30x30 efforts

I don't know why taking away my pen, or even my pencil, causes me to have such anxiety and also seems to make me lose all my hard-won skills, but it does! Maybe this is just a mental belief and not a physical fact, but when I have pen lines down on the page before I watercolor, I almost feel like they provide a barrier so that messy things like bleeding don't happen inadvertently, but only when I want them to. Doing just these few entries into the 30x30 makes me realize how unsure I am of myself without my own self-imposed guidelines to follow, even if they are pencil.

Here is day #3, an orchid given me as a goodbye gift when I retired last October, which recently bloomed out and provided me with inspiration. I tried doing some of it wet-in-wet, but given that the pattern on the petals is so specific, that kind of backfired as things blurred together.

For the next day's work, I decided to try to capture some humans interacting, from a reference photo I found online. I like the color and energy, and saw this as something of a negative painting, given that they emerge from that bright background; but I painted them fairly small, in my 8x8-inch sketchbook, and their features became a bit blobby. I was happy with the hands on the guy in green, and that was about it!

Today, I decided to go back to basics: I plucked a couple of lemons off my backyard tree, plunked them down on the table, and vowed to do them as simply and organically as I could. Alas, my finicky nature made me go in a few too many times while things were't dry enough to do so, with the result that certain areas are less than pleasing. I'm afraid that if I'm going to do this sort of painting, I'm going to need to give up the multimedia sketchbook and go for real watercolor paper, which can much more easily take the abuse of multiple layers.

More tomorrow, or maybe later today if I get impatient. I do like having the time to paint daily!

DAYS 3-5: LEMONS, OLVERA STREET, ORCHID

#30x30DirectWatercolor2019