Watercolor!

I am really enjoying Liz Steel's online course, Watercolour.  At the same time, I am trying to keep up with drawing and acrylic painting, which left very little blog time last week. 

Here is one of the first exercises from the course which involved doing a big swatch of your colors in a watery mix, a juicy mix, and a pasty mix. 

We were encouraged to stick with the colors we have, otherwise I would be making some changes!  I did two swatches of Quin Magenta. That's not true of the yellow swatches in the top right corner. Those are two different paint colors, but they are not very distinct from one another. Also, I have a black color and a very dark green, so I probably only need one really dark color.

In a different exercise, we tested the opacity of each color. It turns out the whitish color is the most opaque. I love the different things you can learn about color!

So Many Choices

After I finished this painting and was looking at it, I was struck by how many choices go into each and everything which is created. This is a complete scene so there were a lot more choices to be made.

I fought with this painting. I started it once and painted it over. I re-cropped the picture and tried again. On this second attempt, I worked on it from 01/10 to 01/14.

#174 - On The Move - 5" x 7" paper - standard palette

Cardinal In Woods

My numbering is a little out of sync. I had three drawings to paint. As I draw one out, I number it and put it in my journal. This morning, I picked up the third one. I started it this morning and finished it at lunch. For this one, I tried for smoother strokes overall, just to change things up.

#176 - Cardinal In Woods - 5" x 7" - paper

It always makes me  happy when I can mix a decent red!

It's A Good Start To The New Year

Last year, my household got caught up in being too busy. One side effect was that we got into the habit of eating out for dinner way too often. I like my home. I like my kitchen. We both like to cook. This is something that I wanted to change in 2018 and so far so good.

I am having fun tackling more complicated scenes. Since this a small painting, making the flower minuscule from what I usually tackle, I used a size 6 brush.

#173 - Koi in Pone With Water Lilies - 5" x 7" - paper - alt palette

Sometimes I like the picture better. Sometimes I like the original better. For this one, I like the original.

My Watercolors

I am taking an on-line watercolor class with Liz Steel. It starts on Wednesday. There were several warm up exercises including painting your palette. Here are the colors I selected.

I have acquired watercolors over the last 6 months, but haven't known where to start with them so I"m excited for the class. I goofed when I purchased several colors, but I'm going with them anyway. The pink color is Quin Magenta from Daniel Smith. I wanted the same one as my acrylic paint, but did not check the pigment so I purchased the wrong color. Paint names don't help. You have to look at the pigments! The bright green was purchased on a whim and it's not the type of shade that I wanted. Still when I was playing around with it, it made a gorgeous color when mixed with the color in the upper right hand corner. My last error was that I purchased Pyrrol Orange when I meant to purchase the transparent version of this color. The one I have is aggressive. Essentially, I am going to use the colors I have and see what happens. It's clear from the introductory information that it's not necessary to use the instructor's palette.

Second Time Syndrome

This is the second sheep painting. I think it's easier to stay in the world of values and shapes (and low expectations) the first time I try to paint a new type of object. The second time is usually more awkward and that happened with this painting. It felt like I was fighting with this painting, while the first sheep painting flowed off of my brush. 

#172 - Sheep and Lamb - 8"x 10" - paper - standard palette

This seems to happen in life. One place I especially notice it is in juggling. If a group of us try a new pattern, the first time it goes well you can guarantee that the next time after that it will go poorly. 

First Drawings Of 2018

While I have continued drawing every day since I took the online drawing class with Roz in May, I got away from having any focus these last several months. I want to get back to having goals and working to gain more skills. One giant area I want to focus on is how to show depth, volume, and weight in my drawings and of course, this also means tackling values and value shapes. When I draw, I mostly stick with the outer edges of the different pieces of whatever I am drawing. It's time to tackle the interior and that means I need to be willing to experiment and think about what works and what does not.

Yesterday, I played around and drew some peppers. They are great for practicing, since they have such interesting changes in their interior sections. I didn't focus so much on values. Rather, I wanted to play with hatching to show shape. On the section in the front, the side to side marks don't work and I'm not sure why. There is a distinct and I thought it would work to make marks like this. I don't have an intuitive sense for this at all, so it's time to experiment and also look on-line for other people's drawings to study.

Next up, I decided to just focus on the stem. After that, I drew the outside dimensions. I was going to go farther with this, but I really liked how it looked.