Confusing goals

I started out this painting of her neighbor's sweet peas in Cynthia's bud vase as a precise, wet-on-dry, realistic rendering. My first obstacle was the vase, which is one of those made out of heavy, nearly opaque cobalt blue glass that, when you put it in the sun, glows a beautiful transparent blue in places and looks almost black in others. I just couldn't capture the effects, no matter how hard I tried.

I gave up on that for the moment and started putting in the sweet peas. Something happened that I haven't yet been able to get a handle on: I was using my Paul Jackson watercolors, which are beautiful jewel-like tones that move from the paintbrush onto the paper like butter, but which take a lot longer to dry than lesser paints. Soon, shapes I thought were dry started bleeding and blending into other, newer shapes, and everything began to blur.

I tried to slow it down and make it work, but soon concluded that I should just go with the blur, so I pulled colors into other colors, and pulled a faint halo of color out all around the vase and flowers to give them a watery look over all.

There are parts here and there that I love, and others that have just turned into an ill-defined mess. No matter what I did to that vase, it just didn't have the quality for which I was moved to paint it. And of course, I realized halfway through that this was no subject to be accomplished on sketchbook paper, but needed the weight and absorbency of 140-lb. rough to hold it together. Perhaps I will try this same painting another day on the real stuff and see what happens. But for now, I have other things to accomplish and will allow this to represent today's foray into #30x30DirectWatercolor2020.

Paul Jackson watercolors, Bee sketchbook

You know I had to do it....

Yesterday there were eggs. Today there is a chicken. This would seem to answer the age-old question...at least on my blog.

I have to confess that although I painted this completely without an under-drawing, I did go in judiciously afterwards with my white gel pen to save a few highlights, and I did make the outside box with my trusty Uniball.

Ken Jackson watercolors, Bee sketchbook, Signo gel pen, Uniball.

Things that are hard to paint...

EGGS!

Eggs are really hard to paint, because they are so perfectly shaped, and so, um, egg-shaped. Everyone knows what an egg is supposed to look like, too, so there's no real chance you can fudge things and hope it works out, like you can a flower or a face or an urban sketch.

Again, this wasn't what I had planned to paint, but I came on this photo that looked so pristine and with it so deceptively simple, and I wanted to see if I could pull it off, because it is anything but.

First of all, you have to save those whites on the eggs and look carefully to see what other colors are present, and you have to figure out where they overlap and where they just touch, and you have to mimic the shadows between them and under them and around them, and you have to find a way to make a white bowl look white while leaving almost no white anywhere on its surface!

Second of all, the cloth on which it was sitting was one of those that is woven from two colors but in various percentages so that some parts look darker and some lighter just because of the weave and whether the color in question is over or under.

And then there was the brown background (the table top), which I considered trying to make look like wood grain, but my sketchbook paper would NOT hold up to that and defeated me, so it just looks like finger-painting.

Finally, remember that I am doing all of this for 30x30 Direct, so I painted it with no under-drawing whatsoever.

So, eggs in a bowl are an accomplishment even if they're not very good!

Paul Jackson watercolors in Bee sketchbook.

Soft

This wasn't what I had planned to paint today, but by the time I got around to it, I didn't have the sustained attention to do the portrait I had lined up. So instead I painted these geraniums in a blue pot.

I don't know why it's so challenging to paint without a drawing—it's not that I can't see and paint the actual dimensions, because I can, but for some reason it feels unfinished, even if my base drawing were to be in pencil rather than in pen as is my usual style.

This one felt so "dauby" (as opposed to Dobbie) that I finally ended up pulling some of the color out with water to soften the silhouette all around it. I don't know whether I like it or it was a colossal mistake. I only did it with the green, and the red blossoms are sitting "above the cloud" in some instances. This is about as close as I get to a wetter-looking painting, since I have not to date mastered the idea of wet-in-wet watercolor.

I also didn't manage to capture either the shiny ceramic of the jar or the feel of the metallic plant stand upon which it sat. So, it's feeling like amateur hour all around. Tomorrow, a better painting.

Paul Jackson and M. Graham paints in Bee sketchbook.

Monotone: Sepia

Today was a quick sketch with a brush to see if I could capture this old sepia-toned photograph of a cute little housewife standing in her kitchen without drawing it first. It got a lot too outline-y for my taste, but I did get a pretty good likeness of her and her surroundings. My favorite parts were her hairdo, her apron, and that she was wearing bobby socks with little white beaded moccasins.

I'm always curious about the way things are done, so I looked up sepia toning and discovered a few things. My online source said: "In sepia toning, chemicals are used to convert the metallic silver in the print to a sulfide compound called silver sulfide, which is 50% more stable than silver, making it more resistant to environmental pollutants. Therefore, people in the olden days originally processed/developed their images in sepia to make them last longer."

So that old photo will probably outlive my ephemeral watercolor on sketchbook paper!

Paul Jackson Cowbell (that's the color), in Bee sketchbook.

The Do-over (sort of)

I judged my beet greens harshly yesterday and swore to do them again, but when I posted the picture on Facebook I got a lot of feedback that said I was being too hard on my picture. (I still dislike the splatter of perfect little round dots, and will practice that with various brushes until I figure it out before doing it on a painting again.) So for today, instead of re-painting the same picture, I decided my "do-over" would be a similar but not identical subject: Turnips! The shapes are similar, the foliage is similar, but the color spectrum is enough different that it kept me entertained.

I think I achieved a little more what I had in mind yesterday when I (more carefully) painted the turnip tops and tried not to mess with them too much. The darks were still difficult to achieve realistically. But what I really had fun with was the turnips themselves—painting lavender and "white" turnips without using any actual white, and yet conveying the idea of white. I think I did okay. And I purposely left a couple of small unfinished edges, including one that spontaneously "bled out" for a nice effect.

Paul Jackson, Daniel Smith, and M. Graham watercolors in my Bee Sketchbook.