Autumn-Themed Still Life Art

    Autumn Still Life   
By Jackie, oil pastel on paper

I just love the amazing colors of fall, so as an artist I'm always looking for new ways depict them in our artwork. 

In the past we have utilized watercolor, colored pencil, pastel, and tempera paint for our fall-themed still life art.

This time, we created these stunning autumn-themed still life artworks with oil pastels on black sulfite paper. Here's how we did it:

Our selected still life elements

The still life. First, we collected a variety of fall-themed objects with which to build our still life model. We couldn't use everything, so we selected the most interesting objects, making sure to choose a variety of sizes, colors, and textures. 

The final still life arrangement

Next, the still life elements were arranged on a seamless 'stage' (such as a poster board) to create the still life model, and a good light source was set up for distinct shadows and highlights.

The sketch. Once everything was in place, the artists chose a pleasing vantage point from which to observe the model, and sketch in the basic shapes on a piece of 9" x 12" black sulfite paper. We use Tru-Ray, which is a high grade construction paper that is very black in color and resistant to fading. Use soft pastels (white or black) instead of pencil for sketching on sulfite paper because it can be easily wiped away with a soft dry rag - no eraser needed.

The palette. Our next step was to observe the model, carefully taking note of each color. A green acorn squash might have three or four different greens in it (ours did), so create your palette by pulling each possible green color from your oil pastel set, holding it up and comparing it to what you see in the object. If the color is the same, or very similar, set it aside. You are creating a specific palette for this pastel painting. Continue choosing pastel sticks until you have compiled your still life palette and keep your palette colors separated from your remaining set until the artwork is completed.  

The painting process. Now you can proceed to fill in your still life elements with color, always observing shapes, textures, colors, shadows, and highlights. Some of your colors will need to be layered, and some of your marks will be laid heavily, others with a very light touch. It can also help to have a toothpick available to scrape in lines and texture, such as in these leaves.

The shadows. The final step was laying in black soft pastel beneath the still life to create shadows. Simply fill in the areas and softly blend in and away from the still life using your finger. Then, stand back, observe carefully, and make any needed adjustments to your artwork. 

Notes: You may have noticed that, although using the same model, the above two pieces are painted from two very different vantage points. Also, one artist chose not to include the pine cone, and some of the leaves are rearranged in the artworks. These pieces were painted by adults, but can be painted by younger artists as well.

For more autumn-themed pastel (and mixed media) paintings by younger students, take a look at our previous weblog posts, here and here.

Autumn Woods in Watercolor

Autumn-themed watercolor paintings are so colorful and fun to create! 

For especially spectacular results, we like to include birch or aspen trees and maybe a few late-summer wildflowers using simple masking techniques.  

It's so much fun (especially for beginners) to remove the masking media, finish the painting, stand back, and take a good look. 

   Whoa! Did I just paint that???

We start, as always, by taping the watercolor paper to a smooth board. You can use ordinary masking tape or blue painter's tape. This leaves a nice white border around your painting and keeps the paper in place and from curling up when wet. 

Next, we decide which direction to turn the paper - landscape or portrait - then we begin "painting" with tape. We rip and tear several strips of masking tape lengthwise and tape it to our watercolor paper to resemble the shapes of trees. larger strips for tree trunks and smaller ones are added as branches. 

The larger trees will extend over the bottom and top borders of the paper. Smaller, thinner ones (in the distance) are placed near the center of the paper.

We use liquid masking fluid (or frisket) to dab in spots for flowers and leaves in the upper branches of the trees. We splatter on more over the lower 2/3rds or so with a toothbrush. 

Now you can paint away, filling in the background behind and around the trees, painting right over the masking media as though it is not even there.  We start at the bottom and work our way down. We try to mix our own colors and we don't worry if colors blend or bleed into others. That's what makes watercolors so much fun!

Once the painting is covered from top to bottom, allow it to dry, or use a blow dryer. Make sure the painting is thoroughly dry! 

Next, remove the masking fluid by rubbing it off gently with your fingers, leaving white paper spots showing through the paint. Remove the masking tape trees, slowly and carefully, pulling the tape flat to one side - not straight up - to avoid tearing the paper. 

Complete your white "ghost" trees by adding a shadow along one side with thinned black paint. Be sure to add shadows to all tree trunks and larger branches. Next, add the characteristic black birch tree markings by scraping or painting small amounts of black and brown watercolor paint here and there on the trucks and branches. 

You can also add additional thinner branches and twigs to the trees, as well as a few blades of grass at the bottom using a detail brush. 

To finish, add color to your wildflowers and some fall hues to your leaves (usually bright yellow, yellow-orange, or yellow-green for birch trees and aspens), leaving the splattered areas white. 

Allow the painting to dry thoroughly and remove the border tape by always keeping it flat and pulling away from the painting. 

Now it's time for your "Whoa!" moment!

Board Game Olympics!

Okay, at first this may not seem like an "art" related post. 

But it is about creativity and it can include  ART, if you so choose - we did!

Backstory: 

It was HOT outside. The Summer Olympics were going on in Paris. Our teenage grandson was visiting, but we were pretty much stuck inside.  We could watch the Olympics on TV, of course. But we needed more! What could we do to celebrate the Olympics???  How could we participate in the spirit of the Games? Wait... GAMES???  

I quickly came up with a plan - why not have our own Olympics within the confines of our nice air-conditioned house? The grandson loves board games. In fact, he is always willing to put away his electronic device to play a board game. So, (drumroll, please)... 

Introducing, the 

Summer Board Game Olympics!

Here's how we did it:

We found a white board and markers for our medal count board.

We dug out a bunch of games to choose from for our Olympics competition schedule.

We assembled two card tables in front of the big screen TV, because of course the Olympics would be on in the background and we would want to pause to watch our favorite events!

We had plenty of ice water and delicious snacks available at all times - so we could keep our strength up throughout a strenuous day of going-for-the-gold!

We gave medals to the first, second, and third place winners of each game - as shown on the medal count board. As an option, you can determine the all-around Medal winners of your Olympics by adding up each person's medal counts: Gold Medals get three points, Silver Medals two points, and Bronze Medals one point. In our Olympics: P got the all-around Gold for 17 points, R got the Silver for 11 points, and S got the Bronze for 8 points.

More tips: 

Choose a good variety of games for your Olympics. We chose two very different word games (Boggle
and Take Two), a dice game (Scratch), a chance/math game (Shut the Box), a silly game (Tiddlywinks), and a drawing game (Pictionary). Choose games from your own collection that everyone enjoys! Shown in the above picture are some of the other games we considered but that didn't make the cut. 

Remember to choose games that won't take all day. Quick and fun really worked for us. If you end up not having time for a game, just cross it out (we didn't play Yahtzee).

Don't choose two-player games (Othello, checkers, etc.) unless you are willing to go more than one round, tournament style.

More art and drawing games

Set up the tables for the number of your players. Have an extra table available in case you need more room for some games, less for others. Example: we needed lots of space for our Take Two game (an all time favorite): two card tables for three people. However, we only needed one table for Boggle so everyone could easily see the letters. 

Make sure you have all of your equipment for your chosen games. I found individual white boards for our Pictionary game and needed a small carpet scrap to cushion the table for Tiddlywinks.

In keeping with the ART theme of this weblog, you can certainly include as many art games as you wish. In fact, you could even hold an Art Game Olympics!

Of course, you can hold your own Board Game Olympics anytime you like. No need to wait four more years!

Carpets of Wildflowers

To celebrate spring, we painted these cozy, atmospheric landscapes featuring a gurgling stream surrounded by colorful hillsides carpeted in wildflowers.

These impressionistic gems were created by artists in our Art Class for Grownups, most of whom having little to no past canvas painting experience.

What is Impressionism? Claude Monet, often considered the first impressionist, described the creation process in this way:

"When you go out to paint, try to forget what objects you have before you, a tree, a house, a field... Merely think, here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow, and paint it just as it looks to you, the exact color and shape, until it gives your own naïve impression of the scene before you." 

For beginning painters, impressionism can be satisfying and fun because the burden of attempting to paint objects realistically is removed. Instead, we paint our personal impression of what is seen. 

We are simply painting shapes and color and light.

An impressionistic painting can be almost dreamlike or based on a memory of a scene: what do I remember about this special place?  

Perhaps the trees along the horizon, the colors of the flowers, the sky reflected in the water. Simplifying the scene becomes part of the process.

Working on an 11 x 14 black canvas (one layer of black gesso), we started by drawing the basic hill shapes using soft pastel. 

We then painted the sky and the background along the horizon, using small filbert brushes and choppy, bold brush strokes.

We continued downward, starting with the distant flowers and moving forward while depicting more and more detail in the midground and in the foreground. 

We then created the flowing water by randomly painting in our sky colors (again starting at the top and working downward). While still wet, we stroked the paint lightly downward, then across with a dry clean brush for reflections in the water. Then we added some rocks, a few waterlines along the edges, and some white water and splashes. 

Painting these little landscapes helped artists learn to:

Create a scene using one-point perspective.

Depict objects in the distance, midground, and foreground.

Create the impression of a reflective surface and moving water.

Utilize a black canvas and bold brush strokes to make colors stand out.

Select colors that work together effectively.

Utilize resource photography (such as these calendar pictures) to observe shape and form, light and shadows, and color relationships to compose a piece of personal artwork. 

 

For more about Impressionism and painting flowers in this style, please see our previous weblog post: Tuscan Colors Like the Impressionists

Open Studio Artwork

Art classes have been hit-or-miss throughout this winter (travel, illness, life). Subsequently, it was difficult to expect artists to work on the same project each week. So we decided to go with an open-studio format for a while and it worked out quite well.

Find out more about how to create this
wintery painted collage here and here. 

Shown here are a few of our winter-themed art pieces that were created during this time by adult art students in our Thursday Art Class for Grownups. 

This snowy alpine painted collages were painted with tempera on black sulfite paper and collage elements were added. 

The completed artwork was then mounted to a large mat board and embellished with evergreen twigs.

We learned about contemporary illustrator Jen Aranyi and created a few pieces of mixed media art work in her style. (Click here for a complete Jen Aranyi-themed lesson.) 

These were done in our watercolor sketchbooks or on watercolor paper using watercolors with ink. 

Jen's favorite subjects are these jagged mountain scenes, so that's how we got started. 

Then, after getting the hang of it, one student decided to make a greeting card using a completely different subject - in the same style:

We also decided to experiment in watercolor depicting various amounts of snow on evergreen trees.  We attempted in the samples below to start with light snow on one tree and work our way to heavy snow on the last tree.  Try it yourself - watercolorist Susie Short will show you how.

Moonlit Snow

These Moonlit Snow scenes were so much fun to create in the past with our tween and teen artists. So this year my grown up art class gave it a try and guess what? 

They loved it too!

This is a multi-step mixed media project that involves wet-on-wet watercolor, splattered paint, iridescent glitter, paint scraping, silhouettes, wild animals, a three-dimensional element, and a quote!  

What's not to love?

One reason I like this project is because so many art skills are used to create it.  We start with wet-on-wet watercolor for our wintery sky. While it dries we practice creating evergreen trees on a separate sheet of paper and using different brushes. Hint: the fan brush is a favorite. 

We also scrape another sheet of paper with black paint using small pieces of cardboard. These are later cut into strips to create our birch trees for the foreground. 

We paint in a few evergreen trees and the silhouette of a an animal that has been outlined in the midground. We splatter with a bit of white tempera paint and add a punch-out of our moon and a bit of glitter here and there.

Then we place and glue our birch trees over the scene using scraps of recycled packing foam for a 3-D effect. Finally, we add a printed 'snow quote' which we cut out with funky scissors for snowflake-like edges.

Take a look at The Snowy North to see our younger artists' versions of this wintery scene.