Onions - Final (Again)

A suggestion was made during critique that I had missed the fact that the left-most onion "kissed" the edge of the table line....this is a no-no that I did indeed miss when I submitted it for critique. So, in the interest of presenting the painting as it exists today, I am showing it again after that correction was made. I simply added another loose flap of onion skin that took the top edge of the onion past the table edge line just a bit.

Thanks Rhonda for your good eyes! I hope to get started on my next rendition of these onions later today. Wish me luck!

Onions I - Final

I finally finished this version of the onions. I like the richness of the colors in this one but will go for the gusto in the next version, one where I will paint directly onto the paper in one go for each color, letting the colors mix on the paper and do no underpainting. I will be looking for which effect I prefer. I love onions!

Onion Experiment

This is another of my "spearmints". I have done a set up of some beautiful red and yellow onions I bought, two of them are red onions, the others yellow. I have them drawn alike on two pieces of watercolor paper. For this one I am doing a sepia underpainting and will add the appropriate colors on top of the underpainting. The second painting I will just paint directly in the colors, with no underpainting. I want to see how much vibrancy I lose, if any, by using the underpainting method. I find myself drawn to doing these value studies as underpaintings so I want to see how much it affects the final painting. Stay tuned for the results!

Notecard Design

I wanted to do a project painting for the Watercolor Workshop online group and the projects for this month were of pumpkins from this reference photo and scarecrows and blackbirds. Since those go together so well I decided to combine them in a coloring-book style to make a seasonal greeting card design. I think these colors should print well for the cards. Nothing fine art-related here, just a fun project to do.

Tucson - 2008

I have uploaded 69 of our recent trip to Tucson photos in our Travel Photos Collection in Flickr. The link to these is: http://www.flickr.com/photos/wcbysusanroper/sets/72157607217494727/

Catalina's Sunrise Expedition

The workshop ended Saturday afternoon, Tom and I decided to take an early morning photo jaunt to catch the sunrise over the Catalina's, north of Tucson. The morning was quite cool...for about an hour! Then, the heat built up quite rapidly, but we managed to take lots of photos, take a hike and have a breakfast picnic and the morning was a great one. I took some series of photos to try to make panoramas and will try that later this morning and post the link to them here. Catalina State Park offered many possibilities with vistas suitable for panos.
I wonder how old this Saguaro is? With the girth of the main trunk and the number of large arms it must be very old. The desert in the Catalina's was just lush and green. They must have had lots of rain recently.
Look at these lights vs darks! This was a magical view I happened upon while heading back to the road from our hike. I love finding sights like this!

Everywhere there was an item to creep up, these Morning Glories were doing just that....cactus, Mesquite trees, fence posts. Very lush foliage!

Carl Purcell Workshop - Tucson, AZ

I have returned from the Carl Purcell workshop I attended with my good friends, Arlen and Nan. We had such a great time together, although we were all three challenged for three days of intense focusing on a painting style that took us way outside our comfort zones. But, in my opinion, one would have no need to attend a workshop that did not do that....shake us up and give us another slant on painting! Two of our paintings the projected reference photo was inserted in the projector upside down and that is how we were to paint them, upside down (the painting was turned upside down...not the artists!) My poor brain was hurting after that exercise! Here we are together at the beginning session.
The painting of the elderly lady was one that I choose to show you that was the demo done by Carl, mine will never see the light of day! It was a lesson in defining the shapes within a painting by value shifts and color shifts as opposed to painting the face, and the skirt, and the apron, etc. We had to paint this in 20 minutes!
Carl tends to be a very demonstrative workshop instructor and uses an enthusiastic, whole-body approach to making a point. This is the fifth workshop I have attended by him and I always just learn so much. I choose not to paint totally in his style, but so much of what he says just works its way into my "style" of painting and is always valuable information.

Another pano test

Just more experimentation here, seeing how small I would have to go with a pano shot to have it accepted by the blog. It is probably better to view these on the Flickr site when I provide the link. Never hurts to try, though!

Panoramic Desert in Sepia

Just experimenting here, I found this older pano shot I shot in sepia mode and then stitched five photos together to make this long panoramic photo. Since it was shot with my Sony camera, it is a slightly smaller file and the blog will accept this size, however will not accept my newest panoramas. I'll probably have to lower the resolution on those, pardon an additional test on that next....

Packing for Tucson

We are spending today packing the motorhome and preparing for our trip to Tucson. Late last year, I signed up for another Carl Purcell art workshop, but this one is not in Zion Nat'l Park where I have attended four workshops by him before, but in Tucson and it won't be a plein air workshop. Tucson in September is still hot enough that I am grateful for attending one of his workshops indoors! His work is magnificent and he always provides such a fun workshop experience. I always come away with loads of techniques and plenty of inspiration to try them in new paintings.

While there, Tom will be scoping out the area for a future trip there. Tucson is close enough to go for just a few days and there are lots of places there we have not explored, so we will look forward to going there again. In the meantime, this will be a welcome trip since we have not been able to travel much this summer and we are happy that we are healthy enough to start traveling again.

If the WiFi is good, I will plan on updating the blog with workshop tidbits and photos each night. I never know how all of that will work, though, such as when we were in Alaska and I was not able to use my blog at all.