The Challenge, Days One and Two

Foolishly or not, I took up the 30x30 direct watercolor challenge, and so far I am two for two. We will see how long it lasts amidst teen summer reading, which starts a week from Monday.

Anarda and I spent two hours yesterday afternoon covering our book covers and folding our signatures to create some sample travel journals for our teen workshop how-to. We need another two hours to do the coptic stitching that puts the book together. Yesterday was a good exercise: It let us know a few things (like we were right to schedule TWO sessions to complete these books) and, because we immediately did everything wrong, we could make notes to tell the kids what not to do! Next week we will practice our coptic stitching to complete our books, and then probably make two more, just to be sure we have it down and also to serve as different examples. I'll post some pictures here when I remember to take some.

Anyway, back to the challenge. Day one, I decided to do a familiar illustration for me—a book cover. But without the ability to draw first, I decided that I couldn't very well do the fiddly little lettering, so I just did the tags and made an illustration out of the front cover. Then I went on the 30x30 Facebook page and saw a couple of people who HAD done fiddly little lettering, so next time I will have to step it up! Here is my direct-to-watercolor (no pre-drawing) painting of Jonathan Stroud's book The Hollow Boy, the third in the delightfully spooky Lockwood & Co. series.

Here is the actual book cover, for comparison:

Today I wondered what to paint. While on Facebook, I saw a post of beautiful photographs taken by a friend who is on the Italian coast right now, one of which was an artistic triple stack of boxes filled with beautiful lemons, at the local farmer's market. I saved the photo, but then decided I didn't have the time, the will, or the patience to paint ALL those lemons, so instead I got out my favorite little cobalt blue bowl, went out to my own lemon tree, and filled the bowl with lemons! (There are decided benefits to living in Southern California.)

This painting took me an hour, while drawing it first might have added 30 minutes to that. But it definitely would have been better if I had had a drawing to go from. I was made so uncomfortable in the way that I had to do this painting: Normally, with a pencil sketch, I would get the shape of the bowl down first, because that is the hardest part—anything that is smooth and regular in shape is much harder to replicate than something with curves and angles that you can exaggerate or leave out without anyone knowing you have done so! But in doing this direct to watercolor, I had to paint the leaves and then the lemons first, because they are in the foreground and are also the lightest colors. That meant I had to look so carefully at the lemons to see how they were cut off by the curve of the bowl; and then once the lemons were in, I had to go put in the curve of the bowl and likewise get that right! It took a couple of reworkings, but it's fairly regular. Not quite as tall as my bowl, and also a bit narrower, but it looks convincingly like a bowl.

I am also used to being able to put in darks using a pen, which I didn't do here, so the color variance isn't as great as something that would have been drawn with a pen first.

Finally, try painting very close to a pale yellow object using cobalt and ultramarine! Any dampness means you have a green color mix. I had to blot off and start over in a few places, some of which are detectable.

Anyway, here is my bowl of lemons. I'm definitely learning from this process; whether I will be making any good art as well remains to be seen!