Category: Chatter

Neighborhood Tree

By nature, I am quite impatient.  Maybe just not patient enough?  What I mean is that sometimes I work too fast, rather than thinking ahead.  In watercolor, timing is important, as is speed, but with patience thrown in.  If I look at what I am doing, some are tight-ass line drawings, and others are just messy and rather free form, without lines.  Here, I used a basic tree shape with cutouts to remind me where to not have leaves, so as to have room for sky and branches.  I also worked for shadows.

Altogether, I worked too fast.  I wanted to make some nice washes of the leaves, to show the color shifts from green to the glows of autumn.  I also need to test out colors on a piece of paper.  This is painted in a notebook, so the back of the previous page is a good place to do this (I keep trying to remind myself).   Accomplishment, though, is no mud.

Colors were fun to use, too.  I mixed together an especially interesting mix of Payne’s Grey, Carbazole Violet, and Burnt Sienna.  That is part of the pleasure of a sketch book – playtime and exploring.

I will be doing a lot of trees as I move along, but will need to do some stilllifes as well.

Tree Ferns

When I first posted the outline of these ferns, a reader, Sharon, suggested in her comment to fill in just the background.  I was going to fill in the stems and leaves, but her idea was intriguing.  I had thought of using watercolor with a brush, or watercolor pencils, or even just colored pencils.  Instead, I thought brush pens (like Tombow, but not Tombow) might work.  So, I ordered them from Amazon.  Fun to use, and a lot of colors!  And a great excuse to buy some art supplies, don’t you think?  I rather like the results.  Thanks, Sharon!

Tree Ferns

This morning I decided to do a free form watercolor of the tree ferns I photographed.  I didn’t draw in any lines.  As you can see, the stem on the left goes nowhere…amazing how you notice things when you see them in a scan!

The main purpose of the exercise was to use a 1/2 inch flat brush for most of the work.  To do the fronds, I used the tip, but in reality such is a better way to express palm fronds.  Tree ferns have a softer, more rounded shape at the ends of their leaves.

Consequently, I pulled out a small round.  If you know the art of sumi-e, I am sure you can figure out how to make the softer, rounder tip of a tree fern.  To do it, start with an upright brush and slow squish it down toward the end.  That would be for the stem-t0-end-of-leaf.  If you want to begin at the end of the leaf, squish the brush and then lift it as you move inward.  Doing either produces better results I think.

I also just wanted to work on colors and shapes, try to get some contrast, too.  As I painted, I imagined living in a jungle of tree ferns – looking up, sunshine, contrast, sparkles.  At 6:30 in the morning, in a rather dark room (with the only light coming in from the eastern window of the studio, and the glow of the computer monitors), it’s always interesting to see what happens – happened – when you see it in the light of day!

Christmas Berries

This morning I wanted to work on the tree ferns, but for now, the jury is out on what to do.  I ordered some watercolor marker / brushes from Amazon, as I don’t have any and the design element seems to warrant more control than a brush.  So, I decided to use this photo I took over the weekend of a Toyon – also called Christmas Berry as it shows up  Decemberish – for a quick morning paint.  Below are the results using my palette with 5 greens (yay!  green!) and a 1/2 inch flat brush.  I painted directly, no lines.

 

Tree Ferns

I took this photo back in 2014, almost exactly to the date.  Tree ferns are amazing plants -they have spores and fronds, and get huge.  I wonder what it would be like to wander through a forest of these!

Anyway, I decided to scroll through my years of photos and found this one.  I liked the pattern repeats and the shapes.  A nice graphic quality.  So, this is what I began in my sketchbook.

I may add more fronds.  I may not.  The big question is what I should use to color it.  Something that contains itself seems appropriate, like markers, given how sloppy my painting skills are.