Award-Winning Hill Country Artist
Well I’m sitting here waiting for the paint to dry on a commission I’m doing for a dear friend of the family so I thought I’d take a moment and update my blog.
This has been a busy week for us. On Monday Ilene worked at the local Food Pantry while I worked on preliminary sketches and colors for Barbara’s painting. That’s after we dropped Bella off at the kennel and picked up a rental car. Continue reading “Waiting for the Paint to Dry”
In the course of improving my drawing skills and learning watercolor I ran across the group: Urban Sketchers a global community of “urban sketchers” started by Gabriel Campanario, a journalist and illustrator in the Seattle area.
I think it was Teoh Yi Chie at ParkaBlogs.com that introduced me to the urban sketcher concept. Continue reading “Urban Sketching”
Happy Flag Day!
One of the reasons I decided to get serious about painting and drawing was I saw it as a way to keep track of our journey as retirees. I’m not really sure where I got the idea of drawing/painting as we traveled but it’s certainly turned into quite a habit.
What I do know is on January 5th of 2018 I started my first sketch book and in December of the same year I drew my last sketch in that book. I know that in the beginning I used pencil but by the end I was mostly doing pen and ink. In fact, if you look closely at the picture above you can see the sketch on the other side of the page showing through…the sketchbook was designed for pencil, not pen and ink…oh well. Continue reading “Artists Journal”
The first art “lesson” I purchased was through The Great Courses program. Taught by Kateri Ewing, her course gave me a good foundation on color, value, and techniques for learning to paint with what many believe to be one of the toughest art mediums—watercolor.
A fun thing she does in the class is show several ways to add “texture” to watercolor paintings. In this case she had us swab several colors on paper then sprinkle table salt and water on the collective colors. Continue reading “Painting with Kateri”
Our visit to Bryce Arboretum last month included some stunning landscapes.
I decided to experiment a bit and went larger than I usually paint; this time 8×10 rather than 5×7. The combination of mountains in the background, trees and bushes in the mid-ground and yucca trees/plants in the foreground gave me a chance apply wash first rather than adding wash after the pen & ink. Continue reading “Arizona Landscapes”