A little bit of defused lighting and a lot of patience!! (plus a master study!)

Hey everyone (aka my sister who I share my blog to to check my spelling and the 3 people who find this through my LinkedIn) I hope you have had a good week.

This week has been very much a self study week! I have got a lot of uni work done and a lot of studying and getting my head down. Last Sunday I went through the first lesson of the Tonko house class on schoolism. Tonko house is a really awesome studio and the work they do is so fun and playful.
The assignment for the lesson was to do a few paintings from life with defused lighting. The tutors in the lesson went outside to paint inside cafes, however I decided to paint my bedroom since Leeds is really rainy and I don't have a laptop case..




 So here is my first painting! This has been very challenging assignment and as you can see I didn't do the best job. But I had a lot of fun and I learnt a lot. (Im sorry the lighting in the photos are very different from the lighting in the drawings I took the photos last minute to give you an idea of the set up I was painting) I struggled a lot making the contact shadows dark enough and making the set up interesting enough. I also struggled with value and local colour. As you can see I made my paintings very flat looking and very plain. But in terms of capturing the defused light I don't think i was too awful at it.

For my next painting I made some artistic decisions to not paint in the damp in my room! But I made the subconscious decision to outline a lot of things AND to add in major tangents I wasn't aware of until I recently got a few peoples feedback on this. I realised by doing this I can't paint textures! But then again all this assignment asked for was the defused light and I think I was about there, there's still a lot I can improve upon. In terms of lighting I really struggled with catching the shadow caused from the neck of the guitar against the wall. The angle I originally wanted to paint it was the angle in the photograph, however I was really struggling to capture it and also capture the shape of the amplifier. 

Finally for my master study! I have decided to attempt at do one master study every week. For now I want to study the beautiful work of bouguereau. I love the beauty and softness in each one of his paintings. For this i started with a block in and tried as much as I could to get the angles correct. I think went in by adding just a warm dark orange like I do when I paint with gouache (Since I want to get that painterly feel) and then just started to paint! This is something I've been slowly working on and off between uni work and my assignments. It also has defused lighting! So everything I've been working on today has started to link together! Ha!