sand

2 Trees

With little to do other than post about flies (see yesterday) and gripe about the heat and a missing package, it is always best to move on to things which please you the most. For me, it is waterolors and landscapes. These are two things that usually give me a lot of delight and certainly act as a balm when I am feeling really pissy!

Okay. Heat doesn’t do me well, so I have the air conditioning on and the house has cooled down from 81 F to about 76 F. The latter is manageable. Lots of water and electrolytes, too. And then, watercolor and color and trees and skies and the feel of brush on paper. Even better, a painting I like, and a second one, which will posted after this one.

I am not really sure what to write about this painting. It is pretty simple. It is a simple scene of trees sits on the edge of a sandy bit of land and is backed by a few distant trees, grasses, and shrubs. The palette was simple enough. I worked to make my painting simple, too, and focused on shapes and contrast as well as recall of some lessons learnt from classes. I think it shows summer, too, and a bit of the sultriness I am feeling – humidity, heat, balmy. And very lazy.

Watercolors, Arches Rough 140#, 10×14.

Coastal Beach

Where I live there are so many wonderful beaches in our county, to the south, and to the north. Just pop onto Hwy 1 / 101 and off you go! Some are wide and flat, such as in Carlsbad, others are easy to get to even if they have cliffs, and others are quite rugged.

Santa Barbara County has a lot of really great beaches. When I lived there, I had a lot of favorites – Butterfly, Hendry’s, and Goleta Beach. This is a view of Goleta Beach facing north. It is very typical of this section of California – sandy beaches, friable cliffs, Mediterranean vegetation. The coastal range is often right at the ocean’s edge and can create some dramatic views from the shoreline. I really like our beaches!

The biggest challenge here was the water, both waves and the damp water on the sandy shore. Putting people in was not too hard – just a few blobs to make the blobs people shaped. The foreground rocks were a bit of a challenge – I wanted enough detail to make them believable but not too detailed. I am pretty pleased with the cliffs, distant mountains, and sky. Overall, I think this painting turned out pretty good.

Gouache, Strathmore Vision 140# CP paper, 9×12.

Oasis

Today I decided to just paint and take it from there. No prelim sketch, some reference to this or that, but the point was to just paint and see what happens. It is really practice, and here I used oils. I just need to get comfortable with them and how they handle. That was the whole point of today’s painting. I think I will do more of these, just for practice. The masterpieces can wait.

Oil, 12×12, cotton canvas panel.

The Strange Edges of the Sea

I got a few painterly goodies for Christmas, and one was a new tablet of watercolor paper, one which I have never heard of before. Of course, it needs checking out. How does it handle wet paper and washes? Dry brush? Bleeding? Etc. It is not an expensive paper – $20 for 32 pages of 9×12 pure cotton paper – but it is actually a decent one. I can lift colors from it pretty easily, too! It is a rather nice bit of paper overall, and while not Arches or Fabriano, I think it will do quite well for studies, and probably gouache as well.

Besides playing with new paper, I have also attempted to lead the eye in the composition to a small area of white. Rocks, waves, clouds, land masses, sand, whatever are all designed to catch your eye. I think it worked out pretty good. I also am rather pleased with the movement of the sand in the lower right hand corner.

9×12, CP 140# paper, watercolor.