So I quit my day job last week. I feel I’ve reached that phase of life where I can work at what matters to me, rather than just focusing on making a living. We plan to consolidate our two residences into one, our house in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Once we’ve gotten through the hassle of moving I am hoping to spend a lot more time painting.
I decided that a recent painting I did was appropriate for this event. It was painted from a photo I took last fall when we visited Tilghman Island. It’s 12×6 on Arches cold pressed paper. Sittin’ on the dock of the bay watching the tide roll away…wasting time…
Stay tuned… hopefully things will get interesting.
I haven’t blogged much for a while, so I thought I’d catch up on several paintings I’ve done in recent weeks. I continue to do all watercolors these days. I will get back to my oils eventually, but watercolor brings new challenges and will ultimately make be a better painter so no harm in focusing on them. I continue to improve but I have a long way to go.
I recently switched brands of watercolor paints and created my own pallet. I had been using Winsor & Newton, which is an excellent brand. The color choices I was using were driven by the recommendations from Purnell Pettyjohn, who I took a class from about three years ago. I decided it was time for me to select colors that matched my preferences, which of course have been evolving.
I did a lot of research on brands. My favorite Youtube teacher, Steve Mitchell (The Mind of Watercolor), highly recommends M. Graham. They have a large following and one of their claims to fame is that they have honey in them, which keeps them a little bit tacky. I thought about going that route, but the honey made me nervous because it’s so humid in the summer at our house in the mountains. I was afraid they would mold. I found another blog, The Scratchmade Journal, where the author lives in the mountains of North Carolina. She had been an M. Graham user for years, but found them completely unmanageable once she moved to the mountains. She switched to Da Vinci after a lot of testing. I tried them and so far I love them. The colors are vibrant, and they lift really well when you want to lighten areas that you’ve previously painted. My new pallet colors are all transparent or semi-transparent. I’m tweaking them a little as I go along, for example, I chose two yellows that are too close to being the same. I’m having fun experimenting.
Now…on to some of the paintings I’ve been working on…
A while back we went to St. Michal’s Maryland for a long weekend. While we were there we drove down Tilghman Island, which is a fairly isolated and quaint community on the Chesapeake Bay. We took a lot of photos and one was of a narrow isthmus with a few houses on it. There were storm clouds in the background, but the sun was shining on the houses. It was a lovely scene. I painted a small painting (12×6) and liked it a lot. I’ve been itching to start painting bigger watercolors, so I decided to do a larger version, which is 24×12. I changed up the scene a little, eliminating one house that I thought was too busy and capturing another instead. I like the results of the second painting as well. I plan to frame it and enter it into the Falls Church Arts all member show that starts in late April.
Here is the original, smaller version.
Here is the large version.
A month or so ago I was at home in the mountains and decided to paint a scene from a photo I took one morning. The fog was lifting from the valley floor. There was a field in the foreground that had hay bales in it from a recent mowing. I actually took the photo with my iPhone from a moving car (my husband was driving), but I still managed to capture the feeling. I think I’ve already painted it a couple of times but this is the best so far.
This next example is of a painting that I thought I’d lost control of, but somehow it came around. It’s from a photo I took at Afton Mountain Winery. At one point the trees were just blobs, and it had no depth at all, but I kept fiddling with it and it mostly came around. The three trees in the foreground on the right I wasn’t able to bring out much, because the ones behind them were already too dark to get contrast. Now that I look at them, I probably could have lifted some of the color from them. The foliage in the big trees is a little blobby. I need to get better at painting foliage. Steve Mitchell is really good at it, but I can’t make it work. This is not one for the gallery, but it’s pleasant enough to look at.
Finally, I wanted to try a waterfall painting. I knew it would be a challenge. I was reading and studying the section on water in “The Watercolorists Essential Notebook: Landscapes” by Gordon MacKenzie. I knew it would be challenging, but decided to try a small painting of a waterfall. The reference photo is a waterfall in Vesuvius VA. The painting is about 4×10. Keeping the white and getting the texture of falling water was challenging, but I was happy with the result. I had to cheat a little in the pool at the base to get the splash. I used opaque white ink to do that. I will try it again and see if I can do better with the rocks and plants on the cliff walls. I may do it bigger next time too.
There have been others, but these are the ones that seemed most worth a discussion. Till next time…and I’ll try not to take so long.
A while back I posted about a painting I entered in the East-meets-West show. It was a watercolor of a stormy spring day on the Stoney Creek golf course. It was sitting) unframed on the shelf above my desk and it kept catching my eye.
I think if was the form factor and the color scheme. It’s 12 x 6 and very green.
I decided I really like that size so I started doing some other paintings in the same form factor. One that I did was a fall scene that turned out really nice. I decided it would be fun to do all four seasons, so I did.
I ended up doing winter twice. I really liked the second one. Summer is very pretty, but I think it’s a little too spring-like. I may try it again.
Now I need to get the other three framed so I have a complete set.
This year, thanks to a youtube video by Steve Mitchell one of my favorite online watercolor instructors, I decided to paint holiday cards for a short list of people who touched my life this year. All told I painted about 15. Each card was roughly 5×7. I had cardstock that was made from watercolor paper but the quality wasn’t good so I painted on Arches and cut to fit. Each painting was fixed to a card with small double-sided tape squares which raised the painting a tiny bit. The effect was pretty nice. It’s too bad that you can’t get good quality watercolor paper cardstock.
In Steve’s video he did what he calls spontaneous painting. This is a technique where he lays down some spontaneous washes and then adds details to turn the image into a landscape. (If you watch the video you’ll see how fascinating it is to see.) I started out trying this, but I’m just not good enough to pull it off. I fell back on my tried and true landscape painting process, which is still evolving.
One thing I was forced to do was to paint things that were different from the way they appeared in my reference materials. I wanted winter scenes, mostly snow scenes. I have some reference photos that are snow scenes but not enough, so I repainted some other scenes I’d recently done, modifying them to be snowscapes. It was fun and got me out of my engineer’s brain a bit, which is a challenge and is always good for me.
Below are photos of a few of the cards. Unfortunately I didn’t get photos of all of the finished products. Perhaps I’ll start earlier for next year.
I did a post a while back on my trip to Paris and more specifically to Giverny. I continue to find inspiration in the beautiful photographs I was fortunate enough to capture.
I’ve been doing a lot more watercolor lately, and as you know I find it very challenging, but I love it. I also believe that it has the potential to make my oil painting better (as I also said in an earlier post). I continue to believe that is true.
Recently I completed an oil painting of Monet’s Garden. I spent quite a bit of time doing it, not because I was working on it, but because I would get distracted by watercolor and then would go back to it. I did it in the studio at our mountain home, so that also slows me down since we are not there as often as I’d like.
I tried to keep this painting loose, focusing on shapes and colors, not starting from the background and painting forward as was my tendency when I started painting. Watercolor simply doesn’t allow that approach and I’m also trying to apply that limitation to oils. I think it makes my work more impressionistic.
I have to admit, it’s humbling to paint a scene that was immortalized by the great Claude Monet. That said, I’m pleased to have had the opportunity to stand in the place where he produced many masterpieces and to use that as an inspiration for my own interpretation.
In September we had the pleasure of enjoying a very relaxing weekend on the Maryland Eastern Shore in the little town of St. Michaels. We actually stayed at the Wade’s Point Inn, which was a few miles outside of St. Michaels, and was extremely serene and relaxing. I brought my watercolor gear with me and did some plein air painting on this beautiful property. It was very inspiring and most enjoyable. I did several sketches in my sketchbook, but I did camp out on the lawn two mornings with all of my gear to do full paintings.
The first piece I did was the morning sun shining on a point where there was a house and a small dock. This piece is 12 x 6, a size I like a lot for small panoramas.
The second piece I did was the front lawn of Wade’s Point Inn. They had a dock that several of the guests fished from, and a comfortable looking hammock in the trees. This piece is 9 x 12.
I entered three recent watercolor paintings into the East and West Art Exhibitions at Falls Church Arts. This show will run from August 19th through September 23rd 2017 at the Falls Church Arts Central Gallery at 700-B W Broad Street, Falls Church VA. This show was a curated show and based on the number and quality of the works they received they could only accept two entries per artist.
The show opening is on August 19th. Unfortunately I will not be able to attend.
July was the second annual World Watercolor Month. World Watercolor Month was started by Charlie O’Sheilds, creator of doodlewash® and a designer from Missouri. Charlie had become enamored with watercolor and started a Facebook page called World Watercolor Month in July 2016. He challenged artists to paint and post a watercolor painting each day of the month of July. It was a great success and had thousands of members before the month was out, so he renamed it World Watercolor Group and maintained it as a place for watercolorists of all levels to share their work.
In 2016, I was only an observer in World Watercolor Month, although I think I did post a few paintings. In 2017, I decided to do my best to participate. With a demanding day job, I knew this would be a challenge, but every evening after dinner I’d get out my sketchbook and try to paint at least a little something I could post. Some were better than others. By the end of the month I’d painted every day but two (and I still posted something on the days I missed). It was very gratifying and I think I did improve my skills. Next year I will paint something every day!
Below are a few of my favorites from the month. (#worldwatercolormonth)
As I said in an earlier post, I recently had the good fortune of traveling to Paris to meet up with my sister and to visit some good friends who are living there. I have been enjoying doing watercolors of some of the photos I took.
One of the things we did while I was there was visit Giveny, where Monet lived out the later part of his life. We visited his home and his spectacular gardens and famous water lily pond. This was on my bucket list and it was every bit as magical and inspiring as I had hoped. I expect to be painting from the photos I took for a very long time.
Below is a shot of the garden followed by my watercolor interpretation. I tried to capture the bold color of the sky and it’s reflection in the water. It took two attempts to get this. I’m still learning the watercolor process and the approach to painting. I after a blue wash I painted the lilies followed by the water reflections and then the trees in the background. That seemed to work well.
Here is a photo of me in the garden standing on one of the famous bridges looking and feeling awestruck.
I’ve been trying to do some watercolor sketching of the many flower photos I took. Here are two from my sketchbook.
Finally, I took some lovely photos of Paris in the evening while on a dinner cruise. I only had my iPhone with me, but it does have a pretty good camera and is quite good in low light. I have attempted a watercolor cityscape from one of these photos. Unfortunately, I don’t think I captured the evening light well at all. It’s hard to get the richness of the colors as night falls in watercolor. This one begs to be done in oil, so I am going to do that soon. I will post when I’m done.
I’ve been absent for a bit. I actually have several posts I need to write, including one on my trip to Paris that included a trip to Giverny, but for now a quick update.
This weekend was the judging of the 8th Annual Falls Church Arts Plein Air show. I was only in town to paint two weekends for the timeframe of the show (mid-April to mid-June). One of those was cold and rainy, the other I agreed to gallery sit at the new gallery. I got creative and sat out in front of the gallery and painted Kensington Corner. The finished product was only minimally realistic because I only painted what I liked. I painted the clock and the bus stop and the trees and flowers, but not the roads and only minimal detail in the buildings. I kind of liked the result, and so did someone else, because the painting sold at the showing on Saturday. It was bought by a lovely couple who very thoughtfully viewed the show and chose two paintings to buy, one being mine. I hope they get many years of enjoyment out of it.
I have been so busy that I framed the painting in haste, and did not scan or photograph it. I will need to remember it from the iPhone photo I took of it in its frame.
This show has several cash prizes. I did not win anything, but below are the well deserving and very talented winners.
