Category: Chatter

Les Fleurs Sont Belles

Yesterday was one of those days where everything else got in the way of painting. Today is one of those, too. However, painting shall prevail!

I have a lot of different paper and sketchbooks, but I have decided that I do want to have a sketchbook going all the time and to use it when nothing else seems to be do-able. This book is a book more for ink and pencil as the paper is very smooth and has a creamy color. For watercolor, I want more texture, and a different type of paper altogether, but it is a sketchbook, and that means it is a playground. So, I played.

Until you try something, you don’t know what will happen. Same with this sketch book. I sat on the concrete of the patio and looked around at the potted plants. Here, rosemary and milkweed mixed together.

Behind the rosemary and milkweed is the beginning of a giant sunflower plant, one which I expect to grow about 10 feet tall!

Felicias are always fun to find in pots as they droop over the edge and provide a lovely accent to anything they are planted with. The ones above were done with a pencil outline and the ones below just rather free-form with the brush.

I like these felicias a bit more as they are less constrained and stiff.

Finally, one of the last daffodils of the spring. I focused on the leaves and flower shape, trying to keep the flower simple but expressive. The dappled light and shadow on the leaves, and their shadows, especially caught my eye.

Besides just being a study of flowers, I decided to be minimalist with art supplies out on the patio and use this as an opportunity to see just what few things might make for a nice plein air kit. Sitting on the concrete was rather chilly and hard on my old bones. I brought out my camp stool, and that helped, but then I didn’t know where to put my water or pan paints as nothing nearby was convenient. What to do? Well, I did stick things on the ground, but my u.go pochade box will be the next addition to the adventure.

What a fun way to pass some time in the sun! We are hitting some nice weather – in the upper 60s to mid 70s F – before it plummets to 55 F or so later on. And, time to work a bit on plein air – the less I have to lug around the happier I am, as long as I like what I do where I am – and that means liking doing, not just making pictures I like!

In the Alabama Hills #1

A decidedly more fussy painting than I usually do, but is also a fairly chromatic painting. The primary colors are yellowish greens and grays. More color planes with a few more details.

In a lot of ways this was a more “serious” painting than my trees of yesterday. I plotted more. I did a sketch, a value study, and carefully placed my lines and considered the composition. Steps were thought out on how to approach the painting process itself since there is a lot of plain, white paper left in varying spots.

First step was to lay down a light wash of a neutral color, painting around the white areas at the tops of the plants and a few areas of the rocks. Then, light colors of the plants were added to remind me where they were. In general, I worked light to dark – standard watercolor – but then more intuitively I moved into dark areas while other areas were still covered with the first wash. I needed to establish values and found this worked out fairly well.

Another thing I took into consideration was the paper. This is the 100% cotton student paper I have, and I know it cannot handle a lot of water. Consequently, my washes were not wet and sopping. The light washes I applied were watery, but before picking up the watery wash from the palette, I squeezed or blotted the extra water from the brush, picked up the wash, and then applied it to the paper. It worked as the paper did not get really wet.

The rocks were hard to do. Part of me wanted to be fussy and detailed – hence the dots on the rocks and boulders closer to the viewer – and other parts just wanted to use planes and strokes of color to express their dimensionality. That is something I will try on another version of this painting and on paper that can handle a lot of water.

So, the planes of color continue, even in a more complex painting. I rather like this one as the backlit plants are so pretty, whether painted or in real life, and the pathway itself is alluring. Nothing like a hike in the desert . . .

Color Planes and Disaster Recovery: Orchard, Road, Windbreak

Yesterday I posted a hill that was a color study. Today I am posting trees and a road as large planes of colors. Green is green, but there are variations. The trees on the left are different greens than on the right, and so is the brushwork. The center is a rather yellowish grey road. The shadows, too, are a bit different, with the ones on the left are more blue than on the right, which have more green.

The painting started out with my using my the Schmincke half-pans on a large painting for the pans. I struggled to get enough color to begin a wash and resulted in blooms and cauliflowers everywhere. The whole beginning was a major disaster and I was not happy. Then I pulled out my usual large palette with tube paints. Start the painting over on a new sheet, or try to rescue it? I decided to apply some life saving . . . .

The sky was a big cauliflower. The trees on both sides of the road were big cauliflowers. I began with using clear water to wash away as much of the cauliflower lines, blending the paint into the surrounding color. This ended up with some lifting of color and some stripey areas, but that was not a bad start.

The next step was repainting the sky. It started out a nice light color but with another layer of color it got darker. Then the trees. Each layer became darker although I did manage to save some lighter areas. This was annoying, but then I decided to re-watch Shari Blaukopf’s “Trees Across the Seasons” to see her tree painting technique. It really helped.

My crime in watercolor is a lack of patience. That is what happened with this painting – my frustration using the pan paints made me impatient. I just want to get in and paint – I don’t want to pre-plan, do value studies, etc. There is a place for spontaneity and a place for patience. Outdoors is for spontaneous painting with drawing and thought; in the studio I want to be more deliberate. I made the choice to use tube paints, and be more patient.

The end result is not too bad. The original is darker than this one, but that is the beauty of digitalization – I can fix things. I use it in my photos, and I use it when I post my paintings online. Is this wrong? I don’t really know, but as far as I am concerned there is nothing unethical about such manipulation. If I were selling prints, I would be working to make sure the prints were good – just as in a photo – removing spots, augmenting colors, etc. Having worked awhile in the printing industry, this is the norm to produce modified images. Digitalizing a painting lets me crop and frame and sign it, too.

Besides helping me make a painting look better, it also allows me to see it differently. A monitor makes everything more clear, and that includes mistakes like weird shapes and splatters that I don’t notice in the original. Seeing such things is a learning experience in and of itself.

So, color planes and shapes, getting rid of cauliflowers, learning that half-pans are not best for my way of painting large, and fixing a painting that could have just gone into the scrap paper pile. Altogether, a good experience.

Up the Hill: A Plane of Color

One of the things that is often a point of contention for many who work in watercolor is when to stop – when not to paint any more – when is overworking the painting happening. Today’s study is of a lone building on Saturna Island in British Columbia. It sits on a hill, silhouetted against the sky.

The building itself is not well done – it is overworked. That, though, was not the point of the painting. The point of the painting is the hill up to the house – paint it, work the colors, create depth and dimension and a sense of the vegetation. I worked wet-in-wet; put a few glazes on; re-wet the paper and painted again when I needed to add some detail, such as the shape of grasses or vegetation. I also wanted to create a way to get the eye up the hill to the house, and the pathway itself does the trick.

Composition is also something I was considering. How am I leading the eye to that little building? Above is a an overlay with some of my eye-deas. I can think of more, too, but I could also go nuts analyzing things. The darks acted as a balance on either side of the hill, but the tree on the right is too big as far as I am concerned. It just kept growing – spring??

Finally, values. Lights, darks, mediums. Is my contrast working? If I look, I see the zig-zag of the darker path leading up the hill, but more subtle is the light zig-zag to its left. The darker values on the right of the hill repeat the zig-zag. Various areas of light and dark point your eye toward the building.

I am pleased with the hill in this painting, and that is what I wanted to focus on. It is an oddly shaped mass of color, but within it are variations of all sorts – warm and cool, dark and light – that give it shape and depth.

My current focus on watercolor is planes and dimension. I am trying to break down my ability to create structure, and for me the natural shapes of hills and trees are far easier to work on for now, although buildings will come in the future. Negative painting was a first study, but that surrounds as well as creates other planes and dimensions.

Let’s see what is next!

Mas Schmincke Pan Paints

I took some time to rummage around the studio and found my pad of paper I had set aside – an inexpensive, 100% cotton paper. This paper does not work well with really wet washes, but does well with lighter ones.

I always enjoy the combination of ink and watercolor. Drawing in ink without a pencil drawing beneath seems to me to be far easier to do, and more logical (if that makes sense) than working with a pencil for a value study and then inking over it, erasing the pencil, and then painting. I guess the amount of lines makes more sense to me than the pressure of the pencil? Anyway, I decided to see what I could do with ink and watercolor.

Nothing fantastic, but it does have a nice composition and sense of value to a point. I think the details – or lack – makes an ink drawing express itself. From there, I began to lay in some light washes, referring to the color sheet from my new set of 48 Schmincke Horadam half pan set I mentioned a couple of posts ago. Already I can see my heading toward specific colors, but looking at the painted color sampler, I tried different ones, like English Venetian Red. That color has never made it into my palette, so this was fun!

It took awhile to get comfortable using the pans as I usually paint with tubes. I am experimenting with things to decide what I want for plein air painting and drawing. Thus, pan paints make sense as does pen and ink. I like to travel light, and don’t like lugging this and that around. Having a lot of colors also allows for less need for water, I think, when sketching and painting, as mixing colors can be a bit of a job. At the same time, I do mix, such as blues and yellows to make greens, and having a lot of choices makes for some new and interesting result.

So, here is the finished ink and watercolor sketch. 9×12 on 100% cotton student grade watercolor paper. Light washes were used for most places, including the darker areas. For the darks, though, I did need to work on making my paint thicker and heavier. And I got to mix a lot of greens in addition to using the 4 or 5 available in the pans themselves. Altogether, I was pleased with the results and the experience.