Sea Turtle

A Bunny for Kyra

Water Lily

Taking the lessons learned from the class I took, I started work on this painting of a water lily. Doing a quick search of 'flower' on google images, I found a good reference shot and printed it out. I transfered the drawing to my paper using tracing paper and got to work.

I used glazing techniques a lot in this work. For the water, there are about 8? 10? layers of ultramarine blue, pthalo blue, prussian blue and even one of burnt sienna. One thing I need to figure out is how to eliminate the hard edges all those layers create. Or perhaps learn to work with them as they do give a sharp contrast about the bottom of the flower.

Kyra came up to me and asked if I would paint something blue for her bedroom, so that'll be the next project. I also picked up a sheet of hot-pressed paper that I'd like to try. Hot-pressed paper is much smoother than the cold-pressed that I've been using so far.

Working on the Lighthouse

My good friend Dottie asked me recently to paint a lighthouse for her. In the past I had done some work in her daugther's room and she wanted something to spice up her sea-themed bathroom. After doing a quick search on Google images on lighthouses (only 7.9 million of them), I mocked up a few quick drawings with my watercolor pencils to get a feel for what she's looking for.

She liked the layout of #1 but wanted more rocks. She also went with the lighthouse design of #2. Grabbing my craft acrylics and brushes, I set off to work.

The first night I got a good start on things. I liked how the lighthouse started to come together and the blue-green of the water complimented the red of the lighthouse.

The next night I dropped in a light grey sky and put in the sun and it's reflections on the waves. I think that I should have dropped in the sky background first instead of doing all the foreground work, but that's a lesson for the next time. The rocks also didn't have enough contrast to make them pop, so I put in more shadows and highlights.

The final night I put in more details and added the cloud cover. Dottie really enjoys it and want's me to do more in the coming year. Overall, it took me about 7-8 hours of work.

Practicing with Two Colors

I picked up a few true oil colors after doing a lot of reading on how best to use the solvents needed for cleaning. I found that Turpenoid Natural is a pretty safe and very low odor brush cleaning medium, and did a pretty good job of both cleaning my brushes and not making the kids run in fear of the smells coming from the dining room table.

For this painting I used just french ultramarine, burnt sienna and white, which is slightly different from my last two color work here, where I used phthalo blue instead of the ultramarine. As you can see, the 'greens' here are a bit darker as ultramarine leans towards the redder side of the blues.

Peppers

Last week I was sitting in Connie's kitchen waiting for her kids to get home from school. Sitting on the countertop by the window was a bowl of fruits and vegetables with the sunlight dropping down on them. Grabbing my watercolor pencils, I got to work. I didn't finish in time as the bus soon pulled up.

As I had started with the orange pepper first and worked my way to the left, the whole composition definately leans to the left. I think it looks better this way than had I done it more level. I also like the brightness of the colors but I need to work on generating deeper contrasts with the watercolor pencils. What you think is dark enough really fades once you bring on the water.

Bird and Berries

I really do enjoy working with my watercolor pencils. Just watching the color blossom as the brush goes on is a thrill for me.

More flowers

Here are some flowers I've been drawing with the watercolor pencils during my lunch time. I had the idea to make the background flowers lower in the distance to make it seem like you were looking up at the iris.

The scanner is still making the colors too light, I need to find the right settings to save to a profile for these types of images.

Blue and Purple

I put this one together for Connie's birthday a few weeks ago. I'm still trying to get a feel for different paint strengths and how to overlay washes of color. In watercolors you can get a lot of different effects depending on how dry the lower levels of paint are and how loaded with paint your brush is. I'm having trouble spotting the difference between slightly damp and almost dry and really dry. I think it'll come to me eventually with practice and patience.

I came across a new paper that I wanted to try for this. It's a very thick poster board material with a watercolor paper surface. It didn't buckle like unstretched watercolor paper normally does, but it did have a slight bow when I was done that I needed to flatten. I used Cerulean blue, Pthalo blue and Dioxazine purple paint.

I think I want to do some color charts next. I feel like I need to play with the paints to see what each paint does with different amounts of water.

Snowy Sunset

I've subscribed to several online art newsletters and one this last week had a tutorial on painting winter sunsets. I liked the colors and thought this would be a good quick project to work on. The most interesting part was trying to put the sun in. The article mentioned painting the deep yellow and then taking an almost dry brush and sucking up the paint where the sun would be. This would leave behind the lighter yellow. Well, that didn't work at all. Inspiration came when I took the sheet of paper towel I keep for wiping off my brush and pressed it onto the paint with my finger tip. I counted to five and lifted it out and it looked great! I think I could have made the shadows of the foliage darker as there's not enough contrast with the snow.

I'm having trouble getting our scanner to pick up the colors correctly. On the first pass it missed picking up the faint shadows of the trees in the foreground so I'll need to tweak the scanner settings more.

I think next on the list is making a color wheel or two. It was hard to come up with a decent dark green for the conifer trees as well as getting good leaf brown colors.

Flowers for Mother's Day

I've been working on my watercolor techniques recently. It's been tough to get a feel for how much water to have on the brush or on the paper. This painting deals with wet on wet painting and how to fade color in a wash. I also wanted to see how the cool colors (the Alizarin Crimson at the top) worked with the warmer Permanent Rose at the bottom. I think it helps give the illusion of distance for the upper flowers.

My photo is a little on the fuzzy side since I had matted this up for a frame for Ticia's Mother's Day gift. I was all about to assemble things before I remembered that I wanted to scan it first!

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.

Time for Fruit

I've been really enjoying my watercolor pencils. I need to work on overlaying and layering the colors to get smoother tones. Here's another still life!

Lots of Leaves

I've finally finished my watercolor pencil drawing. I really do like how these pencils handle and I'll probably need to order some more online.

Enjoy!