Pennsylvania Watercolor Society

This painting was accepted into the Pennsylvania Watercolor Society's annual juried exhibition which this year will be in Reading, PA. This is my second acceptance which means I'll be a signature member of PWS and can append those initials when I sign a painting. It's painted with watercolor on illustration board coated with gesso and it's of Amari, our female dog. I call it "Rub My Tummy."

Vera's Barns

I used to live close to this particular landscape. This is a painting that just sort of "fell" off my hands (pastels?) and was finished in a short time. Those are often ones that endure in my favorites category. It's a painting from one of the thousands of slides I've scanned . . . more to come. As usual, clicking on the picture here will give you a larger one more true to the original color.

Peonies

What's working in this painting? Is it finished? If it's not finished, why not?

Still working in pastel

I keep being drawn to working in pastel. It's such fun! The flowers may not be done because my painting and critique group thought I should have more defined stems. I'm still thinking on that. Thoughts?

I once lived with the view that's the landscape. I've been scanning old slides and found the reference photo there. It's 14" x 20" and I started with an underpainting of orange under the lower part and light blue under the sky. I deliberately painted it with saturated colors, my favorites, and if you click on the photo here to see the larger view you'll see how saturated the colors really are. I thought it would take a long time to paint, but it went very quickly. Critiques, please!

Anticipating Adulthood

I made some revisions on this today and I think I'm done now. One of my painting friends suggested the title.

Splash!

Here's that same cute, blond son again, a bit older here. Pastel again. Am I finished? If not, what's to be done?

What's In Here?

Inspired by a photo I took of my youngest son in 1973. It's pastel and I don't know whether it's finished . . . critiques invited. As usual, the colors are brighter if you click on the one here to see the larger version.

Spring Fields

A pastel from a slide taken somewhere in England in 1984. If this was the US, these fields would probably be growing houses now, 25 years later. I got to use some of the pastels I'd ordered which came today. New colors and new pastels are so exciting! This painting is 14" x 20" or thereabout.

Azaleas

. . . or are they rhododendrons? I took the photo inspiration for this pastel at a Philadelphia-area arboretum a couple of years ago at a paint-out. It's pastel. Complicated and large (14" x 20") and less than half way through I wondered if I was crazy even to try it. I don't know how to do a very specific drawing on sanded, pastel paper, so I kept getting lost in all the petals. I invite critiques. As usual, you can see a larger, more vibrant version by clicking on the one here.

Philadelphia Water Color Society Members' Exhibition

Each of the last few years PWCS has had a members' show in addition to the large, prestigious, hard-to-get-into Anniversary Exhibition. The members' show is juried from the painting itself rather than from slides (or digital starting this year) so only those close enough to the venue are able to enter. Nevertheless, this year the members' show had almost 120 entries of which only slightly more than half could fit in the gallery where it's being shown. AND I GOT IN. As always with PWCS, the show is "works on paper" which includes all watermedia, collage (with some restrictions) and pastel. I entered this collage, made of paper I made myself from shredded paper waiting to be recycled. When I first did the collage, I used string, which you see here, but later I made more paper and rolled it to be the "string" because one of the collage restrictions is that all elements must be of paper. The collage itself is 22" x 30"; a full sheet of watercolor paper. Now, if only I could get into the Anniversary Exhibition! It's coming up this summer.

Daffodils . . . again

As I painted the pastel version, I wanted to do the blossoms large, so this is on a half sheet, rather than the quarter sheet sizes of the other versions. I painted the background blue with watercolors, then did the flowers over the blue, so maybe this is technically a mixed media painting. I think the center of the bottom trumpet needs to be a bit darker. This is the last pastel for a while because I started a watercolor today.

Spring

After those snowy paintings, I decided it was time for spring to arrive, so I dug out a photo of daffodils for inspiration. The daffodils in my garden are not quite blooming. I did it first in watercolor and then pastel. making no attempt to make the drawings identical to each other or the photo. As I worked on the watercolor version, I kept thinking of an AAMilne poem from When We Were Very Young entitled Daffydowndilly. So you don't have to look it up, here it is:
She wore her yellow sun-bonnet,
She wore her greenest gown;
She turned to the south wind
And curtsied up and down.
She turned to the sunlight
And shook her yellow head,
And whispered to her neighbor:
"Winter is dead."
As always, I invite critiques . . . and you can see better versions by clicking on the small ones here.

Front Gate

Or "Winter Series No. 2." Another pastel I did today. I had the same sort of underpainting as the one yesterday. It's fun to see the whole mood and temperature shift as I apply the pastel over the hot oranges and reds. There is a point, however, where the underpainting is distracting and I have to hurry to at least block in the colors I want.

Morning Walk

We have crocuses and early daffodils blooming and I decided to paint winter today. Go figure; usually I want to anticipate a season. I needed to do something entirely different after all my versions of Nonna, so I got out my pastels and printed a photo I'd taken one snowy morning this winter while I was walking the dogs. I love my new iPhone, with its included camera! Before I put on pastels, I did an underpainting on the Wallis, sanded paper with liquid watercolors. I love the way underpaintings sneak a bit of themselves through the pastel and enliven the final painting.