Author: -N-

Across the Pond

This has been a terrible week out here. Where I grew up was burnt to the ground in a lot of areas with family and friends losing houses. Election week was a roller coaster. It is always surprising to me how such things can just cause my sense of world order and sanity to just blow away, as well as realizing the world is not as I see it – perceive it – want it to be. But connections with people and hobbies and doing things – normal, everyday things – does help settle the discomfort and chaos a bit. Not sure what the next several years will bring, so we will wait and see – what else can we do?

I guess we can paint!

Watercolors almost always soothe my troubled soul! Painting and drawing does in general. The act of doing is an act of being, an affirmation of life, and the validity of existence. Me, I am always searching for explanations, but there are times when the only explanation is to do something, like paint, watch a movie, read a book, go for a walk, watch the cloud pictures in the sky.

Nature. Water, trees, sky, grasses. Peace.

Watercolor, Kilimanjaro 300# CP paper, 11×14.

Intersections

More roads, but now with a limited palette to paint a winter’s day at a suburban intersection.

I will leave you to decide how well this works for you.

Watercolor, 11×14 Arches CP 140# paper. Colors include burnt umber, ultramarine blue, burnt sienna, lavender, and a touch of Hooker’s green and some yellow.

Track

Sometimes things just catch my eye or interest and, as someone who paints, makes me want to practice doing them – not just with a sketch, but with a painting. Some people practice but my practice wants a result. Not perhaps the best way to learn, but my little Puritan heart always wants my time to be productive and the productive part falls into a “finished” painting. Maybe a bit sinful for a Puritan, but . . .

So, roads and tracks. Straight lines through a woods, a track over uneven back country here. Also, a suggestion of a water puddle or two reflecting a bit of the stormy sky above. Wet, green, verdant land. Sea or mountains in the distance. I want to walk that road.

Watercolor, 11×14 Arches CP paper.

A Frisket, A Frasket . . . .

I’ve been taking a basic watercolor course at the local adult school with one of my favorite teachers. I decided to do this as it never hurts to return to basics as it can be eye-opening. Here, one of our studies. This one made me rethink using frisket as a resist quite a bit, and while I may never really embrace this – using frisket to maintain white paper – I really learned a lot from this little study.

First, the teacher provided us with a template to use – namely the rose. We transferred it to our watercolor paper by using graphite on the reverse of the template. We were to outline the white areas and then, using the liquid frisket, paint out the white areas. This way we could apply very wet washes to the paper without losing our hard edges and white paper.

Once the frisket dried, we wet our paper around the rose. Colors were dropped in using viridian, quin rose, and phthalo blue. We kept our paper flat and worked relatively quickly. Once the outside colors dried, we moved into painting the rose. Wetting the rose, the colors were then applied using cad red light and quin rose. The violet was a mixture of blue and rose, but I also used carbazole violet as it is a very clean purple. Once more, paper kept flat as the colors dried.

From there, little details were added, such as leaves, extra contrast, and so on, all using various tricks common to watercolor. In the end, once all was dried, the frisket was removed and little bits of color added here and there over the white areas. Lines, bits of color.

And this is the result! It is an abstract and very watercolory and painterly rose. Techniques were wet-in-wet, masking with frisket, and some dry brush. I also splattered a bit of quin rose and carbazole violet onto the surface to make it a bit more interesting to my eye.

Watercolor, frisket, 10×10 Canson XL watercolor paper, wet-in-wet and splatters. Colors were limited to carbazole violet, viridian, phthalo blue, cad red light, quin rose, and a smidgen each of burnt sienna and cad yellow.