Keyon's Bench

I painted this for my good friend Keyon. He's a big fan of sea turtles and originally wanted this on his bedroom wall. We thought this would be a good compromise. It was a lot of fun to paint this, but it took much longer than I expected. Now his sister wants ponies on her walls!

Two Color Composition

In one of the watercolor painting books I have, they suggest trying a painting using just Burnt Sienna and Winsor (Phthalo) Blue. It was interesting to me to see the different shades of blue, green and brown I could generate. It also showed me that I'll need a lot more practice in controlling how the water hits the page.

Sea Turtle

Just a quick sea turtle drawing for Connie. I like how the front fins turned out.

Drawn with watercolor pencils on 200lb watercolor paper.

Color of the Week: Alizarin Crimson

As part of my study about painting, I've been interested in learning more about color. What's the difference between 'cool' and 'warm' colors? What does 'transparent', 'semi-transparent' and 'opaque' mean for a color. What does 'fugative' mean? What are pigments and how do they relate to the paints I use?

I thought I would also make cards of the colors for my reference using several of the different mediums that I dabble in. What you see above is my first attempt using the color   Alizarin Crimson  .

Alizarin Crimson is a 'cool' red, meaning that the color leans more to the blue side of the color wheel than the yellow. This is a good color for making clean purples. Mixing it with yellow will give a muddy brownish orange.

It's color originally comes from the roots of the Madder plant and this color has been used for centuries. It was the colorant for the British army's "redcoat" during colonial times as well as dye for Egyptian pharaohs. Chemists in the 1800's were able to artifically reproduce the color, causing the collapse of the madder growing industry.

Alizarin is a 'fugative' colorant, meaning that it will lose it's color over time due to sunlight. This has caused paint companies to come up with replacement pigments that are more stable. If you look at the swatch above, the Permanent version of the watercolors is actually Quinacridone Pyrrolidine Red instead of Alizarin. Quinacridone was invented for use as an automobile paint in the 1950s.

I know I won't be posting these every week, but I don't think "Color of whenever I get around to posting again" sounds as clever. If you have a better name for this feature, let me know!

Bucket of Kittens

I found a photo of three kittens in a bucket in one of my daughter's calendars that I liked, so I dug out my watercolors and got to work. I had forgotten how much more intense the watercolor paints are versus the watercolor pencils I've been using for the past month or two. My plan is to do this image with the watercolor pencils as well, so I can contrast the different effects that I can create.

I still need to add some shading to the bucket and finish up the kitten faces, but I'm happy with how this is turning out. I'm using my Winsor & Newton Artist watercolors on 200lb. paper. This is the first time I've used a paper this heavy and I like that I haven't needed to stretch it first.

Back to Watercolors

I was at a local bookstore going through the art section when I came across a book from Steven Hanks titled Moving On. I was knocked out of my socks when I started going through the book. He's able to be paint very realistic paintings using watercolor and that's something I've wanted to work towards. (You can view his art here.)

I've always leaned more towards the realistic side of painting. Impressionistic and abstract work just never seemed to impress me that much. I think part of this was from my parents, they were heavily into the art of Aaron Bohrod who was a resident artist here at the UW Madison. Bohrod painted incredibly detailed works of art where you felt like you could actually pick off the items off the canvas.

So this brought me back to thinking about watercolor painting again. I went through my daughter's kitten calendars looking for a good subject to work from and I found something worth trying out. I'm going to do this image twice, once with my watercolor pencils and another with actual watercolor paints. I'm curious as to just how they compare.