Cottages Along the Lane

A Cluster of Cottage Rooftops

This is a small demo from a recent class; another demonstration promoting simplicity.  Everyone always teases me about the "technical terms" I use.  In this lesson I was stressing "swooping"  -  as in " just swoop through with a medium blue for the sky, trees, and shadows, and then go back and green things up and get in a little detail.  Done."

I have a few things I'm working on as I  gear up for summer.  I have some deadlines, promotion for summer classes, house projects  .  .  .   I like to think of it as gearing up  -  not panicking.  Why does it all feel so immediate?  If it's on the calendar, it has a place in time, so what's the big deal?

The sun is shining today, and it is up to 50 degrees.  Maybe I'll just shuffle some stuff around on my calendar and do some outdoor work.  Nothing is written in stone.  That's the problem  -  too much shuffling.

Hope you're all having a good weekend!  Whatever you are doing, do you have your sketchbook with you?

Buttons

Buttons and Clouds

This week in my classes our "warm-up" was painting a few small white buttons.  I can't take credit for an original idea here.  I saw buttons done in watercolor posted on Pinterest and followed  it back to the blog of Jane Minter. 

In yesterday's class, we each took a few buttons, sketched them, and started adding shadows and detail and background.  That's the one on the top right.  Today's class did the little paintings by painting a very wet wash without mixing the colors up too much, and leaving some white of the paper in a few spots.  We lifted some color here and there to leave some lighter spots for more buttons.  This is the one on the bottom right.  When the wash was dry we lightly drew some buttons, and then added a little detail and some darker shadows around the buttons.

The buttons at the top left were done in prismacolor pencils on Mi Teints paper in my sketchbook.
Bottom left -  everyone in the class is working on a different theme, and this was a little demonstration for one of the students doing clouds.

The buttons have me thinking that it might be fun to do a series of very small things grouped together  -  thumb tacks, sticks of pastels, pen nibs, corks, combs and barrettes, pretty stones .  .  .  what else?

I hope this will inspire you a bit.  I think we all need a little help this time of year to keep our creativity going and our brushes moving.

Planning a Painting

Value Studies and Composition

In my classes this week we talked a lot about composition and values (lights and darks).  I'm trying to get across the idea of starting out with very simple shapes in the planning process.  If we get all invested in the drawing at that stage, we are not going to have the time or the inclination to start over if that's not the one that works.  And often, the first one is NOT the one that works.  There are so many possibilities to try, and it takes a lot less time to do sketches that don't work than paintings that don't work.

I find the planning part of the process a lot of fun.  I like getting all comfy with a cup of tea, a glass of wine, or a bag of potato chips and just playing around with those shapes and values.

The cherry tomatoes were in our CSA share this week.   I drew them with a Pentel Sign Pen that my friend Cathy gave me.  It is a felt tip pen with water soluble ink.  I'm going to have to look around and see where to buy these, because I think I'm going to use it up real fast. The ink seems to move a little better than a Flair.

I am so easily influenced  -  I saw a sketch someone had done with a bamboo pen, so I ordered one of those.  I'm hoping I can use it with watercolor, but I don't have a clue.  Does anyone know anything about bamboo pens?

Small Painting - Keeping it Simple

Small Watercolor Demo

Somewhere along the line, I have painted from this value sketch and posted it, but I can't find it to link to it, to compare the two. 

In Wednesday's class we were talking about why we are attracted to a subject, keeping that in mind, and showing that as simply as possible.  In this case I had taken the photograph (years ago) because of the shadows and the simple shapes of the porch and its roof lines. This was a section of a much larger house, but for the sake of simplicity I had chosen to paint this section as a small house.  I didn't feel I needed the rest of the structure to support the simple shapes and shadows.

I "swooped" through with a mixture of manganese blue and a touch of cobalt violet, painting everything that would not be left white, or that I wanted to keep very bright.  As I started putting in the dark green foliage, the fence just kind of painted itself, so I went with it.  I put in the dark shadows along the roof lines and in the porch with manganese blue and cobalt violet again, with some indigo added to get as dark as it needed to be.  I had left the areas on each side of the steps white so I would be able to get in some bright flowers.  I added a washed out warm color for the roof, some neutrals smushed around in the foreground, and that was it.

It moved along from start to finish pretty quickly, and I feel I captured what attracted me in the first place.

If you have some photographs around that you have taken with the thought of someday doing a painting of them, this is a good time of year to get them out and play around with them  -  while we are waiting to get outside and paint.  Take a good look at them, decide what it was you liked about the subject, and paint THAT, and only that.

It was 11 degrees here this morning!!!!

Composition

What Goes Where

I was playing around a little bit with composition.  I just grabbed a photograph out of my photo reference  (reference photo?) box and simplified and rearranged some of the objects.  We need to remember that photos are only a starting point and no more.  If I'm working from a photo I usually work out the composition and a value sketch, and don't look at the photo for reference as I paint.

The pencil sketches are some things we were working on in class.  I was trying to stress the fact that objects take up space, and the placement they are given on the page, or painting surface, has to reflect the volume of the object.  Drawing objects as transparent helps us to see how much space they really need.

There is no serious painting going on here. As I mentioned in a previous post, I'm just kind of puttering around, reading some art books, going over old lesson plans, and Friday I did make a text block for my next journal.

Now it is time to get serious with spring and summer class promotion.  We have had some sunshine here now and then.  That helps.  The Bay is frozen solid.  That doesn't help.

More Minis

One and a Half by Two and a Half Inch Paintings
in Five by Seven Mats

After doing these I kind of have the urge to do a very large canvas.

I'm sitting here staring at the monitor with a million things racing through my brain, non of which you would care a thing about hearing.

Classes were such fun this week!  Everyone was really in a painting mood.  They asked great questions, did great work  .  .  . fun.

Now I am off to finish up the laundry, pack a grandkid's lunch, and sketch up a composition for a large canvas.  Just kidding about the canvas thing  -  after the laundry and the lunch, I'm going to bed.

Very Small Birch Trees

Very Small Watercolors

These are 5 X 7 mats with 1.5 X 2.5 images.

I thought it might be fun to paint some little flower images for these, but we have a little bit of snow in the air today, and flowers just didn't work for me.  Snow doesn't work for me either.

I'm working on getting a few small things ready for the arts center Christmas show.  Deadlines are good. Deadlines and motivation are synonymous.

This is one of my "blogging for quantity not quality" posts.  Day five of blogging every day for the month of November.

Horton Bay Road

Value Sketch and Finished Painting

Watercolor 5 X 8

This is what my classes are working on this week  -  simple value sketches that are our guide to simple paintings. We are going to be talking about composition for the next few weeks.  Of course, we are talking about composition all the time, but for awhile we are going to be taking it apart and paying attention to all the parts.

I love painting small paintings with a fairly large brush  -  it keeps things simple and moves right along.  If I dilly dally, I start to get detailed.  I don't like detail  -  I don't like doing it, and I don't like looking at it.  Just sayin'.

clouds/group pic

Cloud Series

Okay - here is a group pic of the September cloud series.  I know, it is not September anymore.  It's not even October anymore, but  .  .  .


I have signed up, once again, for the National Blog Posting Month (NaBloPoMo).  For those of you who have followed me on this in previous years, you know you are in for a month of quantity, not quality.  


I seem to be having a spell of artist block lately -  hoping this blogging thing will help. I have my  beautiful porcelain palette right here by my side!  What more could I want?! One more palette in my life was supposed to do the trick, wasn't it? 

Clouds

 

Getting Easier

I may be way behind schedule on my self-imposed cloud challenge, but I'm gonna keep on keepin' on. I must say it is getting easier.  Of course it is!   Practice. Practice. Practice.

I had intended to do fall vegetables during the month of October.  I guess it wouldn't kill me to do both vegetables and clouds.  I love cut squash  -  those seeds with the negative spaces!  I'm a sucker for all those colors and textures once I get to the farm market. All those warm colors with cool shadows.  And those big blue/gray/green things (Hubbard?)  -  fun to mix!

Okay  -  who wants to do fall vegetables with me? Small studies. Practice. Practice. Practice.

Clouds 4

View From the Back Yard

This is a cartoon-like painting with ink on Strathmore 400 drawing paper. It started out as a contour drawing.

After a great weekend of spending one day doing nothing, one day doing chores, and one day with family,  I guess it is back to real life for a few days  -  until the next weekend.  Which is real life  -  the weekends or the weekdays?  Of course it is the combination and the balance of the two, but balance is sometimes just beyond me.

There are some beautiful clouds again today, and strong winds are predicted for this afternoon, so the clouds could be moving faster than I can paint. As I'm typing this, the sky is getting darker and the wind is picking up.  While the sun is still in the east and the dark clouds are moving in from the west, we can get some pretty dramatic skys, but I could do without the drama of the winds of a couple of days ago.  The city hasn't cleaned up the damage from that yet, so I am looking forward to that distraction some time today.  I'm serious  -  I love distractions.

Clouds 3

Cloud Watching this Morning

The clouds are moving very quickly across the sky this morning.  I did take some pictures, but it just isn't the same as doing the real thing.  Do you want flat and still, or dimensional and moving too fast to capture?

It is cool and very windy here this weekend.  I told my husband it feels like a cold weekend up north.  He said "It IS a cold weekend up north."  I meant it felt and smelled like when I was a kid at the cottage on a cold weekend.

So after we spent the morning yesterday chopping up and clearing out the tree limbs (from our tree) that came down in our neighbor's driveway, denting her car here and there and just missing her kitchen window, we spent the day doing vacation-like things  -  reading, eating, playing dominoes, going downtown, checking out the storm damage (we didn't have to go far for that), wrapping up the day with a movie  .  .  .

Today it is back to some outdoor chores and maybe some more cloud watching and painting.  Hope you're all having a nice, relaxing long weekend, and maybe spending a little time with your sketchbooks.

Clouds 2

Murky Colored Clouds

Yeah, I know, pretty boring.  But I'm sticking with this cloud thing until I get it right. This paper is Arches Cover, cream.

There was a spindly, lacy-leaved (leafed?) tree sticking up into this sky, but I was losing the light and thought I might go back today and paint the tree.  Today was very windy and rainy, so it didn't happen.

Maybe I don't even like doing clouds.

Happy Birthday to my Blog

Clouds #1

Today is the 5th birthday of this blog!

Here we go with my September series of cloud paintings, drawings, whatever.  I know this is a very unoriginal, uninteresting, etc., cloud painting, but, hey, I did it.  I'm going to have to study up on what's what with clouds.  I don't know one kind from another, and that might be nice to know.  The clouds on any given day aren't necessarily the clouds you want in the painting of the day.

We are being over-run here by wildlife.  Last night after dark, while I was sitting on the porch reading, a skunk walked up to the door, sniffed at it, pawed at it, peered in at me, and then slowly turned around and walked away.  The nerve!  My husband says, "You're sure it wasn't a cat?"  Yes!!! I'm sure!  He was three feet from me  -  I got a good look.

Mid-values

A simple value sketch and half finished painting.

We worked with shadows again today in my class. First we did simple sketches and blocked in all the middle values. We transferred the drawing to watercolor paper and swooped through all the areas that wouldn't be left white with a wash of manganese blue. In some areas successive colors were dropped into the wet blue paint, and in some areas they were glazed over the dry blue pigment. There is still some more to be added to the painting above.

Next week the class would like to do some paintings of snow. Perfect. I had started to work on some myself, and snow is all about shadows.

Just went to see It's Complicated. Cute. Now I have to go look up the sound track.

Is everyone painting? Wasn't that on your new year's list of goals - to paint more? It was on mine, and I must admit I haven't done too well. I have to think about it. Have to build up to it. It'll be fine.

Sky and Turkey

As I was going through old lessons and demos getting ready for this week's classes, I came across these cloud demos I had done for a Water and Sky workshop. Well, we won't be doing water and sky - unless we want to do snow.

The weather has put me in the mood for Thanksgiving. Or maybe it was all the things on sale at the grocery store that did it.

I bought the turkey. I don't have a place to put it. Right now it is on the back porch. It is only 26 degrees out there, so it'll be okay until I make a spot for it in the freezer. Will it be okay out there for a week!? Probably not a good idea. What was I thinking.

More Pears

This is a very small painting of pears (I hope you already knew that - the "pears" part) done from the pencil sketch in the previous post.

I like the pencil sketch much better than the painting.

I have signed up again this year for the NaBloPoMo challenge, which translates somehow to "blog everyday for a month." Don't asked me why I do this, but if you go back to my posts of November, 2007, you'll see I actually did it - and it was fun! So here I go again.

We have sunshine! So I think while I have a grandson here to help, we will go out and pull out all the old dead stuff from my cutting garden and get it ready for winter. We are also putting up storm windows. A friend from Louisiana asked, "What are storm windows?" Ahhh, to live in a climate that is ignorant of such things! Of course they do have more than their share of STORMS, but I guess extra windows wouldn't help!

Christmas Cactus Study

This is a small watercolor study of the Christmas Cactus in yesterday's post. I did I light sketch of the shapes and then painted the leaves with clear water. Starting with quinacridone gold I dropped some pigment on the leaf sections, followed by a little Prussian Blue and a small amount of quiacridone red. I let the colors float around a bit and then helped it mix a little here and there. The petal color was done with a mix of quinacridone red and lemon yellow. Everyone in class did a beautiful job of letting it mix on the paper and keeping it simple.

I finished a little more Christmas shopping today. I have come to the conclussion that Christmas is so stressful because it is all about loose ends! One loose end after another - who's picking up what gift, who's coming to dinner, WHERE is dinner, who's gonna fix that thump-thump noise in the car so I can finish my shopping . . .

It'll be fine. It's all coming together.

Geraniums, Rubber Bumpers, and Parking Tickets

Lots of little geraniums.
These are fun and relaxing to do - and they sell!
I'm getting a few little things ready for a Holiday Market at our local arts center.

Today was the last day of this session of my Wednesday morning watercolor class . Tomorrow is the last of the Thursday afternoon class. We'll start a new session soon, and fortunately I always have a lot of repeat students.

Went to lunch after class with a friend and had some fantastic Tomato Gorgonzola soup. As we sat there eating this fantastic soup and fabulous sandwiches, my friend K. watched as a car backed into her car out in front of the restaurant. She ran out there and the very elderly driver said, "Yeah, I know. See, it's okay" as he looked at HIS car, not hers. Well, he did have a car with big rubber bumpers - there was obviously a reason for that. A few minutes later the meter guy came along and put a ticket on her car! The morel of this story is, if you want to have a nice relaxing lunch, eating tasty food in a cozy neighborhood eatery, don't sit near the window. It's better to enjoy your lunch and be surprised later.
Okay - so she didn't have a dent in her car (thanks to the big rubber bumpers) and the meter guy was actually giving her a WARNING, but we didn't know that at the time. AND it wouldn't have made a very good story. It wouldn't have really made a story at all, and what fun would that be.