New year, new hobby

OB and I were talking for close to a year about painting our own home art.  Surprising coming from him since he's not exactly the artsy type.  He's artistic in the music sense, but anything involving crafts he usually shies away from.  But we went out to Chicago's art district looking for home decor, and we saw how expensive it was to actually buy fine art.  So we talked about trying it ourselves.  That was a year ago and finally, we did it!  For our first painting, we decided to use acrylics, which is a fairly easy medium, and attempt to copy a famous painting.  Not an exact replica, there was a little artistic license taken by both of us.  OB chose to copy Juan Gris's Guitar and Clarinet, which is one of his favorites.  It's the background on his desktop computer.  As he was painting, he ran into a couple problems.  First, the pencil outline wasn't fading behind lighter color paints.  He had to do multiple coats.  Also, he tried using a fan brush and it didn't turn out quite what he was expecting.  But at the end, I think it's pretty close to the real thing and a very impressive product made by him.  (Gris version vs. OB version)

                                                                   

I chose to copy Gustav Klimt's Tree of Life.  Not the hard part with the people on the side, but the swirly trees.  So we got to work drawing in pencil and then painting in the lines.  My pencil drawing literally took ten minutes.  The painting was pretty easy to do too and I was done with the base in one night after work.  But looking at it today, the painting was only two colors - brown and yellow.  Oops, I mean a brown mix of raw sienna and burnt umber, and yellow ochre.  I wasn't too happy about the lack of color.  So I stared at Klimt's painting for a few minutes and decided to incorporate the blues and reds a little more by making the tree trunk into a mosaic looking concoction.  Now that I'm done, I love the inclusion of more color.  But the tree trunk looks diseased or something. Plus, it looks pretty far from the original.  I'm pretty happy with my painting though.  I'd be happy to put it up in my house somewhere.