Every time Veterans Day rolls around, I feel emotional. My brother Mike was born on Veterans Day. Today he is 70 years of age. I haven’t seen Mike in quite a while. My thinking about him has changed over the years. As a child, I tried to make contact with him. Mike is severely autistic, […]
I wanted to see what would happen if I superimposed a regular, studied sketch on a blind drawing of the same portrait subject. I used a photograph of my father as the model on which to experiment. My choice of subject holds emotional content, as my dad passed away a while ago and I still […]
I’ve done many blind drawings in my sketch books. Sketch books are supposed to be studies for future paintings or larger scale works. In the pen and ink/watercolor experiment below, I used two of my previous sketches (Man with Hair Too Small for Rest of Face and At the Eye Doctor’s). I drew the outlines […]
It feels good to get back to abstraction. I have some vague notions of images I want to reveal, but no real pictures that I want to transcribe from inside my head. The watercolor below is a start.
This is the completed sketch from yesterday:
I used lamp black and charcoal gray for the dark undersides of the clouds in this sketch. To soften the edges of the dark brush strokes (applied to dry paper), I diluted the pigment on the brush and drew it parallel to the initial stroke, as one would execute a graded wash. Toward the bottom […]
In these practice sketches, I tried several different techniques. First, I only partially removed the liquid mask. This resulted in a stippling effect in some of the clouds. I also laid down a second blue wash on the sky. I tried different ways of sculpting the clouds with gray and black pigments. In the second […]
This was an attempt to combine clouds with blue skies. First, I used liquid latex to mask areas for the clouds, then I painted the blue sky. I knew that the sharp edges around the mask would need to be soften, as clouds are soft. On some of the edges, I added water, before the […]
I divided my 12×9 watercolor block into four sections. I need a lot of practice representing clouds in watercolor. Instead of painting a generic cloud, I used one of my photographs (previous practice sessions are here: Gray Clouds in Front of Cloud Line…; and here: Watercolor Cloud Studies – First Trial.) Future practice sessions will […]
Here are a couple of more preliminary watercolor sketches of cloud formations. I photographed this cloud bank late last month. I was struck by the smattering of blue sky between the solid mass of white-edged clouds in the background, and smaller steel gray clouds hovering in the foreground. In the first sketch, I laid down […]
