I'm back on track with my weekly plein air painting!

After the excitement of the SCVWS "Anything Goes" reception last weekend, I'm back to fitting in a plein air session each week. This time I chose an excruciatingly hot day and sat out on my deck, looking across to the corner of the backyard. I simplified the scene somewhat-included the picnic table-omitted the chairs, expanded the shrubs, shrunk the brick terrace, etc. I'm still working on depicting layers of foliage; I tried a couple of techniques here. I'm pleased with the way the umbrella came out-patterns of light and shadow on the various segments were very tricky.

Trying out Yupo!

Sheila came over today to paint with me. She's doing lots of work on Yupo and brought some for me to try. I kept it very simple, luckily, bcause the paint does wacky things on that smooth surface! I had pretty good luck with the fennel-she suggested that I use a pretty concentrated paint mixture, which was helpful advice. She left another piece for me to work with later-don't know yet what I'll do. Thanks, Sheila, for introducing me to this new material.

Return of the squash leaves

My sister visited me for 8 days so I didn't get much work done, and missed my weekly plein air session altogether. Fitting in a half hour here and there, I painted the squash leaves for a second time. On this go round, I used a limited palette of only 5 colors: viridian, Winsor green (yellow shade), green gold, perylene green and brown madder. I put a great deal more detail on the leaves, though it doesn't all show up well in the photo here. The terre verte I used on the first painting behaves very oddly-almost sits on the surface of the paper, but it did give a luminous, almost iridescent character to the leaves. This one doesn't have as much of a 3 dimensional quality as the earlier piece, but I like it better-the painting just has more life to it. This is the painting I plan to enter in the SCVWS "Anything Goes" exhibit at the Norton Gallery in Palo Alto.

My weekly plein air painting

I've kept up with my plan to paint en plein air once a week. On Sunday, July 5th, we drove down to Anderson Lake County Park in Morgan Hill. It was awfully dry-no green undergrowth in the woods or grasses in the open areas-just dirt. The creek was full, however. They likely let more water out of the reservoir for the holiday weekend; we saw lots of picnicing families.
I had a real problem capturing the rushing water-there were a few little rapids and lots of sparkles on the water. Without resorting to mask I just don't know how to interpret the movement and light on the creek.

Today I had lunch with several of my painting friends. It was such fun to talk with people who all love art-we inspired one another to keep working!

I've kept my promise to myself to paint en plein air once a week. This is part of my effort to LOOSEN UP! A common goal, it seems. I'll post some of my efforts in the future.

Meanwhile, the squash plants in my garden are so exuberant and beautiful that I wanted to paint them. I began by taking a bunch of photos and thinking about how to approach the project. I also experimented with Winsor & Newton's Blending Medium. It helped me keep the leading edges wet so I could avoid hard lines where I didn't want them. I used a limited palette of 7 colors: Winsor green (yellow shade), terre verte (yellow shade), green gold, perylene green, turquoise, quin.magenta, and brown madder. After I thought it was finished, I put the painting up and looked at it for a day...went back and added more darks in the upper left quadrant, (which is shown at the lower left-for some reason, the picture rotated when it was loaded!?!)which really pulled it all together. I'm going to try another version soon.

This is my interpretation of John Sell Cotman's watercolor, "Harlech Castle," which I painted for the June landscape project on the Following the Masters website. I scanned it, but my scanner bed is a little smaller than the painting (in fact Mr. Cotman's original is smaller, too) so a very little bit is cut off of each side of my painting. I like the puffy little sheep on the hillside-such a common sight in the British Isles. I looked it up, and learned that the castle is in Wales and was built in 1283. The challenge now is to post the painting on Following the Masters...I may need to call in help for that task!

My First Posting!

I hope this goes well-my first time out of the gate! Last semester I took a watercolor class at Mission College and one of our assignments was to paint 2 portraits. I decided to try a self-portrait for the first one. My main focus in creating the painting was to emphasize the contrasting textures. Translating the stone wall to the page was a very experimental process involving the application of countless layers of spattered and smeared masking fluid, interspersed with many washes and splotches of paint, followed by much crossing of fingers and hoping for something decent. The result was far beyond my expectations-it really looks like granite!