Landscape Study

Playing tonight with colors. Still don't have the palette set that I am searching for so will continue to play. This was painted wet on dry. I used cobalt blue, cerulean blue, raw sienna, quin. magenta, quin. burnt orange then added in indanthrene blue and a lemon yellow. This took maybe 15-20 minutes not including drying time and is a great way to loosen up.

NE Explorer

This is my watercolor version of the photo for the August Paint Along project at Painting Friends online art group. I had to use a bit of white gouache in the painting. It felt good to just have a brush in my hand.

Chatter

This photo was taken by my niece after their move to California. I love the ocean in all its moods and thought this sunset was glorious.

My family and I have spent most our time sitting with my sister who is in the hospital so I haven't done any painting or sketching, mostly napping when I could. She is coming home today (I think) so hopefully everything will settle down and become more normal.

Thank you all for continuing to visit this blog even though there hasn't been much artwork recently. I am starting to get antsy to paint and draw. Those of you that paint know exactly what I mean!

Chatter

It is a beautiful Tuesday morning with sun shining through the clouds. We had a bit of rain during the night and that makes the morning especially lovely. I haven't any art work to post this morning though I have been reading blogs and viewing the work of Joaquin Sorolla.

I have been seriously lacking in energy the last month or so. Found out I have a slight heart murmur and more tests are being scheduled. May be something, may be nothing. I will take a leaf out of yesterday's blog post by Ricky Holtman's Journaling Thru Cancer and make lemonade, either way. In the meantime, I will sketch or paint as energy and desire allows. Didn't want you to think that I had lost interest in art because it isn't so. *grinning*

The photo above was taken somewhere in New York near a covered bridge. The guy checking out the area is my brother-in-law. This photo is the reference subject for the August Paint Along at Painting Friends (an online art group.) I host the Paint Along each month and want to get this painted. Not good for the host to fall behind lol.

One other thing I meant to mention is your time, your comments and your encouragement are deeply appreciated. I've noticed though that some of the comments recently will have a word that is linked to a commercial website. While appreciating the comments I feel that the links are actually a spinoff of spam, so those comments are not being posted. Hate to be tough about this but I dislike intensely receiving eight or ten spam e-mails from the same person, at one time.

Sunday Morning Gestures

A slideshow of this morning's 1-minute gestures using drawing-tutorialsonline.com one minute poses. A couple of the gestures were done in pencil and the rest using a charcoal pencil.

Memory Sketch

This sketch is from my imagination, trying to remember so many things -

• how the eyes sit in the orbital area
• the planes of the face
• placement of features
• the shape of the head, how the (sterno-cleido-mastioideus) muscle is placed that runs from behind the ear down to the sternum
• how the clavical sits in the chest
• the shape of the rib cage and sternum
• the oval in the pelvic area that indicates the tilt of the plevis

A lot is wrong with this but the object was to remember as much as I could from all I have been reading and practicing. Now back to more drawing practice and I want to paint another landscape from another photo taken in the northeastern U.S.

House With A View

6 1/2" x 10" Watercolor on Fabriano Aristico paper

This was painted from a reference photo taken by my twin somewhere in the beautiful NE United States. In the photo there was a body of water before the land mass and I painted that in this painting. After looking at it for awhile, I decided the composition looked better cropped. This was suppose to be painted for the July Paint Along at Painting Friends and I just didn't get it painted within that time frame.

Skull Sketch, Form Sketches

I signed up for some drawing tutorials from Drawing Tutorials and used his video to draw the skull above this morning. Below are some quick sketches from yesterday, that I did from Drawing Tutorials forms except for the one on the viewer's lower right. The photo used for this is from Sonni at Wet Canvas. The sketches were done to learn to simplify the gestures or shapes of the gestures or body form.

Watercolor Play - Tea Pot

8" x 8 1/2" watercolor on Fabriano paper. A split-complementary palette was used for this study of a tea pot sitting on my painting table. Felt good to just put paint on paper. Below you can see the line drawing sketch of the tea pot. For the sketch I held the pencil in a writing position which feels more comfortable because I have more control.

Graphite Sketch

Instead of practicing gestures last night I used the reference photo provided by Sonni at Wet Canvas for gesture practice, to just practice sketching. I find myself going every which direction or a vertical direction with the pencil instead of the pencil marks following the curve or flow of the body. The neck looks like a tube and is too long. That is the great thing about practice, we can study what was done and then do another sketch, hopefully improving the pencil marks and form.

I believe it is important to know how the body is formed and shaped so that when the figure is clothed one can still get the feel of the fullness and solidity of body under the clothes.

Blushing Whites with Neutral Complements

I belong to a small Yahoo watercolor group studying color, hosted by Rhonda Carpenter. The month of July was spent studying whites which held just a hint of color using complementary neutrals to set off the whites. I quickly painted these whites at 2:00 a.m. last night as I was behind in my studies of color with that group. The photo shows the use of the three primary colors, with each primary in a warm and cool color. Next, I mixed the opposite of the warm or cool color - warm primary/cool complementary color or a cool complementary gray/neutral was mixed. These studies were done so that we can become familiar with how to paint white objects but also the complements that will help them to glow or shine.

This morning I have spent reading blogs listed in my sidebar, as well as visiting getbodysmart.com which is a great site for studying the body's bone and muscle structures. Another blog I enjoyed reading was by Stapleton Kearns. Lots of lovely paintings and very useful information for artists, especially about design. Mr. Kearns also does critiques of paintings at the request of various artists which is most informative.