the blog of alicia weller

The final two weeks were quite some time ago, so I thought I would finally post the last items so I have a complete set. Here is a photo from the very last class.

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I finally finished this painting (I think). I posted the earlier version here. I learned an important lesson from this one: tomatoes can be challenging to paint because you need to be able to give it shadows and highlights while still making sure it is clearly, entirely red. I think I re-did the tomato three times because first I would do the shadows and highlights too strongly and make it look like it wasn’t fully red anymore, or it would be too close to being a uniform red and look flat. Obviously, I need to paint more tomatoes, and with summer coming, that should be easy.

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I’ve been feeling inspired by all the flowering trees and the bright Spring colors lately. On Saturday I picked some blossoms from the trees and grabbed a sunny orange for this 5×7 still life.

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When I visited the Duke Garden’s last week on a spring flowers photo expedition I ended up snapping a few of some ducks too. There are always a lot of friendly ducks at the gardens, they get fed a lot.

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The following are some photos from my trip yesterday to the Sarah P. Duke Gardens. Lots of flowers plus some of the dog and some of Robert. I love Spring in North Carolina. Actually, I love Spring everywhere…

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I am done with my first venture into painting clear glass. It was lots of fun and I definitely do not think this will be the last time I paint wine. Considering I’ve never painted glass, I think this was a fairly successful final result. I really like the colors.

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I’ve been painting some fairly tasty subjects lately. First, I’ve been working on this tomato and garlic pair. I like the garlic alright, but I’ve been struggling a bit with the tomato and what may have been a poor choice in background colors…but they jury is still out on that, I need to what for the finished result to judge. What you see below is my second time painting over the tomato, but needs a lot more contrast. I need to wait for it to dry again. The only time constraint is that this is a subject from life, and I need to finish it before the tomato rots…hrm…maybe I should grab a photo of that.

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Still having a great time with my figure drawing class. I feel like I have improved a lot since the beginning and I am getting more done in the sessions of the same amount of time these days. It’s interesting how when I am drawing I don’t even notice that I’m on my feet for about an hour and a half standing in the same place, it feels so short. Normally, if I had to stand somewhere for an hour and a half, I would find it tiring, but I could definitely do this for twice as long and not notice.

Session Five

This was a surprisingly difficult pose, and also was a lot of fun. This was 30mns, but I could have spend at least an hour.

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