Category: Blitherings

The Settling Ponds

With the weather shifting from awful to delightful, and wanting to get oot and aboot, photography is always the excuse. As well, I have not been doing much in that arena. When I saw the Lens Artists Challenge #381- minimalist, black and white, I figured one way to get me moving was to edit some of the photos I took when a friend and I went to the settling ponds at a local water treatment plant. It is a dog-free bird sanctuary, and we saw egrets, herons, grebes, and a lot of others. It’s not a well-known place and the only person we saw was a man leaving with a spotting scope. My kind of place.

Now, whether or not these can be considered “minimalist” is up to you, but converted them to black and white, cropped them, sometimes severely to get a closer look, and how they hold up may be a bit dicey. Additionally, I pushed contrast, black and white, as well as dropping some of the highlights for a bit more detail.

Taken with a Canon G7X Mark II camera.

Working with Watercolor Paper Defects

I have been very pleased with the Bockingford paper from St. Cuthberts Mill. It is a good quality, non-cotton paper which gives quite good results and closely mimics the 100% cotton paper most watercolorists prefer. With this in mind, I bought a 9×12 block of their Millford cold press paper. This paper is supposed to closely resemble Whatman’s watercolor paper, long out of production, and highly recommended by painters such as Ted Kautzky.

Choosing to reconsider the composition of my previous painting “North Coast” and the island’s placement, I figured a good, wet wash would give me a good idea how the paper handles. I wet the sky first and then added blue.

Immediately I could see there was a serious problem with the paper’s sizing. You can see it as a dark blue streak with a straight edge about an inch into the paper. After that, the wash blends well. We have all seen skies with an odd straightness between sky and cloud, but this is not what I want to have in a painting. Given the price of paper, this is not good.

However, what can I do since this is a fact of this particular block of paper? I know I could take it into Photoshop to fix should I wish to print it out, but that is not the point here.

On to another painting, one with a sky that is varied. Again, I wet the sky area first. I laid in the yellowish color at the horizon – hard experience shows this to be a really good way to do such a sky. From there, I applied the bluish mix, dark at the top, drawing a very wet brush across the top of the paper and then into different parts of the sky, letting it blend a bit with the still-wet yellows. Here, I worked with the defect. But then! I saw on the left side of the paper, the same sizing issue appeared.

Sigh.

Well, working with thin washes, I painted on. Trees on the left help to hide the defect.

Despite these issues, I really do like the Millford paper. It has a nice texture. Water rests a bit longer on the surface than other papers, allowing bleeds and such to work well together. In the first painting, I lifted a bit of color out of the island, just to see what happened, and it held up well. Additionally, the glue around the edge of the block was light enough to allow for easy removal of the sheet without tearing the paper – I have had this issue with Arches blocks decades ago, and that has been a big turn off. The glue around the edges of the Arches paper was tough. Perhaps I shall revisit it . . .

Problems exist. Things are not perfect. Working with a problem successfully is satisfying. Knowing the problems with this particular block, I can find ways to make my paintings successful. One thing is to allow the composition of the painting to discard that area if necessary. There are other ways, too, but those can be worked on as a painting proceeds. What will be interesting is to see how far down the pad this problem exists.

And there we are – a Saturday afternoon’s painting, exploration, and play!

North Coast

Once more – should I put something in or take it out!?!? The original of this painting, along the northern coast of California, is originally painted with a small island offshore. Looking at it I didn’t like it – perhaps too close to the tree on the left overhanging the beach. Thanks to Photoshop, I removed it.

The above painting is the one that exists in the real world. The one below is the one edited with Photoshop’s “generative fill” – poof! No island.

Because I am feeling kind of spartan these days, sometimes I think I have too much in a painting. Maybe it goes along with limiting my palette of colors?

And my palette? A bit more expansive than the previous, but the subject matter seemed to need a bit. I used umbers, sienna, ochre, Indian yellow, phthalo blue, a touch of ultramarine, a bit of dioxazine purple, and Hooker’s green.

My technique was to use oodles of water as I wanted to see how well the Bockingford non-cotton paper would hold up. It did quite well! Every large area – sky, ocean, land above the cliff – was wet with clean water, and then painted with the colors. The sky had one wash, but the ocean had multiple wet washes. The land in foreground and distance had a big wash later accented with dry on wet.

I am also pleased with this painting, even with my thoughts about the island.

St. Cuthberts Mill, Bockingford 140# CP, 12×16.

And what are your thoughts – island or no island?