Last week I had my painting vacation, which means that I was part of a diverse group of amateur artists that worked hard under the guidance of Ad van Aart, our teacher and coach, to improve our painting and art-making skills.
This year I planned to improve my skills in working on an abstract background. Maybe I just needed to improve my self-confidence but the result is the same. I worked hard for a week and I learned a lot.
The first day always starts with 'blind contour drawing' and one of the things I chose as a subject was a large group of cows in the meadow close by our location.
The group almost looked like one compact mass with lots and lots of legs and my contour drawing showed that image.
On an orange background made with several colours I painted that mass of cows using a contrasting colour. At this point I had a talk with our teacher and it was decided that I would add more structure to the group of cows, indicating the shapes of their backs and darkening some of the legs to suggest depth in the group.
After that was done, the shadows under the cows were painted using one of the colours of the background and the space above the cows was given more structure using the same colour. The shape above the cows is not so well defined so it could be a tree line or the shapes of clouds, that is 'in the eye of the beholder'.
Because this was relatively new to me - I have worked on a background like this before but I have never before painted cows - it took a long time and a lot of thinking before this was completed, but I am happy with the results I got this first painting day of my vacation.
The information about the materials I have used, the size and availability of this painting can all be found in my Tumblr blog.
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