 Funding for Painting Journeys is provided by Veritas. Financial Knowledge is Power. Be Empowered. God's beauty is all around us and my goal as an artist is to capture and interpret that beauty on canvas and to take you, the viewer, along with me on this painting journey. Hello and welcome to Painting Journeys. My name is Kitty Lynn Klisch and we're here today in the studio and we're going to be doing a lovely painting and I'm going to be talking about a special time in my life, sharing that with you. I'm really glad you joined us today. Once again, this is Kitty Lynn Klisch and you're watching Painting Journeys. On our last episode, we were doing a beach, kind of a rock and wave study. It was at Laguna Beach in California and the beach was so huge that I decided to just, you know, kind of zero in on something that I could capture. And when we ended our last show, the rock was much larger and after taking it to my home studio, I realized that the rock was a little too large. There wasn't enough water on it. So I made those changes and here it is, the completed painting in all this glory. I love the ocean, don't you? Yeah, it's a great place to be. So anyway, today we are in Wisconsin and we're going to do this lovely painting of a cardinal and this is going to be our holiday painting this year. What says holiday or Christmas more than red and green? As you can see, I have it drawn on just a quick sketch to kind of know where everything is. And so there's some snow in here and the bird is sort of hidden, of which I find very delightful. And there's some nice soft, gentle color back here. So I think this is going to be a lot of fun. Like I said, I'm really glad you're joining me today. My palette, it's the same palette I always use, the warm colors, the white, and then the warm colors all along the bottom and then the cool colors coming up to the side to the dark. And so if you notice, I have the warm reds here for the cardinal and then I have the darker, cooler reds for the shading of the cardinal. All right. So without further ado, I think we better get started here. I'm going to mix up something for this background here. I'm not sure what that area is, but I really love the coloring of it. I have a muted, soft, almost a grade sort of 19 years ago. And I had never seen a cardinal before. I had seen pictures of cardinals. I knew what a cardinal looked like, but I had never seen an honest to goodness cardinal. So when I first got here, it was in Wisconsin. It was in July, around July 15th. And all my, we had trailer, truck and all sorts of vehicles that we had hauled across the country and had lots of adventures. My husband was driving one vehicle and I was driving another. We had gotten lost from each other. And we were on the same highway, but he was about a day ahead of me. And so it was kind of scary. I was by myself and he had our sons with him and I had all the animals with me, the dog and the cat and the boat on top of the van. And if you can imagine what this looked like. Then I was pulling another vehicle. So anyway, we were quite the caravan going across the country. Not quite as bad as grapes of wrath, but sort of on that order, if you know what I mean. Anyway, we got to Wisconsin and got to our house, this new house that I had flown out earlier in the year and purchased for us. And my husband and my sons were seeing it for the first time. So that was quite a revelation for them. I'm just going to come back in here and scumble a little bit of this color on here, maybe lighten it up just a little bit here. Anyway, my husband was very fortunate. You know, that was July and he got a job pretty quickly. He was a machinist at the time. He's retired now, but he was a machinist and he got a job pretty quickly. There's plenty of jobs for machinists in this area of Wisconsin. And shortly thereafter, seeing some dark coming through here, you'll have to excuse me while I bounce back and forth from my story to my thoughts as I'm progressing on my painting. I'm not sure what this is. I don't know if it's a tree or just what, but it is definitely behind there. It looks like it needs to be just a little bit lighter still. And we're going to put a few more greens across the front of it and everything. I just want to have that little bit in the background there to sort of make sure that this is all okay here. And now I'm seeing some snow. I'm seeing some blue of the snow that's coming up there. I'm not quite sure why what that snow is resting on, but I want to get that value in there. It's kind of a bluish, and it's real soft. It just goes right up on into this lighter color here. This is almost his background on behind this. It's almost like a photograph in the sense that it's very soft and modeled, and I don't want to bring it into too much focus. But anyway, as I was telling you, my husband found a job and he was quite happy with it. It was close to the house. We were living right on a river, and I was quite lonely. I didn't know anybody in the neighborhood, and all the people had been nice and come over and introduced themselves. But it takes a while before you feel like you belong. If you know what I mean, you feel kind of lonely like an outsider. I was totally different than this little teeny tiny town that I had moved to in Wisconsin. Different type of person having come from California if you couldn't get my meaning there. Not too long after my husband went to work at this place, the fellow decided to go out of business and my husband was laid off. Our sons were in school. They were in high school. Anyway, the months went by. We were living off of our savings and getting increasingly worried, and I was increasingly lonelier for my friends in California and my life in California. And I had been doing a lot of praying. Anyway, I think I'll work on that bird for a little while, get him in there. Anyway, I was getting close to Christmas, and it was really bothering me, the loneliness of it. And being in such a small town, I wasn't used to the snow. There was so much that first winter we were here. It was like one of the coldest snowiest winters that they had had in Wisconsin for a long time. And I was really having trouble with that. Our poor dog, we had a German shepherd and she was a California dog. She wasn't used to the snow either. And I'd let her out and it was so cold and her feet would freeze in the snow and she couldn't hardly walk. It just was pretty dismal, pretty grim. And I was pretty unhappy. But I wanted to, I wanted to, I mean, we had cut ties. We had made the move and I just, I knew I just had to just make the best of it. So anyway, on Christmas morning, I opened, we had these great big drapes that went all across the front of the living room. And we overlooked the river beyond. It's quite, quite beautiful, very beautiful place as far as scenery is concerned. And I opened up the curtains on Christmas morning and there in the snow was a cardinal. And I, like I said, I had never seen one before. And I looked at the cardinal and I just, I felt like, I felt like this is a message from God. You know, I ran to get my camera and take a picture to take a picture. And when I got back, the cardinal had already moved to this tree. And so this is a photograph of the first cardinal that I've ever seen, a live cardinal. And I really believed at the time and still do that God sent that cardinal to me as a, as a message that everything was going to be all right, that the new year would be good. And I have to tell you, without exaggeration, shortly after that, my husband received a job offer of which he stayed there for the rest of the time that he worked. He retired from the place and everything from that point on was good. So that's my story. That's my Christmas story. He's not going to look really good until we get the greens around him. But I just kind of want to get some something in here so we can kind of know where he is supposed to be. You know, it's, it's, it's so, the holidays can be the best, the absolute best time of the year, or they can be the worst time of the year. And I guess my advice, it would be to just be aware of those messages, those little blessings from God that let you know that everything's going to be okay. I'm making this kind of light, just kind of scumbling because I have branches to go across there. And the reason that he is all puffed up like this was because it was so cold. Oh my gosh. It was so cold and it was like, I think it was in November, it was 23 below zero. And my sons couldn't go to school, close the schools and everything just because of the coldness. I didn't know what to think. I was really asking myself some hard questions there as to why we had made this move. But my husband was from Wisconsin. I'm a California gal, but he's from Wisconsin and so we decided to come. He wanted to be closer to his family since he'd always been out on the West Coast since he would join the Marines. So anyway, that's enough of that personal stuff. Better just concentrate on the painting now. I mean, it doesn't look like I brought a very big selection of brushes with me today. I think we'll get some of those branches in. Let's see, that's white behind there. I better get that white in there. You have to look at the photograph and dissect it almost. Working from the back forward, you want to make sure that, you know, what is behind because once you try to put, if you try to put the white on afterwards, it's going to be really tricky. It bleeds like crazy. So we'll just put this back here and then I can always wipe out where the branches are, where these pine fronds or whatever you call them. Once again, I don't know what things are called. I never worry about that. I just worry about the shape and the value. Okay, we'll get this kind of light in here. That'll be sort of behind and there's some places over here. I'm seeing it too and I don't really like to go back into a painting and poke. Some artists will do their trees and then they'll go back in and then they'll poke these little whites or sky holes or whatever you want to call it in there. I don't really like to do that. I like to have that back there and then wipe out where I want so that it stays behind so that it doesn't jump out and just look like an afterthought. There's some white down in here. And see how careful I have to be because if I just touch that red, just the tiniest little bit, it'll pick it right up. I'll bleed right into it. I'm seeing some white down in here and over in here. And then the space that I'm leaving is probably going to be where the branches are. See a big white down here. This is kind of fun in a way. Just kind of bouncing all over the place here and over in here. There's some white in there. There's white in here. Now I'm making it. I'm making it. You see it doesn't look like white. It looks like blue. And I'm purposely doing that because the snow back here behind these branches is in shadow. So it's not really white white. So that's why I want to come in and make that a little darker because then I can go back and I can put a highlight on it. Like right here, I can put a highlight on this white snow right there that we're seeing. And you see, then you have your shading. And you have the light part and the dark part of the snow. It seems like we need some more here and here and around in here. Just kind of passing, just going around and poking it here and poking it there. Whoops, what is that? Whoa. Now the red is kind of bleeding on me so I need to really clean this brush. I'm sure that if you think back, you have lots of holiday memories too that are really special to you. And if you're alone over the holidays, my advice is to think back and remember about those times that were so special and when you received a special message or special gift, a special time with someone, remember those. They'll always be in your heart, a part of you that you carry with you. And that's a beautiful part of having a memory and being able to think of those things when you want to make you feel better. All right, now let's see here. My natural tendency is just to get in there and start scratching all over the place. And I really didn't want to do that today. I really wanted to approach this in a little different way, not quite so scumbly and rough. I do see some things coming over here that are coming down over here and I see something coming up over in here and going like so. I see some dark green up in here. That's quite dark. Whoa, we need a little more blue in there. Little blue, dark blue, ultramarine blue with the sap green and that will give us that darker green that we need that is behind in the shadow. Okay, right there, that's a little better. Could be a little grayed. There we go. We'll pick out some more of that up in there. We're going to be putting the lighter things on top. There's probably going to be quite a bit of this painting that I'll be finishing in my home studio because this is the type of this mixture of colors is the type of thing that has to sort of set up a little bit or you can't really paint the white over the dark greens or vice versa, the dark green over the white. So I'm just trying to get some dark in there, some dark underneath the shadow part. I always think to myself, what am I going to paint on the program? What kind of a journey am I going to take you on this particular episode of painting journeys? So I choose something that I think will be really interesting and then I get here to the studio and I feel like, oh boy, oh boy, why did I pick this? But that's okay, that's the way it goes. We can always save it. Okay, and we've got these branches. I just want to get some of that color in there. Well, I hope you're still with me. There we go, different color. He's got some branches coming over him and that's going to tuck him back quite nicely. In fact, I'm even going to soften his edge down right here because we don't really see that so much. Alrighty, a little bit of dark down in here. We will put some dark over in here, kind of bouncing around. There's a lot of light on top of this darker green. I think, let's see here, some dark under there and very dark under here and very dark in here. Now then, we'll take this other brush that we have, start working on some of these branches and try to get those laid in. Okay, there's a little curve right here and it's a little brighter. Just make that color just right and that goes off into there, like so. The branches are darker on the bottom and I don't want to put them in all light. I'm going to make them darker and then I'm going to come back and highlight them on the top. I feel that that is the best approach. In the branches, you want the branches to be... you need the branches to be jointed. You don't want it to seem like a wet noodle. It has to be jointed. So it's like short little strokes that are... and this one here... short little strokes that just come, that's coming right across his head and he's sitting back in there and that's coming up there, okay. Now then, behind him is another branch coming out right here and this is coming like this and this and we have another one. So you don't ever want to just paint your branches just going like a wet noodle. No wet noodles. They're jointed just like pipes, pipes fitted together, even a real graceful tree, like a willow. If you look carefully, those branches are jointed and even if you can't see it, take my advice and paint it that way. You won't be sorry. It'll look a lot more realistic. Okay, now this branch is coming from behind him. It's a little bit larger and it's coming like so and I really love this composition on this with him hidden back there. It took a little bit for me to find him where he had disappeared to when I got the camera and I came back and I thought, oh no, it was an apparition. But it wasn't. He was there. And ever since then, you know, it's kind of a funny thing. When I see a cardinal, I just kind of say a little, thank you God, you know, signs are everywhere for attune to them. And this is definitely the season of signs, holiday season, the Christmas season. I'm going to take this and brighten it up just a tad now and just hit a few of the highlights on there for you so you can see kind of what I mean. Maybe I might want to do this with a different brush, a little smaller brush. They always say that the larger the brush you work with, the better it is, you know. But I just, I don't know, I love my little brushes. I'm mixing a nice highlight color to go on the top of that and it needs to be a little brighter. There we go. And when I do this now, you can see how much more three-dimensional the branches look by putting the highlight on them. You don't need it everywhere. Be careful because it's, if I don't hold the brush just right, then it doesn't. And I wanted to get some of the greenery on there. See, there's one coming right here. Put the dark in, put the light in. Now let's see if we can get something cooking here with a green. First of all, I think I'll just wipe out a few of these here. This is coming down like this and it's going like this. Now this is going to take a lot of time in the studio. I can see that because it's, I mean, in order to make it look the way I want it to look. But you can see already by just wiping out and putting these. Okay, now I think I'll just work in that corner for a minute there. First of all, though, I'm going to put the black in so he looks a little bit more like who he is. A funny little guy. I can't really see that, so I'm sort of guessing. I'm going to put a little white speck on there for you to show a little bit of a highlight of an eye even though I can't see it. I just kind of figure it's there. Come back here. The beak has a little more orange on it. Orangey red. And it's coming down a little bit more like this. And this is coming a little bit more like this. And I'm going to have to take the wipe out. What did I do? There it is. Okay. And wipe this out right here. Wipe that down. Okay. Take this and put just a little bit darker red right under here. All right. Now then we'll get some of those greens on. Hmm. I always think I bring enough brushes. And then I get started. Okay, this is going to be tedious. I can see this right now. You're not going to want to watch this. This is going to be tedious. It's not going to work. It needs to be behind there, I guess. And then over in here it's going to be just a little bit lighter. I see there's some gold ones kind of coming off of here. I probably would have been better off if I would have approached this differently. If I would have put all dark in there. And then come back on top and pulled out my branches. This is kind of a yellow-green thing coming around here. A lot going on here. So the secret is going to be to simplify. And this is a nice color right back in behind here. Well, I'm having fun. I hope you are too, watching me as I journey my way across this canvas with all these detours and road stops and road signs. We're just going to kind of make it just a little bit. Because I want to get a little more of the color in. I can do more with getting the leaf structure on. I can do that later in my home studio. But for right now it's important to me to get some color on this canvas so that you can see, have an idea of the greens and the reds. And I used to tell my students when I taught. I retired from teaching a couple years ago now. But I used to tell them, now paint to finish, not to fix. But I find myself in my one hour of time here having to paint with the idea of knowing that when I get home I'm going to have a lot of fixing to do. But that's okay though, because you know what, I'm having fun. And I hope you are too. Yeah, it's starting to look like something. I don't know. I don't know what. Okay, let's see here. And we've got green coming across there. I think we need a little blue in here too. That would probably perk it up just a bit. Have a little color change in the, want to do that. This hour goes by so fast. I can hardly believe it. Almost it is, he does have this branch that goes across there. I'm going to put that in. This is coming just like this. And I have a hunch this is probably what he is sitting on. So we're going to put that in there first of all with our dark. And we'll come back and we'll put the light on it somewhere in there. He has, he has, I can't see his little feet anywhere, but I know they're there. So we have to allow for that. And there's a branch coming out there too. This branch is everywhere. Who knows where to stop. And there's some coming down here and this, that this snow is on. Let's get a little highlight there. Now he's starting to look like he's kind of tucked back in there. And I think we'll just quickly fill in these other places with some green. I know we're running out of time for today's show. So we'll just kind of come in here and poke a little green around and we'll make branches and all those fancy doodads that you see when you tune into the next episode. We'll make those and bring it back and show you at our next show. Yeah, he's coming. He's in there. It was really all about the Cardinal today anyway. This was, he was our star attraction. You know, the one thing I've noticed about Cardinal's sense is they don't really stay that long. And this would actually, was nestled in the snow and stared at me for the longest time. I don't know what. I've never seen a Cardinal hole still that long. Usually they're looking around and they're very busy and you know. And I have to tell you that we, every year we have a, we've since moved from that house on the river, but every year we have a pair of Cardinals that return and they have their babies and I don't know. They're always there. And every time I see them I think of that first Christmas. Okay, now let's see here. Let's take a little bit of the red and try to get that little, little redder look up here on him. There. He is so cute. And this is, this is soft because it's going back. This has a little bit of the light on it right in here. That's just a little grayer. I think that comes down underneath there a little bit. There we go. And it's a little too far. I have to come back with a black and fix this. I can't remember how this looks. It seems to me it comes down like this, but now I'm just going from memory because I can't see up there. I'm going to better redo his mouth. He doesn't have a very nice mouth. There, that's a little better. And we'll put a little blue in his eye just for a little shine. The center of it, not that much. There we go. That looks like a little eyeball looking at us. Maybe it needs to be pushed in just a tad. There we go. Now we have these things I was working on. Let's see if I can do a couple of those before the show comes to an end. There's these branches that are coming off of here. And how do they look? They're kind of a lace-like thing. Let's see if we can get these here. It's kind of a center-like thing. And then it kind of rolls down. That doesn't show up very good, does it, kids? Oh, well, I have a hunch we're going to be wiping all of this out when we get to the home studio. And we're going to be starting all over again on everybody but the cardinal. The cardinal, we're going to let stay. Let the rest of it say goodbye. So that's why I can just play and make some of these things here for you to kind of give you the idea of what they're going to look like. I just got the five-minute mark. Where does the time go? I have no clue. I can't figure that out. It just seems like I just started here. This isn't even showing up, and I know it isn't. Okay, let's see, come on. Okay, maybe that'll show up a little bit. So the moral of the story is to be sure and look, keep your eyes and your heart open to any messages of encouragement or enlightenment this holiday season because they're all around you. I guess that kind of is looking a little bit more like him. I lost my branch, so let me put that back in there a little bit. There's a little bit of my branch, and here's a little bit more. Okay, so maybe we'll put a couple more in. I'm just waiting for my little camera gal here to be giving me the sign. It's all over but the crying sign. We've got some other things on there, and we've got some things coming down here. Let's see if we can maybe just make a little bit of a lighter real quick here. Just a little bit of a lighter. Okay, kind of messy, kind of messy, kind of messy. But it is what it is, and it was the best I could do in the hour that I had. So with that, I hope you'll be sure and catch our next show. I'm not sure where we're going to be going. We may just go to the Mississippi. I was there recently on a lovely trip to Mississippi, and I think that's where we'll go next, and that will be our new year's show. So anyway, thank you so much for joining me today and listening to my story, my personal story. I hope you enjoy the show and I hope you'll watch again. And so once again, this is Kitty Linclish with Painting Journeys. Catch us next time. Bye-bye for now. Thank you.