A Young Hare – Daily Painting
Young Hare – 4″ x 4″ watercolor on Arches paper
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I had a lot of fun with this one – painting layer upon layer of very transparent glazes to build up the suggestion of fur.
Many years ago, my husband and I read Watership Down at the same time, passing the book back and forth as we’d read chapters in our spare time. I can imagine that this might be Fiver or one of the other watchful young rabbits.
Here’s a closeup of the head:
Coat of Many Colors – Daily Painting
“Coat of Many Colors” – 7.5″ x 11″ watercolor on paper – Available
Out in the meadow that borders the northern part of the arroyo, there stood a willowy creature, pondering what she would wear. Shall it be the gold today? The yellow? The pale chartreuse? I’m done with the dark green … it’s SO last week. Perhaps the rust?
As storm winds rose, her garment slowly came undone, and I knew before long all her glory would lay at her feet.
Citrus Valley – Daily Painting
“Citrus Valley” – 9 x 12 sketchbook study
Between holidays and business, this week’s paintings may consist of quickie sketches in my sketchbooks. This study, painted in my Raffine book, represents a part of the landscape we visited last Sunday during some high windstorms. The area is near Ojai – inland from Ventura and west of the Interstate 5. Most of the area is agricultural with rolling hills covered with avocado and citrus groves, and many eucalptus windbreaks.
Small watercolor sketches like these (9 x 12) give me some ideas of what I might want to do (or not do) when I translate it into an oil painting.
Shell game – Daily Painting
“Shell Game” – Approx 8.5 in. x 6 in. – Watercolor on 140 lb. paper
OK, I lied. I said yesterday that I was mainly working on loosening up with a big brush and soft flowing edges. So what’s the next thing I paint? This.
Actually this is a community project for those of us who are daily painters, suggested by the very talented Laura Wambsgans. I’d love to try one in oils but I stayed in my comfort zone, watercolor. I was planning to break an egg and paint the contents of the shell in a small pyrex cup, but I had no sooner cracked it and set the shell halves down on our quarter-sawn oak dining room table in a shaft of afternoon sunlight that I saw what I wanted to work with.
I found this setup very challenging, but very instructive as well. The dark background is composed of at least a dozen layers of glazes, but no black. I wanted to keep the edges of the shell crisp but I didn’t trust masking so all of those areas were painted around with a very small brush tip. After all the layers were finished I went in with a fine pointed brush to add the “tiger” stripes in the wood which is so characteristic of golden oak. This is one that I wish I had been scanning in stages, but I was trying to push to get it done on time!
Update on a daily painting – asheville
I took this painting to our local art association group last night and entered it in the Artist of the Month competition and was happy to find out that it won first prize!
That was just the bit of encouragement I needed to keep working.
To answer the question Frank B asked earlier about what I’m discovering with this new direction …
I’m finding that for some watercolor subjects, specifically landscapes, I find that the faster I work the better the results are. When I fiddle around and keep working with something trying to ‘force’ a mood or effect, it really falls flat. But when I just let the water do what it’s going to do and keep things more impressionistic, I like the outcome. Using a bigger brush helps, too because it doesn’t allow me to get fussy. Now, clearly this wouldn’t work if I was trying to do something with sharp focus realism. I’m going to have to try the loose approach with other subject matter, too, and discover what happens.
Fire in Ojai – Daily Painting
“Fire in Ojai” – 11 in. x 7 in. Watercolor on 140# paper
Yes, there is a theme this week in my painting – clouds and skies. This one came about for a few different reasons.
1) I was looking for a different kind of cloud to paint
2) I wanted some practice doing eucalyptus trees
3) My talented art friend Ron Guthrie posted a wonderful painting on Wet Canvas today based on a photo of the San Gabriels he took from the freeway – and that reminded me of a freeway shot I’d taken earlier this year that might be good for cloud/smoke practice.
The backstory: My husband and I were driving up to Santa Barbara for a meeting and I saw a plume of smoke rising in the distance. Because I have my camera in my lap whenever we drive anywhere I got a few shots of the Ojai fire which had just started that morning.
As you can tell, I made quite a few changes, just using the photo as a starting point to remind me of the shape of the plume and the geometry of the mountains and agricultural fields. I borrowed the euc from another one of my photos.
I’ve been studying the California regional painters this year, and I’ve noticed that not all of the scenes they painted are pretty landscapes. Often they represent an incident – a moment in time. So this is a tip of the hat to the spirit of those painters and their storytelling power.
Daily Painting – Asheville River
French Broad River – 14.1 inches by 9.5 inches
This painting represents a bit of a turning point for me, and one that I hope takes me into new and interesting directions. The painting is of the French Broad River above Asheville, North Carolina, from a monochrome picture more than 100 years old which I found in a vintage book which belonged to my father in law. In the picture, there were no clouds and it was printed in drab sepia. I’m assuming that the picture may have been mid or late summer fom the amount of foliage on the trees, but that’s only a guess. It could have been mid-fall also. But for the purposes of this painting, it really doesn’t matter because I decided to invent a sky and a color palette that pleased me, regardless of what reality presented the day the picture was taken. I used mostly earth tones – raw sienna, a drab red, burnt sienna, prussian blue
In the coming year, I’m finally going to start working larger and with more expressive and inventive color, rather than just trying to render what I see in front of me. I feel like I’m already heading that way but I need to push it further, step by step and to continue loosening up. This painting, for example, was painted with only two brushes, a one inch flat Japanese brush and a No. 2 rigger – so named because it was good for painting the rigging of ships.
By the way, perhaps someone from around Asheville can tell me where this picture was taken and what it looks like today. I would imagine that there would be more bridges crossing it, and maybe it is developed with housing or businesses.
Edited to add: Thanks to Nancy at Wet Canvas for adding details about the location of this and the reassurance that it probably still looks pristene today.
I’m adding the reference photo for those who may be interested to see what I started with and where I ended up. Keep in mind that my objective was to compress the landscape down into the lower 1/3 or so of the page so as to exaggerate the sky, which means taking some liberties with geographical features.
Chicken – Daily Painting
Study of a chicken … 5″ x 6″ – gouache on recycled paper
I thought the recycled paper worked well for this. In fact, the little bits of fiber in the paper reminded me of the sort of straw and dust found in barnyard environments and gave me a nice midtone to work against.
Pepper Trees – Daily Painting
“Pepper Trees near Lake Piru” 7.5″ x 11″ Watercolor on 140# paper
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Almost as common as eucalyptus are California’s pepper trees, which, in the summer, are heavily laden with pink peppercorns. These tall fluffy trees are especially common along highways, and scent the air with a spicy fragrance when the fallen peppers are crushed.
After I painted this I thought it almost verged on the abstract with large bands of color, shape and texture but no real center of interest.
Crest Pines
“Crest Pines” 15″ x 11″ watercolor on paper
Pines and summer wildflowers on the Angeles Crest – the newest in my trails of the San Gabriel series.
This weekend, at two different watercolor demos held at Watercolor West and the National Watercolor Society, both demonstrating artists mentioned how they like to work in themes and series. I hadn’t been consciously thinking that way, but I now realize that I keep doing similar paintings of trails or byways and our local mountains. So I guess you could call that a series. Although I don’t know that I’ll make every upcoming painting a part of that, I’m sure that tomorrow’s plein air is likely to be a continuation, and I’ll be doing more in the future. I do find that by working consistently on similar subject matter that it reinforces what I’m learning and experimenting with.
As with others in this series, the only pencil drawing was about a half a dozen lines to indicate horizon, mountain range, the shapes of the two prominent pines and the shape of the trail. Everything else was ‘drawn’ with the brush as I painted.
I used about four brushes for this: a one inch flat, a 12 round, a 4 round and a #6 liner. The colors were primarily chrome yellow, thalo blue, payne’s gray and a bit of leftover burnt sienna from yesterday’s painting
