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Back to Basics

Creating Textures…

It’s time for me to get back to basics. After a month of pumping out paintings for World Watercolor Month I’ve decided what I need to do now is work the basics. What do I mean by basics? I’m glad you asked.

My “style”, if you will, pretty much revolves around pen & ink and watercolor. I’m not an oil painter. I don’t work in pastels or acrylics and my style is based upon a sort of realism that’s, I believe, a bit like illustration. With that in mind, as I look at my recent works I want to delve deeper into my pen & ink work and basic watercolor. Continue reading “Back to Basics”

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World Watercolor Month

World Watercolor Month is in the can! It’s done, finished…over…

Crape Myrtle

As I mentioned back in July in my article Quantity-Quality-Or Both, participating in challenges such as World Watercolor Month gives me an opportunity to produce a number of watercolor sketches—quantity. As I reviewed them this weekend I noticed that, as I thought, some were higher quality than others.

I also noticed that as I got closer to finishing the month, quality seemed to go down…until that LAST painting. My first painting last month for World Watercolor Month was the Crape Myrtle on the left.

Continue reading “World Watercolor Month”

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Sky Studies

One of Two-Wet on Wet vs Wet on Dry

This week I spent some time working on sky studies. Clouds and sunsets, colors and techniques to improve my landscapes.

Prompted by World Watercolor Month for clouds last week, I decided to spend more time getting to know skies a bit more. After all, I’ve spent a lot of time up there and I certainly have seen some beautiful skies.

Two of two Wet-on-Dry

Steve Mitchell, The Mind of Watercolor, had a good tutorial on clouds the other day working in both wet-on-wet and wet-on-dry techniques. As you can see in these to photographs each has its own merits depending upon the affect I’m trying to achieve. Naturally I didn’t want to waste the paint and time so what do we to with two cloud/sky studies? We add a landscape of course!

Continue reading “Sky Studies”

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Time to Get Serious

The union oyster house Boston 11 x 14 cold press watercolors by Matthew Mc

After several weeks of World Watercolor Month #worldwatercolormonth, it’s time to get serious about painting. Now…don’t get me wrong, I’ve been very serious and taken my time and done my best on many of my paintings, but…

When I see a painting like this, The Union Oyster House, by Matthew Mc I realize I still have a long way to go when it comes to composition, value, and color in my work. As I mentioned in my post Quantity-Quality-Or Both, I’ve been pumping out a quantity of art, especially this month, to practice and learn but once this month is over I’ll need to concentrate on quality. Continue reading “Time to Get Serious”

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A Peek Behind the Curtain

First layer…somewhat loose

I thought I’d give everyone a bit of a peek behind the curtain this week when it comes to my paintings and sketches.

On the right is my first layer of a painting I did for #worldwatercolormonth sponsored by www.doodlewash.com, whose daily prompt was “Blossoming”. As this is a “loose” painting, meaning I’m not trying to make it a photo-quality work, I used a large quill brush on 300# cotton paper. The idea is to just get a rough outline of the subject.

Continue reading “A Peek Behind the Curtain”

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Of Pen & Ink

Pink Crape Myrtle

I like to experiment with different techniques of pen & ink. Recently I bought a dip pen with several nibs and went to work on a couple of botanical studies.

On the Pink Crape Myrtle painting to the left I penciled in the overall outline before going to the pen & ink. Usually when I’m using a fountain pen I tend to just draw out the sketch without first penciling in the outlines.  Freely inking the sketch forces me to concentrate more as I draw my subject. Continue reading “Of Pen & Ink”

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Quantity-Quality-Or Both

Photo and work in progress

Is quantity, quality, or is both that are important when it comes to learning to paint with watercolor or sketch with pen & ink?

Learning a craft is much like playing a sport—to get good at it, one must practice, practice, and practice some more. Sports legends like Michael Jordan, Tom Brady, and Tiger Woods spent hours, days, and years practicing their sport to get to the level they have all achieved. Continue reading “Quantity-Quality-Or Both”

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Waiting for the Paint to Dry

Waiting for the Paint to Dry

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”

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Urban Sketching

Carol Hicks Bolton Antiques in FBG

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”

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Artists Journal

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”