Dreadful Drake - WIP 3

I have worked on this for about an hour and will stop now and let it dry completely before anything more. I have lifted out all the water surface textures and will next start the geese. Time to stop before I wish I had!

PS...After seeing this online for a few times, I am thinking I will texture those tree trunks better before starting on the geese. They are just too smooth. It is so helpful for me to see this online instead of in real life since that makes me a critique-er instead of the artist as I am viewing it as you all are.  Interesting phenomenon!

Dreadful Drake - WIP 2

I am renaming this painting, for the time being, to Dreadful Drake since I finally had to resort to using my telephoto lens to get a photo of him and his girlfriend. He remained ever-vigilant about me and made menacing steps toward me at every chance. At any rate, this is the second WIP  photo I have taken after the underpainting posted here earlier.

There is still much to do with this in glazing on deeper colors in the water as well as more detail work in the trees. I will wait until finished with the geese before worrying about the foreground grasses. I just wanted to lay in some color, especially around her feet so I can get those buried as they were in the photo.

I plan on working on this some more this afternoon and see how far I can get with it.

Wolf Creek Pass Study

This is a small study I did as a project painting for the Watercolor Workshop. this month one of the projects was to paint a painting with mostly greens and use only mixed greens, no tube greens allowed. For this painting I chose ultramarine blue and cad yellow for the greens. For the rocks I used quin burnt orange and ultramarine blue.

I chose to do this on Yupo since I want to do a full sheet Yupo painting of this scene, but wanted to try a few things out before I start the larger painting. I like some of the textures I got in this, but will keep searching and experimenting with the larger painting textures. I always learn so much if I stop and do a study first, but rarely take the time to do that.

This is a photo taken on one of our trips up Wolf Creek Pass when we stayed in Chama, NM two years ago.

Got my SWAP painting.....

Three to four times a year the SWAP (Sharing With Artists Partners) group has their painting swaps. Lisa Voight from Pennsylvania was my partner this time and I just received her painting of a bouquet of eastern wildflowers from her.

Cheerful painting to be received right at the time of the first full day of Spring, huh?

Watchful Drake Revisited

Those of you who follow this blog and the Watercolor Workshop online will recognize this subject from when I tried to paint it last year. Despite all the wonderful advice I received to make it better, I never felt I resolved the problems enough so scrapped it. I am going to give it another try, only this time paying more attention to the composition and try an underpainting first.

I'll post progress I make as I make it, hopefully will work on this sometime this week.

Self Portrait by an Artist

Just got a call from my granddaughter, Aubrey. She told me she had painted a painting for me of herself. She said she had used one of the brushes I sent her for her birthday to paint this painting.

Our son told me he wasn't even allowed to look at the painting until she was done with it and they were sending it to me. Please note the board with her other artwork on it at her side. She really does enjoy painting and is becoming quite the prolific artist!

Grandma is lovin' this!

Rose Succulent

I finished this painting this morning. Once it was finished, THEN I noticed a few hard edges in the shadows that I don't like but they were done in acrylic ink so there you go...soften the edges in the underpainting before adding the color glazes Susan!

I do like the moonlit glow of the darker colors of this, though. I wonder if I will ever learn enough about this stuff to completely like a painting I have done and not see the oops areas? I guess most artists are still on a learning/evolving path no matter how good they are, that's my story and I'm stickin' with it.

Succulent Rose Grisaille

This grisaille underpainting is from a reference photo provided by the Watercolor Workshop as one of our monthly projects. I told the group when I submitted last month's project painting (the rose in blue vase below) that I had used a purple grisaille-type underpainting to set my values and they expressed interest in that process. So, I remembered to take a photo of the finished underpainting before I started adding the color.

I am glazing on blue-green colors and will post when I have finished. I have three glazes on so far and will probably only add a few more to see what shades of blue green I end up with. As I have added the glazes, some of the hard edges seen here have softened quite a bit, and when I am finished I hope to have something that looks more like the soft-edged succulent rose than a typical thin-edged rose as this appears here in the underpainting.

In the next few days I hope to finish this and post the resulting painting. then, on to the second project for this month!