Two Pastels

Our new pastel paper finally arrived and I've been itching to do some pastel. The late-day one is from a photo taken out our window at the house across the street (although the house itself doesn't look much like the painting). The other one is a field near the Brandywine Creek.

Sailboat and Charts

It's always hard to know when to stop when doing an abstract like this one. I'm doing it for the second time, since the first version contained collages of charts and old maps, something not allowed in many shows because they are not created by me. So this time I used various colors of ink, in addition to the watercolor paint, to draw my own charts and maps. If you look closely, none of the "writing" is real. I will probably work on this a bit more, but it's looking close to being done.

Heeling

I'm still playing with painting sailboats, this time one that's under sail. Fran suggested I do one in reds and blues, so I did. I painted this about a week ago and didn't like it much, so it sat behind another painting. Today when I uncovered it, I liked it much better; it's often like that with paintings I do.

Accepted!

This painting just got accepted into the Pennsylvania Watercolor Society's their annual International Exhibition. It's going to be in Lancaster, PA, opening in the middle of September. Hooray.

Added later: The painting won an honorable mention!

Sailboat, take 3

This is quite a bit bigger than my other two sailboats and it's on illustration board. I found some nautical charts on the internet and painted a couple, one old-looking and one as I remember paper charts from my sailing days. After I glued down a large chunk of chart in the bottom right, I painted the background, leaving the cabin of the boat white. The boat and the compass were drawn first with sepia conté pencil then with a brown magic marker to make them darker. I added paint to the crayon on the hull and for the reflections. Then I cut and tore more of the charts and glued them in places where I thought they'd work in the painting. I'm not sure I'm finished but now I'm going to live with it for a while and see what it (and you) tell me to do.

Sailboat, take 2

I think this is much closer to the image I was thinking of yesterday when I started painting this sailboat in these colors. This time I painted in the background (the diagonals, mostly) then I used a sepia conté pencil for the drawing. I did do the drawing lightly in pencil before I started to I'd know where to leave that white splotch. I think I should crop it higher so the mast doesn't go off the top.

Sailboat in Sepia

I woke up this morning with something like this image in my head. The tough part was finding an appropriate image in all my photos and then doing the drawing. Boats are HARD. This is painted with gold and purple pigments only, mixed in various proportions. I tried to combine looseness and a more precise way of painting.

Anyone Home?

The dogs and I pass this hollow-ing tree on one of our walks.

Daylilies

Someone posted this photograph on Watercolor Workshop, an online watercolor group. Today I had fun painting it. I love the distance created by the photographer and the difference between the precise daylilies and the looser background.

Sheep in the Meadow

There were sheep everywhere in Scotland and this is the first time I've tried painting them (or painting white blobs that are supposed to look like sheep). I was attracted to this particular photo because of the dramatic shadow across the front and the spacious feeling of being on top of a hill. This farm overlooks Loch Tay.

Peony

This sort of thing has NOT been my style, probably because I didn't think I could draw something this complicated, thought I'd get lost in the drawing (it's easy!) and didn't think I had the patience. Well, I tried it and I like the results. And now I know a LOT more about peonies and how they're put together. I painted each section separately and waited until all was dry around a section before I painted it. With so many little pieces in a peony, there are always dry areas in which to paint. I used a much smaller brush than I normally do. During the course of the painting, I figured out to make a beautiful red glow and that's worth the whole project! I'm certainly not going to do this sort of thing all the time, but it's fun to add another tool/technique to my stash.

Now I'm trying to decide whether to put in a background. It would just be faint, maybe just at the bottom. Maybe none at all . . .

Tuscan Fantasy

I decided to do a landscape today in the same manner as I did the rose a couple of days ago: painting each section individually, using a lot of different colors to achieve my intended color. When I experiment with a technique, I sometimes paint pears; this time I painted a "generic" Tuscan landscape which lives in my head. I even did a color sketch before I began. Unfortunately, I didn't follow my sketch closely enough and I ended up with hills in the final painting that are much too round and steep, partly because the proportions of my sketch don't match the size of a quarter-sheet of paper. Oh well, it was all a fantasy anyway and I'm pleased with the colors and the paint application even though the drawing leaves something to be desired.

Rose

I took a photo of this rose recently; I think it's one of those more wild roses rather than a hybrid. I wanted to play around with painting one petal/area at a time and not painting an adjoining area until the first is dry. I used lots of different reds, from an orange-y one to a deep magenta, along with cobalt blue and some gold. The background is the same colors but with darker, ultramarine blue, added.

Rocky Run creek

I just don't seem to be able to stay out of the woods these days. On bright sunny days I take the dogs and my camera and we have a great time, me meandering along the trail taking photos of scenes with bright sun and dark shadows, and the dogs racing all over, sniffing, splashing in the creek, digging. This painting is in watercolor. I was taken by the reflections in the water, especially the bright, lime greens.

Gerbera Daisies

More pastel, with a watercolor underpainting. A friend gave them to us a couple of days ago. She was in Trader Joe's fairly early in the morning when a man working there handed them to her. What a treat!I managed to tip dust down the painting so I ended up with a dirty background. Oh well. These are such bright-colored flowers that I just had to paint them.