New portrait, no ink

Sticking to the precepts of #30x30DirectWatercolor2019, here is a new portrait of Squires, but this time with no ink or pencil underdrawing, just straight to paper with paint.

I knew I wanted to paint this just as soon as Melissa posted it to her page. Doesn't she make a gorgeous Melisandre from Game of Thrones? She and her hub dressed up for a viewing party of the finale, and put photos on their Facebook page, and I've been giving one the eye ever since.

I had a few issues: After I had painted them, I realized that one eye was bigger than the other, and also higher, so I lifted a little paint and fiddled with both of them to make them closer to the same size and the same level. I didn't quite pull it off, and in the process made them look a little less like Squires's eyes, but at least they aren't too wonky. Her chin is also a little too big and prominent. And I definitely like doing hair better when I can map it out with ink, this all blended in too much, somehow.

All in all, she is more elegant than this, but otherwise it's pretty close.

DAY 9: MELISANDE

#30x30DirectWatercolor2019

One more, and a shift

I guess I wasn't quite finished with my themes for the week, so today I put the nasturtiums and the lemons together (since their colors go so well), for a third and final still life of "Nasties plus Lemons." This might be a better picture than the other three (the one of lemons alone and the two variations on the nasturtiums from yesterday): What do you think? I like the shadow, and the front lemon, and the nasturtiums are a little better defined. Practice helps!

Then, because I was still in the mood to paint, my after-lunch effort made a shift to capturing a typical vignette from the French countryside: Old wooden window, with lace curtains and shutters, overlooked by a climbing rose. Yes, it's a cliché, and no, I don't care. I had some trouble getting those curtains to look like lace (or like curtains), and the stonework was challenging and not completely satisfactory, but the wooden shutters feel like wood and I like the rose.

Now I can skip painting tomorrow, if I want to, since I'm ahead by one; but I will probably want to paint.

DAYS 7 & 8: NASTY LEMONS, FRENCH WINDOW

#30x30DirectWatercolor2019

Nasturtiums

Day 6 of #30x30DirectWatercolor2019. These came up volunteer in the corner of my herb garden from underneath a mass of mint, somewhere I had never planted nasturtiums. The wind, or a bird, someone transported a seed there, and all the lovely rain we had brought out the "nasties" in their spectacular yellowness.

There are always so many decisions to consider when you make art, most of which are irrevocable in watercolor. Whereas in another medium you could just paint over anything you didn't like and keep going, in watercolor it's a keeper or a do-over, there's little room for compromise.

 For me, with this one, it was the shadows: I looked at the painting without them and thought, "It needs something to anchor it." It wasn't that I didn't like what I had done, in fact quite the contrary: I felt I had captured the segmented delicacy of the leaves and flowers. But it looked like a flower pattern on a white background, not like a plant that was lying on a surface in front of me, so I opted for shadows.

I don't precisely regret them, but I DO wish I had stopped long enough before putting them in to make a scan of the painting without them, just to see the contrast. Also, it was hard to see where to put them and where not to, because some of the foliage and flowers were lying right on the surface, casting solid shadows, while other parts were suspended above, not casting any (or none discernible to me). Anyway, here is the final, for better or worse!

I am enjoying the focus on painting daily. Last year, it was a rushed moment when I got home from work, either on the patio trying to beat the dying of daylight, or in my office, staring at a reference photo on the computer. What luxury to get up from a late breakfast and think, Oh, now I will paint! and then assemble my materials out on my patio, take my time, and appreciate the location, the weather, and whatever object or scene I'm attempting to capture.

My bank balance may no longer be healthy enough to support an impulsive trip to Dick Blick (Art Supplies), but at least I now have the time to USE all those materials!

ADDENDUM to this post: I even have time to take another look and make another painting of the same subject in the same day! After I finished painting this first one, I picked up the spray of slightly wilted flowers and stuck them into my water "jar" (it's one of those collapsible plastic accordion containers), and went into the kitchen to make a late lunch. After eating, I sat and gazed for a while at the nasturtiums, now at a different angle, with a different slant of late afternoon sun, and decided to do a quick and messy second painting. Which, because of the sun's angle, turned into a sort of negative painting, where the shadow fell. I haven't done much negative painting, and wasn't particularly careful about this one, so some of it runs together, but I like how the colors turned out.

Nasturtiums #2, #30x30DirectWatercolor2019.

DAY 6: NASTURTIUMS 1 & 2

#30x30DirectWatercolor2019

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

30x30 Direct commences!

I did the #30x30DirectWatercolor challenge last year and enjoyed it, but I think I will get even more out of it this year, because A. I'm willing to be more experimental, and B. I'm semi-retired (no more full-time job), so I actually have time to consider what I will paint each day, and the leisure to do so, most days. I happened to have a busy day planned for June 1, so I did a quick little still life topic for the first day, but for the rest I hope to intersperse some portrait work and some landscapes, since those are both bigger challenges to me than the kinds of things I painted last year (mostly still life, although I did do a picture of Notre Dame and one of Susan's dog!).

I had pinched the blooming tops off my basil plant in the morning on Friday, so that it would continue to grow bigger instead of going to seed, and stuffed them into this little pink glass mug, and it interested me to try to capture the transparent glass with the basil behind it. It's a little clumsy here and there, but I was happy enough with it.

For Day Two, I attempted a portrait. I've been painting a bunch of those lately (see below), but with an ink drawing to start, followed by detailed watercolor. This time I tried to concentrate only on shapes, and chose to paint Colleen because her coloring and hair are all close to one another in tone (she's a freckly redhead), so I could use just one color of paint, in various shades of rust, in pale and darker tones, and still have it look like her. (I attempted freckles at first, but it was just too much, so I washed out most of them and hoped for the implication to remain.) I want to try more of these, with a looser feel and more spontaneous colors that don't necessarily conform to reality! But this was my experiment, to see if I could capture a reasonable likeness without my ink pen.

If you are interested to see what others are doing, you can go to the Facebook page where the participants are posting their art. 

DAYS 1 & 2: COLLEEN, BASIL

#30x30DirectWatercolor2019