On Site Painting

Painting on site without any pencil drawing produces the most spontaneous paintings. Here's a painting from last week.

After letting a painting rest for a while (sometimes weeks), I return to it in the studio and refine it. Sometimes it takes just a little touch up, sometimes a lot. I often take a photo of it and bring it into photoshop and paint in layers on top to plan the next steps. I'll have a photo I took of the subject matter on one screen, and the photoshop version of the painting on another.

But it's hard to match the loose attitude that one had when it was originally created. I'll often wait until I have several paintings sitting around and touch them all up at the same time, once I've reentered the loose painting attitude that I was in while painting on site.

Hanging basket

Here's a sketch from the moleskine.

Rachel

This was done at a Friday night session at the Literary Cafe. I had to use a little opaque gouache to touch it up. I have a tube of Permanent White, a tube of Naples Yellow and a tube of Brilliant Yellow (all Winsor Newton brand) so I can make some bright very light corrections if need be. I'm not a purist when it comes to these things. I prefer to get it right without opaques, but if need be I'll use em.

Brilliant White is the most opaque of the whites, and Naples Yellow helps get those creamy opaque skin tones. If I need to opaque any other color, I just mix the white with the brightest version of the watercolor color that I'm interested in and I can usually get a good match.

You'll notice I let the underlying pencil be. The search is the most interesting thing! If there's an inaccurate pencil line, that's what gives it energy.

Gardenview Sketch

This was a loose sketch done at Gardenview. It's always a battle between how loose to make a sketch or painting or how tight. I prefer loose. I think this is just about right. It didn't take all that long, (about a half hour I think) and it has a satisfactory light and dark pattern. While the Moleskine sketchbook isn't the most forgiving paper to work on, if you start wet on wet, letting the colors bleed together, you can start establishing hard edges once it starts to dry. This leaves some of the fused wet in wet colors alone so that there is a bit of "mystery" to it all.