pears – Page 3 – Ink, Yarn & Beer

Pears & Ink

When you get home at 7 p.m., have dinner, and paint some swatches on a wall to choose a color, there is not a lot of time left in the day to do much of anything. To slow down, I thought about what I had done the day before – watercolor and ink, not splashy and loose, but more controlled. A still life, and my favorite fruit – pears!

Last night I did the colors.

This morning, I did the ink.

The ink I used is waterproof, but is a warm grey in tone. It actually works for a more delicate and less contrasting line or dot.

Watercolor Workshop, Day 2

Another day just painting! What a pleasure to be able to do it!

Today we did two different things. Actually, three. For warm-up, we returned to the quick three minute sketches, which eventually morphed into a still life with three objects. Mine were a piece of dried corn, a plastic mushroom, and a plastic artichoke. I was not particularly nimble this morning, but here is one I produced.

From there, we moved on to landscapes, but I will hold off for a moment on those. We did an exercise which I found fascinating: take one object and paint it 6 different ways. I chose a really lovely fake pear – golden and red, reminiscent of autumn. Take a look . . . they are in a gallery format, so click on one image to be able to scroll through them larger than they are here.

This was a lot of fun to do – nothing I ever have considered as an exercise. And then . . . we moved on to landscapes from photographs Brenda took, laminated, and brought to class.

The idea was to take a photo and modify it. This one is in the wine country of Northern California.

This one is, I think, in Carmel, but I don’t recall. All the speckles are from the fact that it is a ghost image from a wet painting. Truthfully, I was surprised it was a success at all. All day I felt restless and unfocused.

Finally, this one. I think it is the best of everything I did today. The mantra for the day was draw, frame, paint.

With Lines, Without Lines

If you have been following this blog of late, you will know that I have been putzing around with watercolor on a more serious level than in a long time. (Really, more serious than ever before.) In the process, I have struggled with control of the medium, like all who begin with watercolors. Lines help when a painting fails, and sometimes lines add to a painting if that is part of its intended style.

Having done sumi-e for many years, I love lines and their expressiveness. I also like colors, and that is where self-control needs to show up the most. Think of Hawaiian shirts or 40s palm frond prints and you get the idea about my ideas of color – louder and more is the best!

This painting of Mirror Lake was very satisfying as I felt the use of sumi ink and colors worked well.

The painting is inspired by a number of paintings I found when I googled “pears grapes watercolor” and chose images. There were a lot out there, and so I painted a number of grapes-and-pear paintings yesterday.

This is the one that pleases me the most. I like its painterly elements and the colors of both the grapes and the pears. It is the most controlled and thought-through of the series. I did not draw any pencil lines prior to painting it, but painted it freehand, recalling brushwork in sumi-e. It’s easy to fall prey to haste in watercolor, to achieve a “painterly” look, but it really requires forethought, just as sumi-e does.

I did four paintings altogether in this series, which you can find under “My Other Lives” above.

The Grapes of Wrath

Today was a day of wrath! I was soooo frustrated!

And a day of learning. I did four watercolors without lines. The first two were sketched in with pencil; the last two were done freehand, relying on imagination and the precepts of sumi-e, where lines are not drawn.

In each painting, something works, and in each painting there are places of failure. What I failed at was separating various areas from the neighboring shape or shadow. Some areas appear rather painterly. I still have a long way to go – but at least, at last, there are no lines.

Paper is Canson’s watercolor paper, and colors include quinacridone yellow, cobalt teal, carbazole violet, ultramarine blue, burnt sienna, Hooker’s green, alizarin crimson, Payne’s grey, and a few others.

Enter the MagMod

MagMod 2

For Christmas, there were a few photography accessories on my list, one being the MagMod 2.0. I must have been a good girl, because I got one. It is an attachment for your speed light, and allows a grid to be added to the flash, along with colored gels, to focus and change the light of the camera. It is made of rubber – or a rubbery substance – that stretches to fit the speed light. I put it on my SB600 as well as the SB400 (which is smaller than the SB600) by stretching the MagGrip.

From there, using the MagGrid 2 and the MagGel 2 systems, I could change my image’s character. Coupled with extra lights from the side, or backlighting, the results were rather nice. What I liked was the fact the MagMod 2 is very easy to use and is modular – hence the “mod” in MagMod. The grid reduces the divergence of the light spread from the flash and focuses it to 40 degrees, per the MagMod website; add another, and it reduces it to 20 degrees. (Will a third halve it to 10 degrees?) In looking at this site, it appears they are now developing a bounce and a diffuser, but they are not yet for sale on the MagMod web page.

Images taken using the MagMod 2 Grid and Colored Filters

The MagMod 2 is easy to use – and rather fun! The magnets do have north and south poles, and they will remind you of that when you line them up wrong. Quality seems to be very good. I am not sure how the filters are made. There are air bubbles in them, which move around, but they do not affect the image at all from what I can see. Also, a few months back, I emailed them with some questions, and I was very pleased with the promptness of their replies. For the price, some people may find this an expensive item, but the kit is a good place to start, and from there, you can add what you want. Modular they are, and you can buy pieces individually.

Finally, here is a video done by someone in the studio, using a number of them.

And here, you can see all their products in production and available for pre-order. Altogether, this is a rather exciting product, I think, and look forward to the continuing development of the MagMod system.