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.

My Watercolor Setup

Sorry for the mix up and the disappearing post. Hopefully I can re-write this.

I took a class a couple of weeks ago on watercolor painting from the excellent Steven Kozar who lives not that far away down in McFarland. I got quite a few good ideas and hints that I'm putting to use and here is a quick shot of my workspace.

Things I've learned:

• Stretching my paper on foamcore boards. I took a full sheet of foamcore and cut it into quarters, stacked them and then wrapped them in packing tape to keep them water resistant. I then soak my paper in water for twenty minutes and then staple the paper to the wrapped board for it to dry. It's much lighter and cheaper than using plywood which is another method I've heard of.
• Using a cheap kitchen sponge to wick off excess water and paint off of the brush. 
• Cut open a large plastic bottle to hold your brush cleaning water. This prevents your brush from getting too contaminated from the dirty water.
• Use thin layers of paint to get clean gradients of color.

It was a fun class and I'm thinking of taking one of his oil painting classes when it comes up in the fall.

View Steven Kozar's Art

Matt on the River

A few weeks ago I got a chance to head down to part of the Wisconsin River with my friend Matt. He wanted to fish and I wanted to do some 'plein air' painting (painting outdoors). So while he was catching bluegills, I had my folding chair and sat in the shade painting away. I was glad I had made those swatches of color I've posted about earlier. They were a great help in helping determine what colors the background trees were and which shade of blue the sky. It was a good exercise for me, as a lot of my drawing and painting I do from my imagination and this helped me work on seeing the colors as they actually are.

Matt caught eight fish.

Working on textures

My latest project has me practicing the layering of color. I'm attempting to get smooth gradients from lighter to darker shades, with only occasional success, by layering successive washes of color onto the previous ones.

My palette probably has too many colors for this painting, but I wanted to get a good diversity of color for the rock wall. The viridian tree on the right doesn't seem to match the intensity of the rest of the painting. I think I'll need to work on the shadows more and increase the contrast to make the lighter parts pop more.

Tale of Two Ceruleans

One of the more interesting things I've learned while getting back into painting is the concept of pigments instead of colors. As you can see from the color swatches I made from two Cerulean Blue paints - the one on the left from M. Graham and the one on the right from Winsor & Newton - that they're not quite the same.

Investigating this more, I find that the pigments that make up the paints are different. The paint from Winsor and Newton uses pigment PB35 which is actual Cerulean Blue. The paint on the left from M.Graham is pigment PB36 which is Cobalt Chromite Blue Green Spinel! The difference is that true Cerulean Blue pigment is very granular and you can see the rough surface it creates on the paper on the right. This granularity was 'solved' by M. Graham by using a different material all together.

Though I have to wonder why they used the Cerulean Blue name, perhaps because it's much more recognizable!

Swatches

I've ben working recently on making swatches of my watercolor paints. In my reading of different painting books and articles, they all mention learning the properties of the paints you have. Which ones are more transparent, which ones are more granulating and how they change with the ratio of water to paint. So I drew up 1" x 6" strips and got painting. Starting with the outside and working in, I doubled the amount of water for each square.

It was interesting to learn how much water is needed for the different pigments to make them the brightest. If you look and see the Quinacridone Gold on the right, you can see that it goes from a very mottled dark gold to a very pretty creamy gold with just the addtion one drop of water! The Lamp black shows to be a very strong pigment as well, needing a lot of water to bring it down into the neutral gray area. The Viridian shows how granulating some of the paints can be even with a lot of water.

This was a lot of fun to paint. I punched holes at the ends and looped them all into an old keychain for easy management.

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!

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.

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.