Watercolor Penciled Succulent

I wanted to paint with my watercolors today but I had to work in the bedroom. I dusted off my watercolor pencils, that I haven’t used very much. Earlier, I used a 2B pencil to sketch a rescued succulent that I have been nursing to health on the back porch. Below is the first stage […]

New Paper

With the new year comes new things to try. Today’s watercolor experiment: I bought a couple of pads of Yupo ® watercolor “paper”. It is has a very smooth surface, similar to a hot pressed paper. It is not paper at all, however. It is plastic. I was a bit disappointed with it. The pigments […]

Leftover Blues

Today’s watercolor experiment: As carefully as one meters minuscule amounts of paint for testing (see Blues Chart), there is always some left over.  I hate wasting unused paint so I decided to use my left over blues in today’s experiment. I used a dry brush for the initial wave of indigo blue, one of my favorite […]

Blue Test

Today’s watercolor experiment: I’m getting back to basics with the help of a book I bought a while ago: Color Right From the Start by Hilary Page. I started with the section about blue pigments and the first exercise was to construct a chart to illustrate the ‘hue bias’ of blue pigments. Hue bias is […]

Monoprint – Third Use

Today’s watercolor experiment: I printed a monoprint the other day for the first time (Watercolor Print). I really enjoyed the process. First, I painted on glass. I used some of the pigments straight from the tube, placing blue and yellow next to each other so they would mix when I squished it onto the paper. Here […]

Lesson 5 – More Washing

Today’s warmup: I continued with variegated washes today. Below are 4 panels that look very similar to those in Lesson 4. In the top left panel I used ultramarine blue, lemon yellow and cadmium red light as washes on the upper portion and a line of my gray mixture (cobalt blue and cadmium red light) […]

Applied Washes

Today’s watercolor experiment: I started today’s experiment with an idea to execute a circular watercolor wash. However, I could not control both the curvature and the flow of pigment from the brush, at the same time. The initial brush stroke was resulting from a relatively dry brush. I executed several disconnected curves with ultramarine blue […]

Coffee Tree

Today’s watercolor experiment: My wife and I frequently stop for coffee while we are out and about. Today I noticed a tree outside the coffeeshop. I usually notice trees that are brightly colored, especially in the afternoon light. In the spirit of experimentation, I began painting not with a brush, but with a sponge. Since […]

Green Red Plus

Itty bitty watercolor experiment: I was happy with my use of complements in my experiment posted earlier today. However, the composition was not that good. I painted another little sketch using the same green-red complements as in ‘Next Complement Please‘, however I added a bit more. For the road, I used the purple/yellow combination, and […]

Portrait of a Turkey

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. It is that time of year here in the US. There is quite a frenzy for those of us who venture out. The pie store had a line out the door; people waiting for their apple, pumpkin, cherry pies. They ran out of mincemeat, so don’t even ask. For the past week […]

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