Oils

This week's brush topics were Oils. Acrylics and Sumi-e Brush. A week is not quite long enough! But, then I did spend a week and one half. More time will be spent after the class because I feel that I have had a very good introduction to the characteristics of the brushes studied so far. However, my use of the Brush Creator continues to be exciting for me! This lesson, for the Sumi-e Brush, I created and saved a variant of my own which I will explain in the Sumi-e section.

The thumbnail below is the Oil selection. I am happy to have learned about the brushes and enjoyed using them, but landscapes are difficult for me and not my favorite thing to do. But, I attempted, over and over and over...finally gave up and have submitted this!

Acrylics

I realize that the poppy to the right is not a farm nor landscape and I hope that everyone understands that I could not bring myself to do a landscape. I did enjoy doing the poppy, but, as one can see there was not going to be enough time to continue the full painting of the poppy that was planned. It was then that I decided to crop it to the area which was completed (with a few more shadings and details added).

I enjoyed working with the bright colors. One problem I had was trying to use the wet brush to put down the color! Once I got that sorted out, I had a wonderful time with the smearing!

Sumi-e Brush

For the blossoms, second image above, I used the Digital Sumi-e Brush, which I love. I had to work to touch lightly to get the thinness, and then, with more pressure widen the stroke, and then let up to get back to a narrow stroke.

At first I was bothered by not using just black and white for the Sumi-e paintings, but then continued to read and found that some Sumi-e painters do use color. Paintings are usually done on Rice Paper because of the lingering strokes needed to fatten a line. Rice paper is less absorbant than water color paper. I did use rice paper texture but tinted the backgrounds a little because the white just seemed too white.