Art Every Day Month - Nov 3 -

Rainy Foggy Day

Rainy Foggy Day - full color monochromatic landscape

Source photo

Fog and rain change the look of the landscape. The river stretches flat in the windless atmosphere and clouds obscure the tops of some of the hills on the other side. At the same time, the fog hides the bottoms of some more hills, and leaves the just the tops showing, revealing interesting forms in the distant hills that normally you don't get to see. It's worth getting wet to see it.

Art Every Day Month - November 3

Spooky Dead Plants

November Fireweed - Detail of 11" x 15" Watercolour on paper -
Study in silhouetted form

Source Photo



There are walking trails and bike trails running throughout our town. Part of my AEDM process this month is to go out for a morning walk along one or other of these nature trails, with a camera, and take photos that focus on some design element that I can use in my daily painting. My intention is to elaborate on that design element or concept and make an "abstract" painting for my daily posts. After a month's practice at abstracting, I hope that my realistic painting style will have loosened up somewhat. 

Well, that may be easier said than done...yes, my daily walking is a good habit, my daily picture-taking enhances my ability to use the camera, and my daily observation of design elements sharpens my perceptions. So far so good. Painting in an abstract style, however, is tricky. I am so used to using recognizable images in my artwork that they creep in unbidden right under my eyes.

So today's image... is it realistic or abstract? You be the judge.

Art Every Day Month - November 22

Translating Value Studies from Graphite to Watercolor








Several days ago on this blog, I posted a 16-block arrangement of value studies based on a series of little graphite doodles.

I wasn't thrilled with how the graphite sketches translated into the watercolor, and I promised to come back to the experiment and repeat it, using what I had learned the first time around.


Today I am more pleased with my work.

This time I painted in a rich monochrome gray that I mixed from alizarin crimson and prussian blue.
I achieved a much larger tonal range, with the darkest tones of gray being touches of thick gooey paint, and the lightest tones being diluted with water and brushed on with even more water.
I developed a smoother application of washes, which more closely resemble the graphite pencil shading of the drawings.

I am not ready to declare this experiment complete, however. There is still a lot for me to discover about brushwork and how to make it correspond with the pencil strokes in my sketches. And I still have a lot to learn about controlling the flow of the watercolor paint, too. But for now, I am happy with what I did today.