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.

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.

Dragon Tattoo 8.6

I've made more progess on the tattoo design so far. I really like how the head and wings have turned out. I'm finding that I may need to go back and adjust the lower body to keep a more consistant line width. Nick's name is far too bold, leaving Kyra's name to look out of place. I am happy that I was able to be fairly consistant in my letter styles, making an A and an N that fit well either in a wing or to fill up a body was quite the challenge.

Next is to perhaps add a lower claw and to add some 'fire' coming out of the mouth. I want to add a few more names and that might be the best way to do that.

I also should get this down to a tattoo shop to have them critique it, I should find out if my lines are too thick or thin before making too many more revisions. Overall, I'm happy with the design and we should be able to get it done soon.

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!

Tattoo Design 8.1

I've been working for many years on a tattoo design for Ticia and I. The idea is to lay the kid's names out in a dragon shape. I've lost count of the drawings I done for this. I'm looking for the perfect design and I'm liking how Rebecca's name is in this design. Now to tweak Nick's and add the others!