Two More

Recent Demo

Here is yet another painting done for class. It's a result of some photos taken on the day of the Sketch Crawl.

2 demos

Here are two demos from watercolor class. The object was to show the traditional method of painting a wet into wet sky and then adding a blurred treeline behind the houses. After the blurred tree line dried the crisper parts of the trees were added for variety's sake.

Cleveland

There was a sketch crawl downtown today. I got there a little late and didn't see anyone. Here is my effort.

2 More

It was a nice moody and cloudy day yesterday.

Paris

Two More

We've had some fantastic weather this fall. Tomorrow's supposed to be sunny and in the 80's. Today it was in the low 70's but very windy. I tried out the Moleskine for the first one. The second is in the Arches sketchbook. I have a hard time with the Moleskine. The paper just doesn't accept the water like I want it to. I guess I have to adjust my approach when I use it.

Bob the Cyclist

While painting the farm scene in the previous post, Bob stopped by on his bike. He stayed and chatted for a while. He is a lover of life, having cycled from Florida to Michigan while in his 70's. I guess this was a smaller trip for him... Elyria to Valley City. Pretty amazing if you ask me. I told him I was going to paint his picture and gave him my web address. Hopefully he'll see this. Hi Bob!

Sunday Sketches

These were done today while my middle son was golfing. While I was sketching the farm scene, I met Bob the cyclist. More on that on the next post. These were done in a 7" x 9 1/4" Arches cold press wirebound sketchbook.

Paris

I had the good fortune to visit my friend Nicolas in Paris in August. Here are the small (4 x 6 inch) sketches I made while I was there. They're done on small d'Arches blank postcards.

Nicolas is a fellow illustrator, so it was easy to stop and spend an hour or so sketching without irritating him. He provided all of the titles for these as I wasn't sure where we were when they were painted.

Ashtabula

It's the Fourth of July Holiday. Time to head up to the sunny beaches of Ashtabula.

Golf

My middle son Wyatt spends a lot of time on the golf course.

Denison Avenue

This is a good chunk of what Cleveland looks like.

From the Sketchbook

This was during the wintertime with clumps of snow in the parking lots.

Venice Once More

Venice

Here's the finished painting. I tried not to do too much to it, as the goal is not to overwork it. Could it have used more finishing touches? Maybe.

Venice

My friend Larry recently went to Venice and graciously gave me a bunch of photos on a cd. I asked him if he wouldn't mind my painting a watercolor or two from the photos. Here's the photo and different stages of the painting. It's not quite done yet.

You can see that certain things had to be left out. I'm not sure if I left out the right ones, but you can't go and put everything that's in the photo in the painting. It won't be "read" by the viewer's mind as quickly and succinctly as you want it to if you stick every little thing in.

Tropical Boats

Lorain Lighthouse

This was for a Christmas gift. There's some scraping in the rocks on the lower right. If you watch the wash as it's drying, JUST as the glisten goes away and the wash is ALMOST dry, you can go in with the edge of a knife or a razor blade and scrape the pigment away. Some watercolorist excel at this technique. I'm not one of them. If I practiced it more my skill level would increase. The first post of the blog had a brutal scraping attempt in the left branch of the far left tree. It dug into the paper far more than it should have (it was still a little too wet). If you use d'Arches paper (140 lb. weight or more) , it'll be thick enough withstand the knife's injuries.

Presti's

This was an attempt at just painting away with no drawing whatsoever at first. You can see that the man on the right had a false start at the placement of his shoulder and arm. If you get over worrying about things like that, you get a spontaneity that's hard to achieve otherwise. You also get a lot of bad drawing! But when it turns out well, it's that more special.

Sunfish

The Naturalist

These were demos from class. Here's the source material. I pieced the two together in Photoshop.

Medina

A page from the sketchbook. Fred Graff, my high school art teacher lives in Medina. He introduced me to the wonders of the medium 30 years ago. Not that I understood any of it at the time. He would always talk about the wonders of warm and cool colors. I kind of knew what he meant, but not really.

Camp

This was a Christmas present for my brother's in laws who were very nice to us and let us stay in this cabin in southern Ohio a couple times and were very gracious hosts. In most cases you want to change things around before you paint them to make a better composition. In this case I wanted it to be accurate so they could look at the painting and immediately say "that's camp!" instead of "that kind of looks like camp, but different!", so the relative size and position of things were kept the way things actually are, but certain objects were omitted. You can see that behind the central tree I started to indicate a wood pile, but the idea was discarded, thinking it would make the painting too busy. I really like the idea of spontaneously deciding what to include and what to omit while painting. It keeps the mind sharp and alert.

Welcome

Welcome to my feeble attempt at blogging.

The above image was a demonstration painting created at my Monday night watercolor class at the Westlake Rec Center. In the posts to come I will share with you the thought processes and techniques associated with painting watercolors.