Name that tune!

"It's a mid-week day. A rainy day. Walk-a, walk-a, walk-a waaay!"

Really, bonus points for whoever can name that tune. Think waaaaay back to the decade of decadence, the 80's. That's the only clue I'm giving.

"After Boticelli- "Birth of Venus" " ACEO
Coloured pencil on Mi-Teintes
Copyright Rita Woodburne

It is, in fact, a mid-week day and although not rainy Mother Nature has granted us some warmers temps and a weird concoction of ice pellets and light snow. I don't have much to write as I've been creatively sapped for the past week and a half, although I do have a couple of ACEO's to share, one above and one below.

"After Sargent- "Madame X" " ACEO
Coloured pencil on Mi-Teintes
Copyright Rita Woodburne

I've got more of these Masters ACEO's I plan on doing since I'm really enjoying the challenge of re-creating famous works and giving them a bit of my own twist. I thought about turning it into a series titled "Tackling the Masters" but then I got a weird visual of me in a huddle with van Gogh and Mary Pratt about to take on Vermeer, Michelangelo and Emily Carr in an attempt to push them back past the 40 yard line. It was odd and yet slightly amusing.

Anyhoo, art mingled with sports aside, this week again has been filled with a ridiculous amount of running around and the Other Half and I are having guests this week-end so I'm quite sure that no art will get accomplished.
Next week might hold some promise though, but only time (and my energy level) will tell...

Yellow anyone?

Let’s talk about van Gogh, shall we?

More specifically, let’s continue with the discussion from earlier about works that can cause grief. I debated doing this one... extensively. Despite being one of his most famous works, I am really not a fan of this one. I look at it and say ‘blah’. Even for me, who likes simple composition and uncluttered images, it’s about as exciting as a loaf of bread.

Also, there’s a lot of yellow. And not even a nice kind of yellow. It’s the kind of yellow that makes you uncomfortable. However, I shoved my dislike for this piece aside and decided that I wanted to tackle it.


Normally an ACEO takes me a couple of hours to do. This one took me 4 days working on it on and off. It's progress can be seen below:

van Gogh, "Sunflowers", Part 1

van Gogh, "Sunflowers", Part 2

"After van Gogh, "Sunflowers" " ACEO
Coloured pencil on Mi-Teintes
Copyright Rita Woodburne

Let's just say I can understand now why van Gogh went off his rocker. Yellow. Orange- yellow. Yellow ochre. Canary yellow. Goldenrod. Deep cadmium. I mean, really, how much yellow can one person tolerate?

About half way through this one I almost tossed it into the fireplace but I'm glad I didn't. I knew I needed to persevere and get this one done... even if it meant that I was going to go crazy and eat my cp's.


Thankfully that didn't happen and this ACEO has found a new home. Doing this ACEO reminded me of a lesson I learned when I was seriously starting out with cp's and that is that coloured pencil pieces can have a very long "ugly" stage. I had forgotten this because I've been working on ACEO's for so long and they are generally done very quickly so if there is an ugly stage it's very brief.

This one was educational and I'm glad it's done.

This week is shaping up to be a very busy one for me so I don't know that I'll get to do another post until next week-end. Hopefully I'll be able to sneak one in but if I can't, until next week-end keep on art-ing!

Keeping my sanity... kind of.

So the art is keeping me sane... who woulda thunk it?

That said, before my mini hiatus there I had mentioned that I wanted to discuss pieces that didn’t keep me so sane. More specifically, pieces that were difficult to get through for one reason or another.

To touch on this subject I’m going to use 2 ACEO’s I completed not too long ago, those being Vermeer’s “Woman Holding A Balance” and van Gogh’s infamous “Sunflowers”.

Let’s start with Vermeer, shall we?

This piece, while exciting, was fiddly in nature and also, because ACEO’s are so darn small, presented the challenge of getting the woman’s face in that space without it looking something akin to the female version of the Elephant Man.

Before I get into my ACEO trials and tribulations here’s a link to what the full original painting looks like:

http://media-2.web.britannica.com/eb-media/37/76837-004-D488CF6A.jpg

Now imagine cramming even a portion of that into a space 2.5 x 3.5 inches!

I liked the challenge that the aspect of teen-weeny spaces presented to me (so much so that I’m doing more of them) but I didn’t anticipate how much it would frustrate me.

Below you can see the stages of how this ACEO progressed:

Part One.

Coloured pencil on Mi-Teintes

Part Two, with some wonky lighting issues.

Coloured pencil on Mi-Teintes
(Yes, those are some of my cp's the ACEO is sitting on)

Done!

"After Vermeer- "Woman Holding A Balance" "
Coloured pencil on Mi-Teintes
Copyright Rita Woodburne

I think the biggest challenges I had with this one, aside from teeny-weeny faces, were making the balance obvious to the viewer and retaining that softness and dramatic value that Vermeer has in so many of his works. There was also the challenge of getting her hands to look like hands, rather than making it look like she’s wearing flesh coloured mittens, and speaking of flesh, there were issues I had with colour as well. I don’t often do portraits or works with figures so this particular piece offered up a few learning curves.

In hindsight I’m pretty happy with it but if I were to do it over again I would have given more attention to values and colour (in that order of priority) since in comparing the original with my ACEO the two main areas of focus, her face and hands, are lacking darker values in the ACEO which is part of what gives it that drama.


Since this post has already gotten quite long I’ll save van Gogh’s piece for this week-end. It’ll be a nice break for me to post again and I suspect that if I have to address two pieces that gave me trouble the sanity I’m trying to hang onto will fly right out the window. Although that would make for an interesting post, wouldn’t it?