Notices by surely bazkie 👩🏼‍💻 (bazkie@beige.party)

@vlrny I hate it when that happens!

painting with bazkie! e2 🧵 a (slow) thread [1/x]

I get to present some works in art gallery "forma aktua" in #groningen next month! for that, I want to paint 2 or 3 works, on canvas, a lot bigger than I usually do.

I prefer making something meaningful, like an activist thing, or something weird, but my brain was short circuiting over this for weeks, and time is running out.

so to heck with it, I've decided to start with something more simple that I know; a forest scene :pumpkin_uwu:

I'm making these sketches when I have ideas, and I picked the "creek through forest, passing under rustic bridge, and high trees on the sides" thing.

off to a start! look at how big that canvas is! 🥵

the yellowy paint is just guidelines for where the stuff is going to be located. but I'm tired so I'll keep it at that for today :)

ps. I specifically chose yellow, as I want to whole painting to have a big of a yellowy vibe, like you can get at sundown :)

thanks for tuning in, see y'all tomorrow! 👩🎨

#painting

painting with bazkie! e2 🧵 a (slow) thread [2/x]

started giving the trees some basic color, starting from the back (hey, it's called "painter's algorithm" for a reason!)

I've used 2 colors, a slightly more cold one for the trees furthest away, a bit warmer up front.

the whole "far away == cold (blue'ish), close by == warm (orange'ish)" works too well to ignore 😁

you can't really see that effect yet, but it should become apparent next time, when I fill in the foreground trees with some basic colors :)

I know this phase isn't super exciting yet, also I'm moving a bit slowly because of the renovation, so I have only so many spoons of paint per day!

painting on a big canvas is fun tho, no problems there :)

painting with bazkie! e2 🧵 a (slow) thread [3/x]

so we have a bridge now, with a reflection no less! I fucking LOVE reflections 🤩 the perspective of reflections can be tricky I suppose, so it can be handy to make a simple blender scene with basic shapes to see how that works.

In this case I just winged it, I generally have an okay feel for that kinda thing :)

so eh yeah, I know what you're thinking, those foreground trees look awfully red! they do! I'll tone them down a bit later 🤣

the tree on the near front left is supposed to become a birch tree but I was out of time so it's just some base 'shaded' color for now :)

I gotta say, usually around this stage, things kinda come alive and start looking interesting, and honestly I'm not really feeling it yet in this case. hopefully tomorrow after I fill in the remainder of the unpainted areas with some base colors 🙏

I'm still a bit in doubt about the next phase after that: whether I should make it all very detailed, or more "wild". the latter is probably better for my mental health, and maybe more interesting to look at; but I will usually automatically go into neatly detailed mode, I'm a bit of a neurotically tidy person 😅

what would you choose?

see you tomorrow!

painting with bazkie! e2 🧵 a (slow) thread [4/x]

today, I worked on the ground. I should have only added some basic color, and then go on to fill in the rest of the unpainted space first; but I made the deliberate 'mistake' of detailing the ground a bit more right away.

honestly it was a matter of frugality; I had so much green paint left on my palette and I didn't want to throw it away, so I figured I should ignore the rules. fuck the police!

(the idea of first doing everything with some basic colors, is that you get a better idea if the image as a whole works at all; at that point you can still easily make big corrections)

so here's some images of 4 different stages of this process. I gotta admit at stage 2 I was like, omg this is ugly af, is this going to work at all?

so I decided to be a bit bolder with the colors, added a bunch of yellow to the lit parts and a bunch of blue for the shadows, and that worked a lot better. (orange and blue == complementary colors, so like opposites, putting them close to each other makes it pop! (yellow is close enough to orange for this to work, lol))

finally I added some brown for contrast (green and red == complementary colors, so like opposites, putting them close to each other makes it pop! (brown is close enough to red for this to work, lol))

now I'm a bit more confident again this thing is going to work :) still not really feeling it though. but I hope I will tomorrow after adding some sky & water colors.

ps. yep, if you know how to use complementary colors, and atmospheric perspective (the stuff about further away stuff fading out in color saturation/temperature) you pretty much know 93.189% of what makes paintings look cool. trust me, I'm good with numbers

well, see you tomorrow, thanks for tuning in to painting with bazkie! 👩🎨

painting with bazkie! e2 🧵 a (slow) thread [5/x]

feeling like absolute doom today, and I think it may have helped making me choose some pretty dark background colors.

I understand now what I'm painting. a storm is brewing in the background, while in the foreground, it's still sunny.

that's perfect! it's like a metaphor for contemporary society, where all still seems somewhat normal (well at least here in the netherlands), but we all know what's coming. :ablobcatknitsweats:

or you might have a more positive outlook, of course! :party_kirby: don't wanna make people depressed going into the weekend. everything is going to be fine. don't worry. :dancing_kirby:

see you all on monday for the next, hopefully less depressing episode of painting with bazkie! 👩🎨

painting with bazkie! e2 🧵 a (slow) thread [6/x]

long session, everything is in a very half finished state. I spent most time on the background trees, giving them shading, and some leaves, but I'm not so happy with that yet. leaves remain my worst skill! will fiddle around with them some more.

I also made the foreground tree on the left a little bit more interesting, in shape; the color is just placeholder. also I might have overdone the roots a bit 😁

then I made a start on the water, but it's very BLUE as you can see.

and, the trees in front of the bridge are still very RED. (they are yet mostly unshaded, shading them should improve things a bit hopefully)

I think this is a recurring pattern with this work, it's, uh, very colorful.

I would like to keep it vibrant, while making it less.. cartoony. I'm not sure yet how!

also I feel there's just something missing, can't quite put my finger on it.

I do feel the pressure, since this is for an expo; this is the first time I have to come up with something I am proud of, and I have ~a week left to do it. (then 3 more weeks to make a second work of the same size)

so far, I'm generally unhappy with it, so I do feel a bit of stress if I can make it work. 😬

but I can bear it, I think it's a good lesson, to work under some pressure! 🙏

ps. my new painting table works wonders for my back! been painting all day and yet my back didn't deteriorate any further 🙏

painting with bazkie! e2 🧵 a (slow) thread [7/x]

had a great long session today! I fiddled around with my WIP in GIMP tonight, to find ways to improve the colors. I noticed there it looked a lot cooler if I made the highlights (the left side of the trees, basically) more bright yellow, and the backside more brown and darker. like it's a bit later in the evening.

and so today I made that happen! finally shaded the foreground trees in the process (except for that ugly left front one lol).

I do find it a bit problematic that the background and foreground trees are the same color, so there's no atmospheric perspective == harder to see depth.

I could make the background trees more foggy or blue but I like them so much as they are 🥺 so instead I'll make the foreground trees more yellow.. maybe that could work :) I'll try that in GIMP tonight before I ruin my painting! 🤩

I got a lot of respect for painters back in the day who had no computers (nor reference photos, tho I'm not using them here either 😎 (probably should have 🤣))

anyway, with that out of the way, I decided it was finally time to add the water; that is, a translucent gradient over the reflections I had already put there.

for that, I used acrylic medium, which is basically normal paint but without the pigment (color). so, just the medium! it's transparent, and so by mixing it with normal paint in different ratios, you can get different levels of transparency.

you can also do this with water, but there's a maximum ratio of water to paint before it doesn't "hold" anymore, especially on canvas as I understand; so hence the medium. also it looks a bit better than mixing with water.

I had never tried that before but I think it worked out pretty well!

I also worked on various details, like making the sky slightly more green higher up, and in the process removed some of the leaves I made earlier as I didn't like them much. gotta have another go at those 😬

I've been painting now for 6 days a week, more than I ever have before, because of the upcoming expo. still not hating it luckily 😁

at the same time, I still don't really like this painting, tho I think the water improved it a lot; it calms the chaos a bit by virtue of being more monochrome than the rest.

next up, I really gotta work on that left foreground tree, and also the leaves.. 2 really hard things! 😬 wish me luck!

painting with bazkie! e2 🧵 a (slow) thread [8/x]

aw yeah, we have an actual tree now on the front left! I like how this came out!

I've included a video with 4 stages of how I made it;

1. the base tree as it was before

2. added some "rings" like birch trees tend to have, I love that shit. I figured if I started with those, I could use them as helper shapes to denote the 3D shape of the tree; like how the perspective goes, and on the branches, which direction I wanted them to point in (like forward or backward)

3. shading; used 2 pairs of 2 colors; a set of 'lit' and 'shaded', for both the normal tree bark and the dark 'rings'.

4. it was all too bright, so I darkened the 4 colors I had (I still had paint left for all of em), and added more shading.

also added some random variations in the last stage, as I tend to be too tidy, so I needed to wild that shit up a bit.

also added some muted greens to the 'lit' paint later, because I noticed that color working really well on the smaller branches, from my initial tree.

I guess because when there's leaves on there, these lit parts become a bit less well lit, and also turn more green from the light that bounces off/through the leaves. or something. 🤷♀️ 🍃

very happy with this tree! first thing this painting that I feel really happy with!

I really appreciate all you cuties following this series, and sorry if I've been overly negative on my results so far 😅 the expo this is for means a lot to me, you don't often get such an opportunity to show your work, so I'm looking with a very critical eye. I hope it isn't too annoying! 👩🎨

painting with bazkie! e2 🧵 a (slow) thread [9/x]

today was crunch day! I felt pretty bad and the renovation on my windows is unstoppable and apparently never-ending, BUT I have just 3 days left (after today) to finish this one, as the gallery desires a photo for marketing of the new artist exposition this is for :)

(and I have to start on the next painting soon anyway, as the expo starts the second week of july)

I wasn't sure where to start today, so I just tried to finish and detail the bottom half of the painting. it went better than expected!

I thought the red trees were a bit too bright so I added more contrast by darkening the shadowy side and brightening the highlights. tree on the right looks a bit weird in terms of texture/bumps, might edit some more.

I felt the water was too bland still, so I've given it another transparent dark-to-light gradient layer, this time with extra glossy medium, and it really works to make the water seem more shiny! (kinda hard to capture on photo tho lol)

it does mean the reflections became less visible, so that's a bit of a shame, but it was already kinda of a chaotic scene so I don't mind too much.

added lilies for @jiub :pumpkin_uwu: one reason I wanted the water to be very bright on the foreground is so that the lilies would contrast on it better, and I think that worked!

then I worked on the ground, and changed the colors in the process to more.. earthy tones? it was a bit too candy green before, now it feels more grounded to me.

also I wasn't sure what to do in terms of, like, what to "grow" on the ground. so I just added some grassy stuff, and imho it works surprisingly well on the near front left part :) the front right is maybe a bit much, it looks like a hedgehog lol

but all in all, when stepping back a bit, I was really happy to see the results; it lost the "cartoony" vibe it had before. I'M FINALLY STARTING TO LIKE IT, OMG!

..but let's not celebrate too soon, still gotta complete the upper part, which basically means add foliage/leaves, and as recurrent readers may know, I dread that part! 🍃👀

so now I'm watching all these tutorials on how to paint leaves lol. let's hope it pays off 😬

cheers! 👩🎨

painting with bazkie! e2 🧵 a (slow) thread [10/10]

aaaand it's done! ✅

sorry I stopped updating for this last stint; the deadline was looming so I just frantically painted for a few days until it was done :)

after finishing the lower part of the painting last time, I realized that half had gotten pretty dark/gloomy, and I liked that, so then I had to also darken to top half to make it fit the vibe.

I re-shaded the trees multiple times, just couldn't get them right. same for the leaves/foliage, what a struggle. but in the end I found solutions that I'm okay with :)

I especially like the bushes on the right behind the bridge; the darkness implying that there must be dense foliage going on, and the bright green dots that the sun does reach give it a nice feeling of depth.

I also like that the bridge is very bright, like it's some magical bridge. I decided to name the painting "de brug" then ("the bridge"), because I felt it was kinda the star of the show, even tho it took the least time to paint lol. I love you, bridge fren! 🌉

I'm not super happy with the trees in front of the bridge, I find them too simple, too boring. In hindsight I wish I would have made them more organic/spooky, just like the birch on the front left!

alas, time was up, I need to move on to the next work soon (after a 2 day break), so it is what it is. (I'm pretty perfectionist so it does bug me lol)

what also bugs me is that it's "just a nice forest scene", like, sure, pretty aesthetic, but is it *meaningful*? 🤔

all in all tho, I'm okay with this being my first work for the upcoming expo, and I hope I can deliver something with more of a message or meaning for the second work!

thanks everyone for following along, I feel really thankful for all the positive support and interest 🙏 😊 🤗 💚

cya next time lovely fedi frens! 👩🎨

@Gargron @Mastodon hey, if it isn't eugen "let's make a deal with facebook" rochko.

eugen, meet my blocklist

@Mastodon will you also add a ™️ to the mastodon logo, so people know they're dealing with a bunch of corporate cuntwaffles?

ran into these cutie patooties today biking near the stadspark in #groningen :pumpkin_uwu: 🐂

thanks y'all for coming to the release party! 🤗💚 but if you missed it, don't worry, you can now check out these renovation bangers right here! 👇🙃 (thanks keef!)

#bonkwave https://music.bonkwave.org/bitplanes-presents-renovationwave/

#mirlo https://mirlo.space/bonk-knob-records/release/bitplanes-presents-renovationwave

#bandwagon https://bandwagon.fm/6a6e47044e0cb11843732db9

this is so clever and well done

hey ai come train on this song
by Luke Nickle

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBvLadXo7XA

went to an art expo showing graduation works from the classical academy in #groningen !

and behold this absolute masterpiece "duiven" by noah remmelts!

https://www.pictura-groningen.nl/activiteiten-pictura/vanaf-1-juli-eindexamenwerk-ka/

eww, tomorrow, mumford & sons play in my local park. gross.

HOAX! white chocolate does not exist..

🚲🤸♀️ aaaah!!

#groningen