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.