Blossom & Grow

Tonight I tried another illustration to go with a book review I will be posting on bookadept.com/blog as soon as I finish reading the book! The main action takes place in a flower shop, so I googled pictures of flower shops and then painted it as described in the book, which is in a lovely shade of pink, with ivy painted around the top, surrounded by more mundane ochre, rust, and beige shops.

I don't have much sense of perspective (I have mentioned that before), and the angle at which the partially open door is set just confuses the issue further, so this is a little wonky as to its orientation with other shops and the sidewalk. And the colors got murky because, as usual, I couldn't wait for things to dry before going in again. But it will do as a support painting for a book review that hopefully will be better!

DAY 21: BLOSSOM

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In the sketchbook...

Walking the Camino

I'm not going to say too much about it here because I intend to post about it and review it on my Book Adept blog, but I just finished reading a charming and thoughtful novel about two people who (separately) commit themselves to walking El Camino de Santiago de Compostela, charting their experiences, their interactions with one other and with other pilgrims, and what they learned from the trip. It's called Two Steps Forward, by Graeme Simsion (author of The Rosie Project) and his wife, Anne Buist, and is loosely based on their own experience.

The idea of making such a walk, whether there or on the Appalachian Trail or through the Pacific Northwest, has always been intriguing to me. It's not something to which I could aspire at the moment, given the state of my knees and the degree to which I am out of shape, but who knows? Could happen someday before I die!

Since I'm committed to painting every day, and since I'm also committed to blogging about a book at least twice a week on The Book Adept, I decided to put those hands together and
do an illustration to accompany my blog post. I haven't written it yet, so the picture is going up here first.

This shows one of the stone markers that indicates the Way for the travelers to follow, with three pilgrims or walkers making their way in the background. The scallop shell symbol originates, as much of Christian iconography does, in pre-Christian pagan practices. In Roman Hispania, there was a route known as the Janus Path, that had as its starting point the Temple of Venus, who rose from the sea on a scallop shell. Ideas and themes related to the Camino experience correspond to the symbology of Janus, Roman god of beginnings and endings, transition and transformation.

Santiago de Compostela is named in honor of St. James the Greater, with whom the scallop shell later came to be associated. The shell has been found in conjunction with images of St. James in medieval graves in Ireland. It has become a symbol, a souvenir, and, in the practical sense, an implement, since early pilgrims would use a scallop shell for drinking and eating.

Another reason for my interest in the Camino, other than the novel I just read, is the experience documented by my Facebook acquaintance, artist Jennifer Lawson, who walked 500 miles of the Camino a few years back and both illustrated and wrote about her experiences. You can see details about the book here, but also be sure to click on her blog and sketchbook links to see what she's up to lately!

DAY 20: WALKING THE CAMINO

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In the sketchbook

Dressing

A quick still life today, set up out on the patio in the late afternoon so as to get some shadows and highlights on the glass. Because I'm not drawing, just painting, I didn't want to go too complex, so I turned the Grey Poupon into a generic glass jar of "moutarde," and let the symbol for olive oil suffice rather than spelling it out on that bottle. And although the Balsamic got labeled, it went without its brand names and more elaborate artwork.

I probably could have fiddled with this for another 15 minutes and made it better, but...exercise in cool buoyancy beckons (water aerobics class)...and I have to stop at the store for cat food and hair conditioner on the way. In other words, pragmatic life intervenes, as usual.

Olive oil, Balsamic vinegar, and French mustard, aka...

DAY 19: DRESSING

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In the sketchbook

Working it

The biggest (and most frequent) complaint you will hear from watercolor artists is,
"I overworked it." It's that temptation to go in once more, to try to infuse a different color that unfortunately turns to mud, or to try to lift a color off the surface that was unfortunately a staining color and therefore unliftable, to correct a line or a shape that looked spontaneous before and now just looks like you messed it up.

On the other hand—and this is so rare that no one even talks about it—sometimes overworking something turns out to be a good thing. You get it to a point and think, Okay, stop! and then you look at it again in 10 minutes, and you see where you left out something important, or could make something look a little more convincingly like itself if only it had a few more darks, and you take courage in hand to keep going and Hey, it worked!

That was how I felt about this one. I borrowed the reference photo from a fellow on Facebook who is on a cross-country bike trip and takes marvelous shots of his route every day, but I wasn't sure I could pull it off in paint.

The thing about it is, the shadows don't look right, because the objects casting the shadows (the trees) are for the most part "out of frame," so the logic seems wrong. But I just started at the top and laid in the flat background colors, then painted the vignette of the far distance. Then I proceeded from top to bottom again, laying in those shadows line by line at the proper angles. I kept going back and tweaking them until the light and dark spots on the road corresponded more or less to those on the verge and down onto the grass, and then...I finally stopped. Had lunch, came back, and thought, Hmmm! a few more darks, the road sign I left out...and five minutes later, I was finally satisfied. It's not perfect, but it's a lot better than I expected!

Thanks to Sam Taggart for this wonderful vista.

DAY 18: Shadowy Road
About 6x12 inches

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(Here's the original. I wanted to use the long narrow piece of Fluid watercolor paper I had left after yesterday's painting.)

A wet dry landscape

Today I attempted a landscape, and since I wanted to try painting wet-in-wet, I switched from my multimedia sketchbook paper to "real" watercolor paper (Fluid 140-lb.), because I knew the sketchbook wouldn't stand up to it. I can use quite a bit of water on this Bee paper, but it's not something you can pre-wet.

My Fluid paper is in a watercolor block, which means I can wet down the whole page without it buckling. People who paint mostly wet-in-wet would scoff at this method—Paul Jackson, my friend Colleen, others I know actually dump their paper into a bin of water and let it sit to soak through both sides for 5 to 10 minutes to make sure it's super-saturated. But since I haven't quite got the hang of this yet, I decided it would suffice to wet down the front side thoroughly.

The landscape I painted was somewhat nondescript, but what I liked about it is that it proceeded from pale distant mountains to closer ones with some discernible detail, to close-up brush and grass and road, so that you could achieve a graduated effect with the use of color, becoming more intense as you get closer in. It's also a dry landscape (Southern California, not much green on those hills for most of the year), so it's ironic to me to paint it wet to make it look dry.

Some of my machinations working wet really backfired on me, and while I was able to finesse parts of the painting to work, other parts were less successful. The far purple hills bled a little too much right away into the sky, so that I had to come back after and overwork them to give them more solidity. I put the clouds too high above the hills and left the whites in too-angular chunks, so they're not as fluffy as one would want.

On the near-distant hills, there were rows (corresponding to roads or trails) with the small dark dots of oak trees along them, defining their routes, but the paper was still so wet when I dropped them in that they became big bloomy dark dots! I had to pull them out into lines with my brush, leaving too many of them and not giving sufficient definition. Likewise, with the closer-up bunches of trees, they're a little smudgy. Finally, I wish I had left a lot more light and white in that dried grass along the bit of road in the foreground, to give the picture more punch and sparkle.

Oh, and finally, at some point I stuck my big fat thumb into the sky and had to paint that out as well!

Since this is one of the first landscapes I have ever attempted, and also one of the first wet-in-wet paintings, I'm going to say that it's okay, post it, and move on.

DAY 17: SO CAL HILLSIDES

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Legacy

I left painting until late in the day today, and was unsure what I wanted to do. It being Father's Day, I had been thinking of and missing my dad all day (and since 2011), but I looked through the few photos of him that I have and didn't feel inspired to make a painting from any of them.

Then I came across a black-and-white photo in my Reference folder that I had saved because it reminded me of Dad's family, the Wilmeths and Garrisons. The man in the picture was dressed as so many of my granddad Elmer's generation did for day-to-day work, in a white shirt tucked into overalls, and in the foreground of the photo was an old gray felt hat just like Elmer always wore. (I forgot to paint in the hat until too late.)

The man was taking his ease, reading his copy of The Progressive Farmer out in the yard in front of his clapboard house, and I had thought maybe I could fit him into my "People Reading" series. Elmer wasn't a big reader, but my dad, Joe, and his siblings certainly were, so this photo also gave me a feeling of legacy.

It wasn't until today, looking through my reference photos and suddenly focusing on this one, that I realized exactly why I had saved it. The man in the photo is holding his paper with his hand cocked at a particular angle that was so familiar to me from years of seeing my dad read, and it's a BIG farmer's and builder's hand, just like his was.

It was that hand that made me save this photo, even though I didn't know it at the time. Granddad and Dad had almost identically shaped hands, and I inherited them too (although not quite so large!). It was satisfying to be able to use mine to paint this, in memory of Dad.

DAY 16: JOE READS

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