Tag: gouache

Two Boats

Every week I am trying to focus on a subject.  I guess for the next week it will be boats.  My drawing skills are not the best, and so focusing on how something is constructed will help.  What made me think about this is a very simple way of drawing and painting boats by an excellent watercolor YouTuber named Shibasaki.  Below is his demo on boats.

What makes this video so valuable is he shows you that a boat is a series of rectangles with a few curves.  Don’t believe me?  Check it out.  I’ve learned a lot from Shibasaki-san!

My palette here was limited to zinc white, ultramarine blue, a touch of gamboge, burnt sienna, and some left over colors on the palette from the sunset coast I painted the other day – a bit of teal and some red.

One thing I have always loved are sail boats and tug boats.  Those are on the agenda.  Stay tuned . . .

Coastal Dawn

Evidence of overworking is present in the white highlights . . . they just don’t seem to go with the rest of the painting insofar they are too bright.  I was thinking in terms of photography and histograms – white point, black point.  I wonder if I am criss-crossing two different art formats.  Besides that, the rocks are perhaps too orange for the distant sky, although sandstone can take on an incredibly orangish color under the right light.

Hmmmmm.

Sunshine & Shadow in the Oak Grove

I went off for a morning walk in the local botanical garden, taking pictures with my phone (and film camera) looking for contrasty bits of landscape to paint.  I took a lot, much to my surprise.  What I found was dappled sunlight more than anything as the garden is in its summer glory with trees leafed out and bright sun trying to break through the canopy.

Truthfully,  this painting is considerably more lush in color than the photo as we are in August, in hot weather, and the vegetation has dried and browned from a lack of rain.  I really worked to create a gouache painting reflective of the photo, but couldn’t hack it!  It was so dreary!

What I did like best, though, was simply the experience of a slow ramble through the garden.  There were birds, scents of pine and sage, butterflies, the buzz of bees, bird song, caws from crows.  I think, perhaps, the painting is more reflective of the richness of the experience of the garden rather than its current shades of beige, brown, and green.

 

Girl on a Bed

I have a fear of painting people.  I cannot even imagine doing a portrait.  For the past several days I have been debating on deliberately focusing on people or buildings and perspective.  Guess what won?

As with many of my paintings, this is from an image on Pixabay.  A girl is lying face down on white sheets; she wears a grey T-shirt and her face is not visible.  It would be easy to try to put in facial features and overwork a picture, and this is why I chose such an anonymous person.

At this point, I am simply looking at proportion, light, dark, shadows.  In general, this worked out okay – the right hand is a bit off, but that is not what I was aiming for.  I worked to keep everything simple, as well as use up paint on my muddy palette.  I added zinc white, of which I am using a ton, as that has been missing from the muddy palette for weeks!

Clouds Above the Fields

I don’t know about most people who paint, but I expect every painting to be a masterpiece.  Of course, this is silly.  I don’t think about practicing things, such as painting clouds.  However, I watched a few YouTube videos on cloud painting and decided to give it a go.  I found a picture on Pixabay I liked, filled with clouds, and a plowed field stretching to the horizon.  To me, it just seems a bit ridiculous not to try to paint a masterpiece each time – really, practice – so a finished picture it is.

Clouds really are variable, but there is a tendency to overwork them.  Here, I simply tried to get a sense of white-white-white and ways in which clouds have contrast, shadow, distance, and how they look in the sky.  These are rather poofy ones, without any defining characteristics other than that.

Since this was practice, I put in some black ink lines just to see how they “feel” in a painting.  Don’t know if I like them . . .