The myriad of possibilities opened with yesterday’s post, condensed today with the completion of my watercolor. I decided to try my hand at a campfire, since I could imagine it filling up the spaces I left vacant. I created the space that reflected the fire light with the underlying quinacridone nickel and dabbed in shadow […]
I never realized how crazy the world of retail was until now. Last year I was worked very few hours, as I was inexperienced. But now that I know what I’m doing, I work a lot more and, this time of year, the store is open even longer than usual. How is this relevant to […]
I happened upon a technique of growing watercolor ‘trees’ by allowing earth-tone pigments drip into a pre-wetted section of paper. My first efforts (Landscape, Fiery Landscape, Rocky Landscape, Trees Around the World, Trees for Flat-Earthers) were fantasies. Yesterday’s post was not about creating trees, but rather about composition and layering. I took the same tack today. Individual trees were even […]
The good thing about painting more than one picture at a time (when one has the opposite of writer’s (or painter’s) block) is having one available to post when one does not have the time to paint during the day. That was the case today. I had no spare time at all. I did a […]
One of Miró’s works that has obsessed me of late is The Beautiful Bird Revealing the Unknown to a Pair of Lovers. Its title alone is fascinating. It combines line drawing with shapes, which when studied, reveal the narrative. Even without study, the arrangement of the dark shapes is appealing. The design holds together without knowing Miró’s […]
Emergency Room again today. Not sure how the shapes below relate to the visit, but this is my art at the end of the day. Here is my own word cloud for this study: body shapes, disproportionate, disconnected, big head, keeping it together, tension, relaxed, empty, full, what is wrong. After cropping this image in Photoshop, […]
I could not get the subject framed exactly how I wanted. Other than the composition, I really like the colors. I tried to resolve the composition issue with my watercolor/pen and ink sketch below.
At last! I progressed to the section in the Tate Watercolor Manual * that discusses the technique of Joseph Mallord William Turner. His lifetime spanned the late 18th century to the mid 19th century and made most inventive use of the pigments at his disposal and those new ones developed within his lifetime, according to the […]
Today’s watercolor experiment: Following my warmup exercise (Warmup and New Brushes), I painted a full size (9″x12″) painting in the style of Corot. One of the authors of the Tate Watercolor Manual*, Tony Smibert, inspired today’s experiment with his 2005 composition ‘After Corot’. I used the same color scheme as in my warmup exercise: burnt […]
Today’s watercolor experiment: I am working with the Tate Watercolour Manual today, as I have been for the past several weeks. I expanded my work from the smaller panels in my warmup exercise (see Lesson 12) to reproduce one of the exercises in the book onto larger paper (9″x12″). The composition today was inspired by […]
