Tag: limited palette

Old Trees in Winter

If you have been reading this blog awhile, you know I live where there is fire and not snow. Still, winter does come to my warm (ish) part of the world, and with it memories of tromping through the snow under spreading trees along a lake shore.

I use two software programs these days to scan my paintings – and I rather like the way they end up, similar but different. Above is the one using VueScan. Below is the one using Epson V600 and its software.

Epson software is more inclined to push colors, but in this case it does a decent job and pulls out more of the colors I put into the tree. Both scans are pretty much straight out of the scanner. Your choice as to preference!

Watercolor, Arches Rough 140#. Colors primarily burnt umber, ultramarine blue, Hooker’s green. 10×14.

Sand Dunes in Death Valley

Death Valley is up and off Hwy 395 along the Eastern Sierra Mountains in California. It’s a strange and eerily beautiful place with a lot of surprises and history. It is preserved as Death Valley National Park. The website is filled with great information and it is one of the best places to visit – in the right season, and in the right weather. People die in the desert because they do not understand it, so if you go, be careful!

Sand dunes always amaze me. I am still stuck in my child’s view of the world that sand dunes exist only in the Sahara, and can only be found by riding a camel. Silly, yes!

There are sand dunes everywhere – beaches and deserts mostly, but sometimes in places you least expect. Their shifting shape in the wind and blowing away foot prints or burying ancient cities all lead to a fascination as they make everything seem so temporal.

Anyway . . . . this is an oil painting using a limited palette. Some of the goals in doing this painting included smooth, smooth brushwork for the dunes. I tried to catch the gradual gradations and color changes I saw. In the distance is the flat valley before the towering mountains. For each I used directional brushwork and a deliberate vagueness to create a surreal effect. The mountains, when I look at them afresh, can also be visualized as swirling clouds. Interpretation I will leave to your eye.

Oil on canvas panel; 16 x 20 inches.

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.

Through Many Seasons

While the peasants needing food and firewood in the past centuries in England were kept off the king’s land, it has left a wonderful legacy of old growth trees, unlike, I understand, in most of Europe. Here in the U.S. we have many old trees, and the wilder parts of our country have many stunning examples.

Personally, I am partial to oak trees because of their oddly twisting limbs and branches. As a kid in the mid-west, I grew up with a forest of oaks behind my house, and these trees have always held a special place in my heart. The Druids found them magical, and so do I. 

There are multiple species, distributed worldwide. Here in California, the overall objective is to give oak trees the protection they deserve, and while property owners can cut down trees, permits are generally required, and woe betide those who fail to follow those regulations. Sadly our fires are killing many.

A return to the theme of snow and winter. Can you imagine what these old trees must have seen through the years and years they have stood? Changes in forest, change in season, spring to summer to fall to the desolation of winter. For me, a tree is more than a tree – it is a legacy of times gone by as well as, in many ways, a hope for the future.

Kilimanjaro 300# cold press paper, 11×14, limited palette of blues, umbers, and siennas.

Playtime Is Fluid

Several years ago I bought some Golden Fluid Acrylics in 1 oz. containers. I really didn’t appreciate them as I wanted them to do something they couldn’t. However, I have pulled them out lately and played with them here and there. Many of them are dried up and old, worthless to use, so I decided to pick up some newer ones and in a limited color palette – one yellow, two reds, two blues, a brown, and two whites.

Obligatory color testing – and mixing – to see what could show up. I like the oranges and red violets, but the greens are not the bright ones I like. I think the blues are not quite what I would like for mixing, so I am getting some cobalt teal. The same with the lavenders – they are okay, but, again, not exactly the shades I want. So, some dioxazine (aka carbazole) violet, as well as a quinacridone magenta as the alizarin is not to my liking either. Oh, let’s add a raw umber to that mix – not sure about the burnt umber.

Anyway, some playtime with the paints, quick sketches to see how the fluid acrylics work. They are a lot smoother, but dry out quickly, too. I did a sad lemon and a decent bit of bok choi. I think the bok choi is worth a bigger glance.

I may actually begin to enjoy the acrylics – working on 140# Canson watercolor paper – 16×20 – gives me plenty of room to explore. I am working on a bit of a landscape to see how to use the paints, and will report on my progress later on. I laid down a value study on the paper, and will next consider colors and layers, probably moving dark to light, and my brushwork, too.