The open studio preview is now up!  Check it out here.

If you can’t make it to the show, but are interested in buying a painting, email me or leave a comment and I can send you a price list.

Cambridge Open Studios is coming up this weekend.  If you are in the Boston area please stop by!  I’ll have paintings up for display and sale and my friend Laura has promised to make cupcakes.

Because I worked on both abstract and realistic pieces this year I wasn’t sure what to call the show, or which painting to highlight for the poster.  But this title was rattling around in my head, and seemed appropriate for a year in which I played with new media, pushed myself in abstraction, and tried to bring my abstract and realistic styles closer together.  Recently my more realistic pieces have all centered around transportation.  Train stations, highways, airports.  I find these places evocative and it doesn’t hurt that they align with Joey’s interests.

Here is a preview of a few pieces that will be in the show.  I’ll put up a complete catalog later in the week.

Think colors are hard?  So does Joey.

Thanks to everyone who commented on my earlier painting lessons!  And especially to Uta and Elizabeth for sharing their paintings with me.  Check out what they’ve been making here and here.

Now we’ll get to the heart of why most people paint: color!  Colors are the opposite of the earth tones I mentioned in the last post.  They are bright, saturated, and (usually) transparent and highly tinting.  Good pure color pigments used to be expensive and often toxic.  But now most colors can be made from organic pigments that are relatively inexpensive and non-toxic.

In theory you can mix any color from three primaries: yellow, red, and blue.  In practice most pigments aren’t “pure” and any three pigments will only be able to produce a limited range of hues.  ”Hue” refers to the color of a pigment: its redness, greenness, blueness, as opposed to other properties like value (light vs dark) or saturation (color versus gray).  Many artists use a “split primary” palette, that contains two of each primary color (a greenish and an orangey yellow, an orange and a purplish red, a purplish and a greenish blue).  This sort of palette is much more powerful and will let you mix almost any color you see.  I like to use 2 yellows, 3-4 reds, and 4 or more blues, plus a couple other pigments.  I find this gives me the best balance between being able to produce a wide range of colors and being able to keep track of all those tubes. Here are some colors you will usually find on my palette:

Yellows:

A light yellow:

Arylide yellow, also sometimes called primary yellow or Winsor yellow.  A clear, light, lemony yellow, it adds sun to whites and is indispensable for mixing clear greens.  This color has the weakest tinting strength of any of the saturated colors (meaning it takes a lot of pigment to shift a mixture towards yellow) so you’ll tend to go through a lot of it.  Cadmium yellows can be similar in hue but are opaque, expensive, and much more toxic.

A dark yellow:

Indian yellow is weak and transparent, hansa yellow deep is stronger and more opaque.  Other dark yellows include new gamboge and any yellow labeled “deep.”  This is a darker more canary yellow, useful for mixing oranges, olive greens, and brightening yellow ochre to paint earth in the sun.

(A quick note: you will often here painters refer to colors as either “warm” or “cool.”  Warm means yellowish or reddish, and cool means bluish.  So they will call arylide yellow a “cool yellow” and indian yellow a “warm yellow.”  I find these terms more confusing than just saying what hue you mean.)

Reds:

Scarlet vermillion (an orange-red):

Makes orange with any of the yellows.  Can be mixed with other reds to make them sunnier.  Similar in hue to cadmium red but again, less toxic and expensive.

A pure red:

Napthol red or primary red or Winsor or Grumbacher or permanent red.  A pure clear fire-engine red that can’t be mixed from any other colors.

A quinicridone magenta:

Quinicridones make beautiful roses and magentas, and pure purples when mixed with ultramarine blue.  Quinicridone rose is the lightest and pinkest, magenta is darker and purpler, and violet is darker and purpler still.  If you love purple you may want a range of these colors.  Otherwise you will need at least one to add light to shadows and warmth to blues and grays.

Blues and greens:

Ultramarine blue:

The reddest of the blues.  Makes clear purples when mixed with quinacridone reds.  Makes a fairly pure blue when mixed with a dark greenish blue.  Weaker in tinting strength than antwerp or pthalo blue

A dark greenish blue:

Antwerp blue or prussian blue or delft blue.  A dark inky blue the color of the deep ocean.  Together with ultramarine blue can produce many of the blues you see.

A light greenish blue:

Cerulean blue or azure blue or manganese blue hue.  A light, slightly green “sky” blue.  Every brand’s version of their color is a little different, but I find it useful to have something in this range on my palette (I prefer one that is more turquoise and quite weak and opaque, which means I can use it as an earth tone as well.)  Very beautiful when mixed with ultramarine blue or Payne’s gray.

Pthalo turquoise:

A clear bright saturated turquoise like robin’s egg blue.  Highly staining.  Very useful for mixing greens.  (This image looks different because it is watercolor rather than acrylic like the others.  I don’t have this color is acrylic at the moment.)

Permanent green light:

I used to paint without any greens on my palette, preferring to mix them from yellows and blues.  But if you are going to have a green, permanent green light is a good one: neutral in hue, medium in value, it can be made into many different greens by tinting it yellow or blue, and makes a nice gray with primary red.  It is also exactly the same color as the green on stoplights (which is why I got it originally).

Here are some other blues that I don’t often use but you might:

Pthalo blue:  A very dark pure transparent blue.  Also by far the most strongly tinting color out there.  Used sparingly, and dulled down with orange or an earth tone it can be very beautiful.  Used indiscriminately…well, I’m sure you’ve probably seen some garish coffee shop paintings that are overpowered by an unnatural blue or green.  That’s pthalo.  You will only need to buy one tube of this ever because a little goes a long long way.

Cobalt blue:  A beautiful pale clear blue, slightly gray and relatively weak in tinting strength.  Many artists swear that you can’t paint the sky without this color.  I don’t have it because it is expensive and because my mindset about buying paints dates from when I was in grad school.  I should probably get this color though.  Note: cobalt blue “hue” (or anything listed as “hue”) means they have tried to match the same color using less expensive pigments.  The properties of these colors will be different).

Darks:

Alizarin crimson and pthalo green are especially useful for mixing dark colors and blacks. If you compare the mix of these two colors to the mix of colors shown in the center of the color wheel above, you’ll see that these two pigments give you a deep dark black, while mixing other colors will give you a more middle gray.  Alizarin crimson is a dark purpley maroon that is also useful for tinting reds and blues. Pthalo green, like all pthalo colors, should be used judiciously. And I pretty much only use it for mixing black.

Choosing a palette is a very personal thing. We all have favorite colors and colors we’d rather avoid. But learning how to mix and use colors really does give you a new way to see.  A split primary palette is a good place to start and you can then specialize it for the kinds of colors you like best.  In the next few posts I’ll share some exercises that can help you learn to analyze and mix any color you want.

When I was a kid I could never understand why grown-ups were always wishing they were younger.  Being young meant people telling you what to do and having to go to bed early.  What was there to miss?  But all the adults I knew would complain on their birthdays about getting older.  So I figured there must be an age at which you stop wishing you were older and start wishing you were younger.

I think I know what that age is.  It’s 34.

I know people older than me are going to roll their eyes at this but yeah, I’ve been feeling old recently.  Old as in achey.  Old as in my hands don’t do what I tell them to do.  Old as in I realize I am no longer the target demographic of most advertising campaigns.

So for my birthday I did a couple things to help me feel younger.  I got my hair cut (finally!)  And I finished up this cute chevron twist dress (B4789) that I’ve been working on for the past month:

Can you see where the CF seam is?  Yeah, I’m pretty pleased about that.

Actually it turned out to be a lovely birthday.  My lab bros surprised me with a cookie and makeshift candle (see above).  David and I went out for a fabulous dinner.  And he gave me these bee-ooootiful roo-ish colored gloves for which I will now have to sew an accompanying leather jacket.

Ok maybe it’s not so bad being older.  I do wish I could still go to bed early though.

Do I look tired in this picture?  Maybe its because the past month has been crazy.  I took four different trips (3 for work, one for family), gave 2 talks, a lab meeting, and a poster, and squeezed in a little time to finish this dress.

I knew when I ordered this fabric that I wanted to make it into a wrap dress.  My first thought was V8379, but once the fabric arrived— somewhat sweater-y and soft— I thought it would never hold up with that full a skirt.  I checked with Faye, who had just made the Vogue dress, and she agreed.  So I went for the faux wrap , M6163 instead.

Since I am paranoid about knit dresses stretching out under their own weight, I did my best to reinforce the top.  For the long edges of the wrap I followed Cennetta’s lead and serged elastic onto the edge of the seam allowance.  I then rolled it under twice and topstitched it down so the elastic was completely hidden and the wrap had no chance of drooping.  I also interfaced the neckline and all of the raglan seams.

I spent a long time puzzling over the pattern pieces, gathering them and comparing them to my sloper to try to decide if and how I should alter the wrap.  I finally decided it was beyond me and cut the bodice as-is according to my measurements.  I ended up having to take it in quite a bit at the front, sides, and neckline to get a good fit.  I guess I should have made a muslin but I didn’t have a knit with similar stretch and weight that I was willing to sacrifice.  How do you guys fit knitted garments?

As with all printed fabrics, I also spent a long time laying out the pattern.  I wanted it to slope in by the same amount on both sides of the wrap and I think I pulled that off.  Despite my care, though, the hemline doesn’t line up with the pattern.  I hope it’s not too noticeable.  Here’s a slightly crummy full length shot so you can see the fit:

Once it was done my big worry was that it was too dressy. The fitted sides and skirt feel very formal to me.  But I wore it with a cardigan for a weekend day and that felt ok.  And I wore it for the first night’s seder this past weekend.  The second night we had to sit out due to a nasty stomach bug.  Then on Sunday night we had a dress code:

Yes, that’s four generations of David’s family.  At 10pm with a toddler who is only holding it together due to a hearty group rendition of “Six little ducks.”  Did I mention I was tired?

I have to say I am loving these hanger shots.  Not only do they show the details on the garment much better but it saves me the trouble of changing out of my PJs in order to update the blog.

I bought this faux suede from Fabricmart about a year ago and it is one of my favorite fabrics to work with.  I love how the top has a 3D form of its own, but it feels light and comfortable to wear.

What I don’t like is the neckline.  As in how plunging it is.  At first I was kicking myself for not muslining but when I went back and measured the length of the pattern neckline was 18″ including seam allowance.  It’s now over 20″ measured from the seam.  Other than that I really like the cut of this top .  (It’s Simplicity 3566.)  I love the fit— not tight at all but still nicely shaped.  Once again I think I need to make more woven blouses.  It never occurred to me till recently that you can make woven blouses that don’t look like button-down shirts.

Since I still wanted to rescue this top I had the idea that maybe I could tack up the edges of the neckline like so:

What do you think?  Cheesy?  Not cheesy?  I wore it this way (with thread tacks, not pins) to a party the other day and I think it’s a little cheesy but whatever.  I’ve been thinking about improvisations recently because…I keep trying to think of garment designs of my own.  Not that I don’t have a backlog of patterns but because that’s the hook of sewing right?  You get to wear things that reflect your own personal sensibility.   Your choice of fabric, your fit, so why not your own design?

Only, I find that when I try to think up a design of my own my mind keeps coming back to patterns and garments that I know.  And that’s okay.  I tend to be of the school that thinks that we find our own voice by first copying others.  So long as you credit them there’s nothing wrong with that.  I met a woman the other day who was trained in classical ballet and now composes her own modern dances.  I asked if she ever gets stuck.  She said yes.  I asked how she gets out of it.  She said by improvising.

So here are some first attempts at improvising.  Taking patterns I’ve seen and adding bits and pieces.

What do you think?  Do you design your own garments?  Where do your ideas come from?

Every artist chooses the palette he or she likes best.  I’m going to tell you about my palette, why I use it and how I think about it.  I hope that will be helpful for you too.

In my mind I divide my paints into two groups: colors and earth tones.  Most painting books I’ve seen start with colors.  But I’m going to start with the earth tones, because that is how I start (nearly) all my paintings.  What do I mean by earth tones?  The colors shown above are what I usually work with: red ochre (also called venetian red or english red), yellow ochre (also called transparent iron oxide or transparent gold ochre), payne’s gray (a pale purplish blue-gray), raw umber, and titanium white.  What do these colors have in common?  They are unsaturated (meaning gray, dull, the opposite of intense, saturated, colorful).  They are weakly tinting (meaning it takes a fair amount of paint to shift the color of a mixture).  And they are opaque.  Sometimes I’ll include a couple of other colors if I can find ones that meet these criteria.  A weak turquoise (like some brands’ versions of cerulean blue or manganese blue) or a dark red like alizarin crimson.  There are lots more earth tones, like raw sienna (similar to yellow ochre but less yellow) and burnt sienna (similar to red ochre but more orange).  And there are colors made from quinacridone (quinacridone burnt orange, quinacridone sienna) that look like earth tones but behave totally differently—using these pigments as earth tones can get you in trouble.  I like the group of five shown above because it keeps things simple.  I think of them as earth red, earth yellow, earth blue, neutral, and white.

Why start with these colors?  Well, most things in the world are earth-toned.  So if you want to paint “realistically” these colors are extremely useful.  Because they are weakly tinting they are forgiving to mix.  And because they span the full range of color hues (red, yellow, blue), they let you easily create pictures that look “full color” without worrying too much about whether all the colors “match.”  You may read about old masters who painted with a only a handful of colors.  The colors they used were something like these.

Personally I love earth tones.  But even if you prefer bright colors, here are some reasons to get to know these colors:

• They are cheap.  Traditionally earth tone pigments were made from colorful dirt.  Now only the expensive paints are made from real dirt.  Most are made from synthetic iron oxide.
• Pretty much any combination of these colors will look good together.  So they are a great way to try out color mixing.
• They provide a base on which to add bits of more saturated color.  Colors glow more when placed on a ‘dull’ background.  Earth tones provide the dull.

A couple notes about buying paints:  Each brand formulates their paints a little differently, although nearly all will have versions of each of the colors I listed above.  Some paints are pure pigments (like titanium white), others (like payne’s gray) are mixtures and so vary more across brands.  The pigments that make up watercolors, oils, or acrylics are all the same.  So what you learn about color mixing in one medium transfers very well to the others.  Many brands carry both “student” and “professional” lines of paint, with the student line being cheaper.  The big difference between these two is how much pigment (versus binder) is in each tube.  The paints with more pigment really are brighter, but you can learn just fine on student paints and upgrade to professional when you feel ready.  (That’s what I did).  The one thing I wouldn’t compromise on is to buy paint in tubes (not flat cakes of watercolor).

Exercises: Washes, gradients, and mixtures

Here are a couple quick exercises to do with earth tones (or really any paints).  The first is to make a “wash”— a large flat area of color.  Big areas of color are the skeleton of a painting.  In oil they are sometimes called “masses” instead of “washes” but it’s the same idea.  A gradient is the same thing but with a gradual mix of color.  I’m going to do this demo in watercolor but you could do the same thing with oil or acrylic.

Start by picking three colors and squeeze out some of each onto your palette in a triangle.  Take a large natural fiber brush, one that holds a lot of paint.  Dip it into water (or medium) and pick up a bunch of water.  You may want to do this several times.  Now dip into one of you colors and start to drag it out toward the center of the triangle.  Add more water or medium until you have a good pile of color.

Now pick a second color and drag some of that into you mix.  Add more water and vary how much you add of the two until you like how the mixture looks.  (Note: if you are doing this with oil you might want to mix with a palette knife.  For watercolor or acrylic a brush will work fine.)  Make sure you have a lot of paint.

Making sure your brush is full, go to your paper and start laying down color in big strokes.  Each successive stroke should overlap some with the last so you get continuous color.  The most important thing is that the area stays wet as you are painting (this is easy to do in oil and harder in watercolor and acrylic).  When you go back for more paint the edges should stay wet.  That way you can continue painting without getting a hard edge.

Another trick is to wet the page first, then add color to it.  You can do gradients this way too.  Wet an area of the paper and start a wash with one color, covering only half the area.  Then choose a second color (or mix of colors) and start another wash coming from the other direction.  Where the two colors meet you will get a smooth gradient.  This will continue to smooth out and blend as it dries.

Why so much paint?  Why does the paper need to stay wet?  Try it with a drier brush and see what happens.  These strokes have more energy and movement, but don’t fill the space evenly with color.  Sometimes we want one and sometimes the other.  Putting dry energetic brushstrokes on top of large washes generates depth and contrast.

You can add other colors made from mixing any of your three original tones.  Because you mixed them all from the same three colors they will all look good together and complement one another.  Try it!

I have been complaining for a while that I wish my paintings had more of an abstract quality to them.  But it hadn’t occurred to me to, you know, actually work on abstract paintings.  I think this is all due to snobbery.  As a girl I always wanted to be a “real” artist.  Which meant: drawing human figures, painting in oils, painting on canvas, that sort of thing.  I always sort of figured abstract painting was easy.

It isn’t easy.

I was going to use these little scraps of paper to do demos for the painting lessons posts.  But then I enjoyed doing the first one so much I thought I would just keep playing.  I had the idea that it would be fun to try to compose a painting the way you might compose a piece of music.  I’m not quite sure what I meant by that.  In music you often have the same note in the melody and just the harmony changes and it sounds different.  And I thought you could do the same thing with color: keep using one color but place it in different contexts so it looks different.  The there is the way musicians will take one theme and transpose it, invert it, change the tempo, bring it back in another key.  And I thought you could do the same thing visually.  Take a theme like three red dots and make it big, change its color, move them around, flip the composition.

So this is my first attempt: five pieces for english red.  I’m not sure what I think about them but they were fun to do.

So far I am really enjoying working with acrylics.  They dry super quick so it’s easy to build up a lot of layers.  Working in layers makes a lot of sense to me and comes more naturally than pushing around big gobs of oil paint.  Plus you get all kinds of cool crazy textures when you mix them with water.  Getting to clean up without solvents doesn’t hurt either.

I promised Elizabeth many months ago I would do some how-to posts on painting.  I’ve wanted to teach art for a long time but don’t have the time to do it in person right now.  So posting a few lessons seemed like a good idea.

The more I thought about it though the more overwhelmed I felt.  I have been painting for many years now and drawing for a long as I can remember— what could I say in a few posts that would be useful?  At the same time, there are hundreds of books out there on painting and drawing…what could I possibly add?

In my experience there are two parts to learning any medium.  One is learning your materials.  What are they, what can you do with them?  What do they do easily and what is difficult?  The other part is learning a new way to see.  Learning to draw changes your brain.  You see colors you didn’t see before, you estimate sizes and distances differently.  And you also develop a new kind of vision— you look at a scene you want to paint and start to see it in terms of brushstrokes and pigments.

It might seem like the first of these is something you can teach and that learning to see must be very personal.  In my experience though a good teacher can help with both: introducing you to new materials and giving you exercises and feedback to help you develop your vision.  At the same time, both can really only be learned through experiment and practice.  I can tell you what the difference is between ultramarine and pthalo blue, but you won’t really know until you play with them yourself.

So I thought for this series of posts I would try to do a little bit of both.  I would start with materials and move towards vision.  To keep things simpler I though I would focus on painting rather than drawing, and on abstraction and color more than realism.  I hope that way the posts may be more relevant to the sewists who stop by.  Anyway that’s what I feel like working on myself right now.

So: materials.  The picture at the top shows my painting set-up.  It’s optimized to be easy to set up and keep (reasonably) clean.  On the bottom is a big sheet of acrylic (from a hardware store, I think) which I use to catch drops of paint and keep my table clean enough for sewing.  And on the right in front you can see my palette— another piece of acrylic.  Personally, I like palettes made of acrylic or glass, and perfectly flat.  Again this is to make them easy to clean: you can scrape dried paint off of acrylic or glass without too much trouble (glass is easier to clean but heavier).

Brushes:

The most important thing I’ve found about brushes is having a range of sizes.  These are my oil painting brushes which are sorted into small (size 0-6), medium (size 6-12), and large (housepainting or chip brushes).  Having a range of brush sizes means the finished painting will have a range of different-sized marks.  As I learned, this gives the painting a lot more dynamism and energy.

What brushes you get depends on the medium you use and what you want to achieve.  Nylon brushes hold little paint and are good for controlled lines and details.  Natural fibers hold a lot of paint and are useful for laying down large areas of color.  Bristle is better for thick paint, hair is better for thin.  For watercolor, I’ve found that one large natural sable brush is indispensible for washes.  For oil, I have a large number of inexpensive bristle brushes, so I don’t have to clean them as often between colors.  I just picked up acrylics the other day so I don’t really know what to use.  I’m starting with a small range of nylon brushes and we’ll see how that works.

Rags:

Rags (or paper towels for watercolor) are as important as brushes.  They are the equivalent of pressing for sewing: the unsexy part of painting that makes the difference between sloppy and professional.  I use rags to clean my brushes between paint applications (which reduces the need for solvents, and keeps my solvent jars cleaner).  I also use them to remove paint from the canvas or control its flow.  I usually paint with a brush in my right hand and a rag in my left.  Gloves are useful if I don’t want to end the evening with a densely painted left hand.

Jars for medium and solvents:

A medium is what binds and hold the pigment in paint.  Adding medium to paint changes its flow and texture.  Solvents are used to clean up and remove paint.  In watercolor, water is both the medium and the solvent.  In oil, mediums are usually a mix of oils, varnish, and turpentine, while the solvent can be turpentine or odorless mineral spirits (OMS).  In acrylic you can buy mediums to make the paint do just about anything, and clean up using water.

Although you can get cool effects by using solvent as a medium, its helpful to physically separate the two into different jars.   As you paint your solvent jar will get dirty, and if you are using the same jar for medium your painting will get dirty too.  For oil, I stick a folded up drain cover in my solvent jar to help get paint off my brushes.  This lets the paint particles settle to the bottom and means I can keep using the same batch of solvent for months.

In watercolor, I often use a single water jar out of laziness but then I need to remember to change it often!

A surface to paint on:

You can paint on just about anything.  Canvas, wood, paper.  I like paper because it has great texture and is easy to store.  Canvas is cheaper if you want to paint large, and has the advantage that you don’t have to frame it to hang it.  Paint and paper are two things where quality really improves with price.  I use heavy weight Arches watercolor paper (140 lb or 300 lb) for watercolor, and also for oil.  To use it for oil or acrylic, you first have to coat it with gesso.  This is a goopy white substance that seals the paper and prevents the oil from soaking into the fibers and making the paper disintegrate.  Watercolor paper comes in big sheets.  To prepare it for painting, I first tear it down using a straightedge, leaving a nice deckled edge:

Then I apply gesso using a house-painting brush.  I apply 2-3 coats, diluting the first ones with a little water to make the gesso flow more easily and soak into the paper.  Each coat will dry within 30 minutes-1 hour.  I’ll often gesso a bunch of paper at a time so I have lots to work with when I’m ready to paint.  I don’t stress too much about how the gesso goes on.  Often it has some texture of its own but that just makes the final painting more interesting.

I used to stretch my own canvas, but now usually buy the pre-made ones from Toile d”Artiste.  These come pre-gessoed so you can just go ahead and paint!  Cheap pre-made canvases are awful.  The coating on them is slick so paint hardly sticks to them.

Exercise: playing with brushes and media

I haven’t mentioned paint yet, because that needs a post (or two) of its own.  A good way to start though is to pick one color (or two) and just play with them. (Credit to my watercolor teacher Glenn Hirsh, who introduced me to this exercise.)  Try diluting your paint very thin and see what happens:

And then try applying it more thickly:

Try out all your different brushes.  How many different kinds of marks can you make with a single brush?  If you keep making the same mark then try holding your brush a different way.  Hold it vertically like a chinese brush.  Hold it thumb-up like you are about to flip a coin.  Try standing up versus sitting down.

I did this exercise myself the other night when I first broke open my acrylic paints.  Here’s what I came up with:

Fun!

Let me know if you try this and I’ll post a link to it.

Oh and please let me know if any of this information is useful or confusing.  I really would like to teach art someday and I can’t learn without feedback.  Thanks!