Art Garden Diva: Movin' On

We had another fun meeting of The Art Buddies (We really do need an official name), at Dinah's yesterday. We decided to save 'backgrounds' for another time when more of us could attend-which may be in the fall with everyone's summer schedules. Anyway, we were the 'Mighty Four' and had fun thanks to Dinah's hospitality, lovely flowers, and everyone's good company. We s-t-r-e-t-c-h-e-d our comfort zone painting car fenders, and in spite of the comments "OMG, This is hard!" etc. I think we had some pretty good results!

In case you're wondering about the flowers: Dinah salvaged a fantastic vase from the trash in her office. The shape allows the flowers to be arranged perfectly, hence the photo. We started talking about cameras, and the consensus is that people are loving the Canon PowerShot. Mine's a SD960 IS with 12.1 MegaPixels. This whole digital thing is relatively new to me, despite the fact that I've been a professional photographer since college. With a Hasselblad, all you needed was a good light meter, some knowledge of posing and light composition and you were set! Digital is a whole other story. In many ways, now you can do so much more with a lot less of a camera investment. I was able to put my camera on Macro 2x and get the close-ups of this peony. We decided to bring our cameras and the instruction book that came with it to our next session, and teach ourselves how to take pictures for our art.

Below, Carol shared her find from Art Media. There's no tray on the bottom for pencils etc, but it tilts up and you can tape your work on it. It's great if you don't want to sit all the time while painting.

It's always fun to have Show and Tell (Thank you, Jude). I always think we learn a lot from each other. I always hate it when I take an art class and don't get to see other students finished work. Above, Carol shared a recent finished pencil drawing, and showed a layering technique in which you paint a grey wash and then add your color for increased value. Maybe she will do a show and tell when we're all together. Carol showed us some of her beautiful work. I especially loved the creek scene below, where she used pencils on watercolor paper, and it had a lovely texture.

Dinah shared this Lake Oswego bridge painting from her journal. I was so impressed, since I've tried to paint that same bridge with dismal results!

Hard at work...

I brought some car photos from an exhibit from the High Museum in Atlanta, and it was fun painting them. I had to leave before everyone was finished, but I think we did good!