Good Model Today

Ten minute pose charcoal



Ten minute pose on Tyvek with Dr Martins Hydrus Watercolors ~ A little heavy-handed on the sap green to offset the indian red that also got heavy-handed!



Twenty minute pose on 140# Arches with Dr Martins Hydrus Watercolors ~ More ultramarine on this one.  It works better, I think



Twenty minute pose on Arches 140#
Dr Martins Hydrus Watercolors

Twenty minute pose on Arches 140# with Dr Martins Hydrus Watercolors ~ That's his thumb hanging down!

Jahman is a wonderful model, and has a gorgeous body.  He holds poses, and knows how to best show himself to the group.  Now, with such a terrific model, I have no excuses.  Even so, I was not "on" myself today. 

I am trying to see which combination of paint and surface will work the best for me, using the Tyvek, the Doc Martins, and Arches.  I am still using too much pigment when I "draw" with the Doc Martins droppers.  I am intending to "punch through" pretty soon, and break the code!  I love using Doc Martins, but need to figure out what's going to work best.  Stay tuned.

Have you tried it?



Have you been to the Virtual Paintout blog [Virtual Paintout] yet? I am hooked on the concept, but haven't submitted anything so far.   Blogger Bill Guffey hosts the site and challenges artists to use the Street View of Google Maps to locate a "site" and do a virtual plein aire image of what the artists find in the designated city of the month.

The current city is Cape Town South Africa, and Bill has a Google map on his site on which to clack and get the Street View.  I toyed with the function for a while, and found lots of suburban streets, some highways, etc, and one or two terrific views of the ocean.  What I really wanted to find was people, and indeed I did.  Remarkable.  I "went" to the City Center, and and found some shopping streets, and just roamed the streets to find some local color.  I did find some wonderful images, and THOUGHT I lifted them correctly, downloaded them into Photoshop to tweak and rotate, retaining the street info, etc., and thought about how I might paint them.  Then, I went back to the Virtual Paintout to review the protocols.   I found out that I didn't identify the images correctly, so I can't use the ones I lifted to submit.  I now know what to do to use an image for the paintout, but can't find the original images again!  Oh well, I WILL do it correctly soon, and I still may paint the ones I found.

Even though I may missed painting something for the blog, I had a lovely virtual visit to Cape Town, and can't wait for what's next!  So far, there are some marvelous paintings done by artists who have figured it all out.  Wouldn't it be fun to join them?   

Tuesday's Life Drawing

Ten minute pose is tight.  The model was tight, and I was tight

Awkward ten minute pose and a play with Tyvek and Doc Martins

Of the bunch, this was my favorite, but can you see how tight she is?  That doesn't excuse MY tightness but it added to the challenge



Another twenty minute pose and still tight.  Not my favorite model



This one is from last week's session.  Better sketch, looser model, which, I believe helped ME be looser.  Done with a Flair felt tip pen and brushed with water.  This model is a dancer and currently going to circus school.  Grace and poise made it a better day.



The tulips are coming, the tulips are coming!

The snow is almost gone, and Skagit Valley will soon be ablaze with color.  Acres and acres of tulips bracketed by the foothills of the Cascades and Puget Sound.  The month-long Annual Tulip Festival starts April 1st, and so will an abundance of art shows presented by the various art groups in the Valley.  So many artists paint tulips, of course, because that's what visitors buy when they are here.  I enjoy the tulips, but, frankly, I am "over" most tulip field watercolor paintings that I have DONE, and that I see each year.  

So, in a drop-in watercolor class, the group was doing tulips, and I chose not to do what they were doing but to "play" with my Dr Ph Martins Hydrus Watercolors.  Because I am still "feeling them out," and experimenting with them,  I tend to get heavy-handed and overdo.  And, I am still experimenting with Tyvek, never sure what the medium will do on that, so I like, but don't LOVE, the tulips above. To camouflage the amateur work, I spattered the painting with metallic acrylic ink, again, just playing. I am "getting there," and will still keep on trying, but this is an effort that may end up in the pile ... my gallery in the closet.  

To absolve myself in the group of pretty traditional tulip painters, I did a quick more traditional tulip painting, again with the Dr Ph Martin Hydrus Watercolors, that might redeem myself in the wonderful world of tulip art this spring.

We'll see ...  Maybe I should try some daffodils.  I need some remedial flower painting classes!

   

Sketching at Gere-a-Deli's

Some of my students just started a sketch group recently, and I was able to join them on Monday because I didni't have to teach.  It was great fun and, now that I have been snowed in for a couple of days, I appreciate the opportunity even more.  We met at a local luncheon place, and because it was President's Day, there was more activy than usual, and lots of subjects to sketch.  We had to work quickly, which in its way was good skill building, but the results were varied.  In any case, fun was had by all.  A few sketches below ...

Composite of three folks at separate tables

Family of seven ~ Mom, dad, five kids and a sixth on the way

Love the beret.  This guy was fun to sketch.  As I was finishing up, I noticed his anarack was not the same as it had been, and I saw it move in a funny way.  All of a sudden, a little dog's head popped out of his chest to finish reading the newspaper.  The beret and the pup got up to leave before I could "catch" him.  Amazing!  You never know what will be next when you sketch in public places! 



Snowed in and catching up

Well, it's not that there's so much snow, although there is a lot, it's the ice that makes getting off my hill pretty treacherous.  So, I am trying to pay attention to chores having gone undone for a while, and updating my blog.

I haven't written since I went to Myrna Wacknov's Variations Five Day Workshop in Portland [http://www.myrnawacknov.blogspot.com/ ], where, with one image she sent before the workshop, we worked with major elements of design, including shape, size, direction, value, line, color and texture, and relationsips of unity, repetition, donimance, balance, harmony, gradation, etc. [Long sentence, I know, but it tells you a little bit about why the workshop had to be five days!]

Myrna sent us an image of a San Francisco artist named Mike Johnson, who is a very interesting character.  Each day, after Myrna demoed and shared inspiring and creative ideas, we would paint one or two paintings using dominant elements and limited palettes.  Challenging but really liberating in some ways.

We had to roll the dice and a draw slips of paper to determine dominant design elements we were to use, and colors we could use.  My first "roll" and "draw" were Shape dominant with  Direction secondary, and a palette of blue/green and yellow/orange.  What does one do??

Here's one I did just to loosen up and try a "variation" with my Dr Ph Martin Hydrus watercolors.

These watercolors are extremely concentrated and dry permanently.  In all other ways, they act like traditional watercolors.  The fun thing to do with these is to "draw" with the droppers themselves.  The painting of "Big Mike" was done almost exclusively with the droppers, and watercolor crayon.  LOVED the process and am painting/drawing with them more than with traditional watercolors at the moment.



Will be doing a second post today if I can't get outside  ...



Away too long ...

As much as I enjoy seeing other artists' blogs updated almost on a daily basis, I am afraid I have been so not able to devote time and attention to my blog.  It's not that I haven't been painting, I have been painting for classes and student demonstrations.  As many of you know, I have been creating calendars from watercolor paintings I have done during each of the past four years.  It might be that I will share those, but not today.

As much as I have loved painting with watercolors, I am so loving painting with acrylics.  I teach both watercolors and acrylics, but I am finding that when I paint just for the fun of it, I am painting more with acrylics than watercolors.  Acrylics continue to make me smile, and I get less stressed out when I am messing about in acrylics.  A couple of recent acrylics [since my last blog entry!] are below.

This photo of my birches painting was taken by my friend, Linda, at the art show where it was sold.  I was in such a rush to get the painting in to the show, that I forogt to take a photo in good light at home.  I used this painting as a demo for acrylics classes using palette knives.  The students loved the lesson and did great work to boot!

This was another acrylic I did to use as my Christmas card.   My son looked at it, and said that it didn't look anything LIKE my granddaughter.  Well, that is really fine, because it was not meant to.  Odd, that he made a negative statement that I interpret as a positive.  It IS sort of a stylized impression of a young girl that might look like my granddaughter with some tweaking.  Anyway, I was happy with the outcome.

Th tulip picker is from a photo I took several years ago during the Tulip Festival in Skagit Valley about five minutes from where I live.  When I took the photo, the young man was as shocked as I was to see him.  He smiled, I smiled and I clicked the picture.  I tried to paint it several times as a watercolor, but it always lacked something and never seemed to come together.  During my "playing with knives" period this past fall and winter, I did this totally with palette knives.  I thoroughly enjoyed the process as I always do when playing with knives ...  I am now understanding that it is truly about hte process as much as it is about the outcome. 

Art League North, one of the painting groups I belonged to, liked the outcome as well.  They selected it to be used for the 2011 Tulip Festival Art Bash Show poster.  Am pleased with that, and humbled because there were so many other great paintings in the running.

Well, now that I have caught up somewhat, I am promising myself that I will be more attentive to updating my blog.  It's a discipline as much as anything else, and it makes me accounatable to you and to myself for painting more and sharing more.  

Would love for those of you who are dropping by the blog anonymously, to comment, good or not so good, comments and questions.  You can sign up to receive notificaton of the random and hopefully more often, posts I make.  Would love to hear from you!