Day 15: Winter Dreams

Winter Dreams ATC

Monochrome Winsor & Newton Watercolour Marker, Raw Umber. I like the feel of an old time photo that monochrome brown gives a painting. This one was an exercise in values and shapes, an icy creek and snowy landscape with scattered pines and some other grasses or bushes. Even the sky is just pale clouds and slightly darker color.

Monochromes are fun. Not always black, any dark color will do. 

Light colors obtained brushing a wet Niji waterbrush over the tip of the watercolor marker.

Stormy Skyscape

Stormy Skyscape

7 1/2" x 9 1/2" pastel on paper, 

stormy sky above low hills, row of pines, wind-tossed lake

This painting took me two months to create from start to finish. Intended to become a demo, I'll sort the images and post it on Rob's Art Lessons in afew days. Right now I just finished after a long day and I'm so glad it's done!

Pastels used: Cretacolor Pastels Carre' for underpainting, then 120 Unison half sticks for nuances in cloud values in muted colors, a few final details on land with Caran d'Ache Soft Pastels including my signature.

I love that sky and want to do more cloudy sky scenes! I had so many ideas for it that I finally quit fiddling and moving the clouds around. I can just paint more cloudy skies after all!

Tree Study Lake Scene

Tree Study, Lake Scene

W&N Watercolour Markers on Fabriano Artistico

6 1/2" x 8" sample watercolor paper

Have been resting up, lost a few days lately to both the deep cleaning overexertion and going out for my medical appointment. Plenty of sketching on Wednesday, but otherwise been sleeping a lot. This time of year isn't great though not as bad as November and December for exhaustion. Just haven't done much. Today was getting my toe back in with a quick sketch and designed painting. I had this nice sample of good paper - a paper I've bought blocks of. Found it during the cleaning and thought it should get something in water media on it since it looked so fine.

It's actually cream colored, thus the warm colors of the main palette worked well on it. I half think I should have gone for the darker and slightly less intense Prussian Blue Hue for the water but this is all right.

Also an experiment in combining textures. I meant to wash out the foliage but by the time I was done with it, I liked its effect as is. When something works, don't overwork it!

Digital Skyscape from Memory

Digital Skyscape from Memory

Sketchbook Mobile App

I bought this app for my iPhone back when I first moved here and played with it a bit, got quite a few images done. But I forget its iconic commands fast if I don't use it for a while and once I got it onto my Kindle Fire with its larger screen making digital sketching easier, I could not fumble through getting the images saved and exported in a way I could offload them to my computer.

Tonight I figured it out. Today was a miserable sick day. I didn't do 3 in 5 with new art, just posted the three pieces I had up in the Vantage Points exhibition at Openhouse that were so inspiring to me. They really are my current best anyway. But just when I thought I wouldn't get anything in, not so much as a cat sketch, I decided to have a go one more time with Sketchbook Mobile.

Now that I can do more with the images than just store them on the Kindle and maybe lose them if I have to go back to factory settings, I'm more likely to keep playing with it and experimenting. I bought a Sensu Brush on sale from Dick Blick a couple of months ago and hadn't really tried it. That's the next experiment, that and finding the right brush tool that works with it for a gouache-like effect.

Day 6 of 30 in 30 Challenge Humpback Whale

Humpback Whale Cow

8 1/2" x 11"

pastel on paper

Photo reference from the WetCanvas Reference Image Library by frangipani, titled "Humpback 3." I sketched her in response to an animals challenge for "a cow" because I knew whales, bison, elephants all use the same terms as cattle, bull or cow. 

One thing I like about this sketchbook is that it's getting me sketching large. While I enjoy using the small sketchbooks I've been doing a lot more pastels with the big pages, and whatever pastels are handy. This time it was the Mungyo Standard 64 color half sticks set, a student set I picked up on Amazon cheap. They are the best, handiest student set of pastels I've ever used, perfect to introduce someone to the medium with a big enough range to really get a feel for it and not get bogged down in substitutions.