I’ve been pretty pumped about the pumpkin I painted last week in my virtual painting class. It’s hanging on the bulletin board over my desk and I just keep staring at it — I’m just so impressed that I was able to paint an almost perfect pumpkin — the shape is good, and I’m really impressed with my shading and highlighting. And I mixed several paints to make the brown I used for the stem and it’s just a beautiful shade of brown!
Obviously I have been pretty excited about painting a good pumpkin and the instructor posted another tutorial on painting two pumpkins onto a wood board. Of course I wanted to try out my new pumpkin painting skill again! So I ran out, bought a wood board from Michaels and I sat down yesterday to paint two little pumpkins on the wood board.
And maybe I should have stuck to mixed media paper because…well, it was definitely different painting on a wood board. And she had us use a palette knife, which I had never done before, and I definitely had a problem spreading the white paint across the wood. The instructor said that it was supposed to make a texture to the wood board, but I just had globs of white paint that I was smearing around on the surface. It took me forever to figure out to how to get it to look a little bit more like texture.
And what’s up with the stem on my smaller pumpkin??
It looks more like a hose coming out of my washing machine then a pumpkin stem. The other stem is a tad bit better, but I still feel like my perspective is off. There’s more stem then pumpkin!
And then I was trying to do a little shading on the smaller pumpkin, but I didn’t like the black paint I used, so I tried to lighten it up, but the paint was so wet that it just made everything darker and redder. It definitely dried better than I thought it was going to, but I just wasn’t as pleased with this painting as I was with the one last week.
And then my husband asked yesterday if I was going to start painting anything besides pumpkins. OK, I get the hint — maybe it’s time to learn to paint something else. Maybe I could paint some squash or maybe an orange??
Notes from a Self Quarantine 