure whatsoever.
2. I feel that the skills used in learning to draw the human figure will translate into all my artwork.
3. I tend to get very involved in detail and spent a lot of time erasing and redrawing lines. Live models don’t really allow for that. The poses are very limited and the challenge of the allotted space will be good for me.
4. I don’t get charcoal. Paint makes sense to me with blending a shading. It just clicks. I can even get by fine with pencil. When I use charcoal however, the implementation of whatever I’m doing seems to have no grace whatsoever. So I just feel like I need to get a feeling for the medium because I like looking at charcoal drawings, I just have not developed any finesse with them myself.

Next are two of my very first figure drawings! They are all about 15 minute poses, possibly 20. Obviously the shading is pretty terrible, but the proportions are okay, especially on the second one. I would love to take both figure drawing and painting during the same session if I can manage to swing it.

After two sessions, my feeling about all figure drawing is: love the instructor, love the class, love the challenge. There are a lot of talented people taking the course with me, and I really enjoy seeing their interpretation of the work. Everybody has a different style. My work has no style yet, I’m just trying to sort out how to deal with getting out of my head for 15mns and sorting out this whole charcoal thing. The only success I have had with charcoal is eraser drawings, I can make those look good (where you wash the page with charcoal and erase out the picture) but I certainly will not lean on that crutch to get me through anything.

The human body and face has some of the most interesting shadows and curves to draw (and paint I’m sure). It’s way outside of my comfort zone to confine a drawing to a time limit and that’s great. Part of the purpose is to get you to stop thinking about what you’re drawing and just draw…that is very hard for me.

From class one:

From class two:

Necessary Ingrediants

You will have to judge the quantities yourself here. Some of it depends on the size of your pot, and some of it depends on your preference on how much you want and some of it depends on the size of the veggies.

• A Giant Pot
• Good dipping bread + butter
• .5 – 1.5 lbs beef stew meat
• 1-3 diced potatoes, diced skin on (I recommend yukon gold or red)
• 1-2 white onions
• 4-5 carrots (I use about equal carrot/potato proportions)
• 3-4 stalks of celery
• 2 cans whole or diced tomatoes (you can use fresh tomatoes, but you need to peel them)
• Beef stock or good bullion (I use “better than bullion” you can get it from whole foods)
• 4-6 tbsp flour (or corn starch)
• 6-8 diced cloves of garlic
• 1/2 – 3/4 tbsp Rosemary
• 1/2 – 3/4 tbsp Thyme
• 1/4 – 1/2 tbsp Bay Leaves (or one whole leaf)
• 1/4 – 1/2 tbsp Morjoram
• 1/8 – 1/4 tbsp Red Pepper Flakes
• Sea Salt (or table salt if you must)
• Celery Salt
• Alcohol, red in color (port, merlot, cabernet, whatever you want)
• Worcestershire Sauce or Balsamic Vinegar

Optional Ingredients

• Mushrooms
• Green Beans
• Peas
• Leeks
• Cream
• Shallots

Make the stew

First get all your ingredients ready to go. You can dice everything to any size of your liking. Lay it all out on a cutting board or in bowls to judge the ratios of the veggies and beef to each other.

Start by sauteing the onions, all the garlic and half the spices plus a dash of salt in oil. I tend to use olive oil.

When the onions are translucent add the beef and another dash of salt to the beef. If you’d like throw on a splash of Worcestershire Sauce or Balsamic Vinegar to the beef. Sometimes I throw in a tablespoon of butter for good measure too.

When the beef has finished browning, add all of the veggies at once. Add enough water to just cover the veggies. If you are using stock, add stock instead of water. If you are using bullion, liberally add bullion at this point. Use more than recommended per cup. Throw in the rest of the herbs/spices and taste for saltiness. At this point, you want it to taste overly salty. If it’s not, add some salt+celery salt until you get there. Also at this stage add another splash of Worcestershire Sauce or Balsamic Vinegar if you have it (but it’s not essential) and your red alcohol (which is essential). I would use 3-4 tbsp of port or 1/2-3/4 cups of wine. I am very liberal with alcohol in cooking. Whether you decide on 1/2 or 3/4 cup of wine should depend on the fruitiness of what you have selected. The more fruity, the less you should use.

Simmer for 30 – 45mns. (do not boil)

If all the veggies are soft, add enough water or stock to give the soup as much liquid to solids ratio as you would like. I tend to fill it most of the way up for whatever pot I’m using. You might need to add some more bullion and/or wine and or herbs at this stage. Let the new liquid warm, give it a taste and if it’s not very rich and pleasantly salty you’ll need to make some additions.

Now that you are at your final liquid level, you need to thicken the stew, because if you don’t, it’s just not stew. To do this with flour, start with 4tbsp in a glass and then add cold water. Whisk the flour and water until it is completely smooth. While stirring the stew, slowly stream in the flour mixture and you will feel it thicken. Let it simmer for about a minute and you will know what thickness level you are at. If it’s not thickened to your liking, repeat the process with 2 more tbsp.

Let it simmer for another 15mns or so, but you need to watch it carefully and stir it often now that the flour has been added. Now it’s finished. Let it cool. (I always burn my tongue through impatience.) Unless you want to drain a lot of energy, let it cool in the counter for a looong time before you put the leftovers in the fridge. (at least 2 hours or more) If you’re lucky enough to live in Minnesota, the garage is a good place to store soup.

Serve hot with good bread.

Things to know about the process

I give as little detail as necessary, but the things I listed and the order I listed them are important. You want to make sure you salt the stew at each stage a little bit. If you added all the salt in the beginning, the onions would be overly salted and other items would be less salted. The reason you add all your seasonings and simmer the stew when it’s much too salty for eating is because you want to infuse all the veggies with flavor and you just don’t if it’s watery. I know that many recipes have you add veggies at different stages and saute them but it’s really not necessary for this. We are simmering for so long that everything will get soft. Plus, carrots take just as long or longer than potatoes to soften so there is no reason to give the potatoes extra time. We add the beef first and cook it the longest so it becomes as soft as possible. One of the secrets to amazing soup it lots and lots of herbs. Do not be shy with them ever. If there is one you don’t like, then don’t use it and sub in something else. But keep adding herbs until you think you’ve added too much, and that will be the right tasty amount. Anytime you see a recipe that serves 8 and asks for a dash of an herb, it’s just for show. Lastly, if you want to add some cream, or half and half you do this at the very end. Turn off the heat, stir in a few tbsp of cream or up to 1/2 cup of half and half and let it cool down enough to eat.

Each received a light watercolor wash for color and the ink was applied on top. I have also included the photos that served as inspiration.

The Art

The Inspiration

I was also lucky to have the opportunity to see my aunt who traveled all the way from England over the holidays. She has asked me for an ink drawing inspired by her stories about her chickens. That should be interesting.

Below is a photo of my aunt and I, albeit a bit of a fuzzy one. The rough part of being the only one who can operate the digital SLR camera is that when other people touch it, they don’t understand quite how to get it in focus.

/%postname%/

The above gives the result: domain.com/page-name which is perfect for simple websites if they only have pages.

When using WordPress to manage a website and blog all in one installation, it can be important to be able to have a blog that appears to live in a sub-directory of /blog/ or something similar so posts appear to live at a different level than pages. Plus, the appearance of a blog directory may be more desirable than the year or year and date based urls for blog posts. (not that you couldn’t have both)

To create a faux sub-directory for your blog, all you need to do is take the name of your blog page whether it’s “blog” or “news” and plug it in to the custom permalink field like:

/blog/%postname%/

Only single entries are shown as domain.com/blog/post-name. Pages still show as domain.com/page-name, and since your blog page is already domain.com/blog; whenever a user browses to a single entry, it appears to be in the same sub-directory as the blog or news…or whatever you choose.

Hopefully some of the people who need this information stumble across it before they go doing something crazy like adding a second WP installation to solve this problem.

Lastly, here is a close up of the frog. I love my Nikon DSLR, you can even see my subtle brush strokes of gesso on the paper beneath in this close up below. Obviously the oil on this painting is quite thin for that to show through so clearly.

I liked the flower so much that I scanned it into the computer, did a live trace in Illustrator and added holiday colors to it for a card. The printed version will sport a lighter, brighter green so the pen lines don’t get lost. If you want to make sure you are getting the card this year, please email me your mailing address. I lost them all when my computer crashed nine months ago.