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."

Evening Light

I took the photo for this painting last weekend when we were in Maryland. We were sitting on the deck having dinner when I saw this incredible light on the trees.

The Stump

We spent a couple of days this weekend with our friends Cheryl and Paul in their new (second) home on the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay (west of Cecilton, Doris). This is the view from next to their house overlooking the water, which is a lake made by damming the creek with bay dredging goop. Cheryl, Paul and I canoed to the dam and walked from there to the shore of the bay and I made this little sketch. Otherwise, we spent our time visiting and eating. It was beautiful weather and we spent most of our time on their deck.

It's done with brown, ultra-fine Sharpie permanent marker and a wc wash.

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.

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.

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.

Tea for Two

The photo for this painting was taken in Scotland at a general store/tea room/post office in the glen of the River Lyon. We stopped here for something to eat on a Sunday after we'd driven the one-lane road over the mountain from the village where we were staying. I loved the open space on the mountain but it was drizzly and hard to get a photo that encompassed the openness of it.

The drawing for this took me half a morning, what with getting the perspective and all the different elements and shapes. Then so as not to get too lost in the drawing, I painted in the shadows first. I worked for a long time from a copy of the photo that had only 4 values. The color was added over the shadows. It's a good way for me to work, since I sometimes get so caught up in the colors that I lose track of the over all painting.

Flowers and more flowers!

I had a photograph of poppies taken at a friend's house and another friend brought some Japanese iris and peonies for our painting morning today. I first worked in my sketchbook (first picture) with a fine black pen and watercolors then moved to "proper" watercolor paper for the second painting. Now I like the first one better because the poppies in the second look almost like zinnias. In the sketchbook, I drew the poppies with the pen, then just kept adding stuff to make it more interesting. After lunch I did a peony not quite out with some of the irises. None of these was any attempt to paint the arrangement; I used the photo and flowers for reference only.

Another Iris

Our friend Dorothy brought even more irises over on Thursday, our painting day. I took a bunch of pictures of this peach one before she took it home again. This is the result, painted yesterday. It's hard to paint something this abstract. I draw enough outlines to (try to) find my way, then paint the colors and shapes within those outlines while I study my reference very closely. It's easy to get lost! As I paint, it doesn't look like much but a stroke of paint here and there. I have to get back from the painting---way back---to have it look like anything. I usually strive to paint the final color and value on the first stroke, but this time, because of the glow in the flower I painted glazes. That requires the patience to let one layer dry completely before I paint another, not often easy for me.