Post Workshop Painting

"One More Week"

oil

12" x 6"

I mentioned in my last post that I attended an oil painting workshop this past weekend. If you wondered why I didn't post any paintings from that workshop, it's because they weren't very good. I came away with knowledge rather than finished paintings. In fact, my eldest daughter, upon seeing what I had done over the weekend, exclaimed "What happened, Mom? You paint better than that!"

One of the things that Tim emphasized at the workshop was to have a focal point in the painting. Try to make the focal point stand out by, among other things, using lots of detail there and less detail in the rest of the painting. Above is a painting that I did yesterday. It's very different from how I usually paint - I usually try to get every scrap of detail that I'm able to paint. In this, I picked the blackberry that's in between red and black to be my focal point. I painted it with lots of detail and left the others less defined. That berry was actually ripe in my reference photo, but I thought to make it stand out more by making it to be the only in-between color. I did paint the leaf up above with quite a bit of detail because I liked it - probably not a legitimate reason, but there you have it.

This painting is a lot different than what I normally do, but I kind of like it.