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