Maizie

WOW, what a summer...It's been too hot to paint or do anything. I found myself taking pictures of the thermometer...fried brain entertainment. One day last week it was 104 with a heat index of 113. Thankfully, a cool front came through and today it's only 90...

I am now back with my watercolors and pastels and catching up with some things I had started a few weeks ago. We will have company next week. My son and his family are coming for a visit. I thought it would be fun to paint some portraits of his children, so I started looking through my picture file.

Maizie is now a 20 year old college student. I found an adorable photo from a summer visit many years ago.

I began with a watercolor underpainting.

Next step was to begin to add pastel. I was mainly working on lights and darks and some local color to see what worked.

I wasn't sure about a background color. She has always loved purple so I wanted to keep the hat and shirt purple. I do like green with purple and I knew I wanted to keep it simple and not paint the whole scene. 

Whoa! That's really green!

I toned it down a little with some light blue and then tried to work on the shadows. The original photo had dramatic shadows. Note the dark under her chin and hat. However, I keep remembering two of my instructors warning against dark shadows with small children. So, I lightened up some of the darks.

I did a little more defining and 'tweaking' and signed it...thinking I was done...

It's so hard to stop. I looked at it a few days later and made a few more revisions in background color, smoothing out skin texture, a little more work on her hat...

I just need to put it in a frame under glass and call it finished!

Tomatoes!

There is nothing like a fresh summer tomato!

My son has been an organic farmer for over twenty years. Every Saturday, from May through October he has sold his veggies at a farmers market in Montpelier, VT.

I have always thought his veggie displays were beautiful...and I particularly craved his tomatoes! He carefully boxed his tomatoes so they would not be bruised. They were packed gently - no one wants a crushed tomato!

I took this photograph several years ago. I love its simplicity.

"One Turned Over"

This week I have an opportunity to put a couple pieces of artwork in an upcoming show. What about showing the photo as my inspiration along with a newly created painting?

I began by drawing all the tomatoes...and then started painting. As I painted, I kept asking myself ...was this really a good idea? It seemed like the more I painted the more I had to paint!

I got this far and had another thought... I really should have painted in the box first. I will have to paint around all those tomatoes! I probably should have started over...but the thought of painting all the tomatoes again...no way!

By the end of the afternoon I was here...

An OK start...I needed to leave it overnight. When I came back to it the following day, I was itching to get out my pastels. I really like to mix the two media. The watercolor underpainting enhances the pastel. The glow comes through. I added some highlights and tweaked here and there...

"The Taste of Vermont"

It will soon be tomato season. I can hardly wait!

I found something!

I'm still in my 'yupo-play stage'... Here's another beginning with yellows and reds. I brushed on a lot of paint. As it was drying, I took a crumbled up wet paper towel and lifted some color here and there - it added a little texture. I do love the way the paint oozes around on this paper! I put it aside to dry completely.

The next day, I gave it a good look... I like this abstract, but I didn't see any 'thing'... until, maybe...if I turn it around...

I began lifting color...it just might be..a pot of flowers! I added a little extra greenish color...

It doesn't have enough darks in it. I tried adding a little more. The problem is, that whenever I add to this paper, it gets the paint that is already on the paper wet again...and it wants to lift! This is what it looks like now. 

I may try a few more darks - on another day...

Leaves

This is another in my yupo paper study series. This time I used blue and yellow to create an abstract background. After I put the paint on the paper, I turned it around in several directions. I really like the way the paint oozes around on the paper. The blues, yellows and greens have their own ideas about where and how to mix it up! (It's kind of hard to see the delicious ooze in this small size...I tried to make it bigger and it was off the page!)

I let it dry and, of course, couldn't decide what was there. So, I took my spray bottle and lightly misted it. Interesting texture began to develop. Then I gave it a couple of strong spray shots of water and added a little more interest by lifting color with a balled up wet paper towel.

I let it dry and came back to it a few days later. (after I had done the puzzle pieces on the prior painting) I was thinking that this looked sort of lacy and I loved the color...  I got out the fun foam pieces and began to cut out leaf shapes. I think I ended up with 4 or 5 different shapes and sizes of leaves.

I wet each shape, placed it on the dry paper, picked it up and blotted the paper with a paper towel. I love this effect.

I guess the question now is, do use the whole thing or pick out some smaller portions? Lovin' the crop tool!

Who knows, I might end up with several paintings from one!

Life Interrupts - follow-up

Looking at my last post, I must say that this process on yupo paper had me somewhat stymied. I still couldn't find any 'things' in what had been done so far. Time to go back to basics.

We were told... if you like portraits, you will see faces. If you like trees and birds, you will see them. If you like water...and so forth.

Well, I like puzzles - and, this was surely a puzzle. Hmmm, maybe that's it. I began to cut out puzzle piece shapes from foam stickers. (I have had art bins for my grandchildren for years - lots of stickers to cut up!)

Since one of the properties of yupo paper is that the paint doesn't stick to it, I would try to lift some of the color. I wet a puzzle shape and gently put it on the paper. I pressed it down and then removed it. A quick blot with a paper towel, most of the paint lifts off and there is a shape!

That was interesting and fun! I experimented with two different shape cutouts and then tried to use the foam shape as a stamp. I applied paint to the stamp and put it on the paper.

A few more lifts and stamps and it just might be a piece of art...

"It's puzzling" 

A quick look at the foam cutouts... I stuck them to more foam as a backing. Easy to use...

Life interrupts...

Several years ago when I began this blog, I set a goal of posting twice a month. In the past, I sometimes met that goal... Lately, not so much. All by way of saying, "Oops...Life interrupts. It's been since mid April that I last posted."

And, life interrupting means that I haven't painted much recently. However, at a recent art league meeting we had a demonstration by a watercolor painter who does interesting things with yupo paper. Yupo is a synthetic paper...very smooth 'plastic'. Watercolor paint goes where it wants to go...sort of. The paint is not absorbed into the paper - it just sits on top.

Our demonstrator, Kathy Daywalt, took advantage of that property and covered the paper with paint. Actually she threw it around in what seemed to be a rather haphazard fashion. She let it dry and then looked at it. It's a little like looking at clouds and seeing images. Since she began as a portrait painter, she mostly 'sees' a face somewhere. She indicated that if we usually paint flowers, we would probably see flowers. If we paint birds or trees, we would see those images.

She defines her image with a watercolor crayon, wets the area with a brush and then lifts the paint with a crushed tissue. Amazing! She then uses other ways of defining and comes up with some very interesting textures and designs. see https://www.kathydaywalt.com/carousel.php?galleryID=180151

Well, anyway, it looked like fun. So I have been experimenting with yupo. What I realize is that my imagination (finding something in the 'clouds') needs work!

I brushed on and threw color at the paper.  See anything?

      

Maybe like this?

I couldn't come up with anything. So, I got out my spray bottle and played with it...creating interesting textures. I threw some more color at it. I added more texture by using a wadded up, wet paper towel and did some blotting. It still didn't look like any 'thing', but was getting more interesting. I set it aside to dry.

Eh, maybe I'll go back and visit it again. Any ideas?

I have three more that I am playing with. They are drying. Maybe I can catch up with my 2x monthly goal...

Inspiration...and then what?

I haven't been very inspired to paint lately...but then, as I was coming out of church last Sunday I looked down and saw these!

Beautiful red tulips! We usually see tulips from the side - we recognize their familiar shape. Looking down their throats gives a much different view. Maybe I would paint them like this!

I sketched out a few of these flowers.
I wanted to try to paint loosely so I began with 'wet on wet.' That is, I wet the paper and began to drop on color. A few dashes of yellow to highlight the centers and it's a mess.

Recently I have been looking at ink and watercolor sketches on line  - the line defining shapes and the color washes adding zip.  I tried adding some ink lines...

With all that messiness I could barely see the lines. I thought they needed to be more prominent. I got out my matchstick and ink and made the lines heavier. (Explanation of matchstick and ink - take a wooden matchstick, shave the end into a point and use it like a pen, dipping it into ink and draw with it. It's a heavier and uneven line - kind of interesting.)

I also added a little more color to it. I love red and blue together, but tried to go greener. It's not getting any better.

However, I carry a phrase in my head that repeats itself when I get this far in an experiment... "It's only paper!"

The next step was to just wash some of that mess off... and then I literally threw some paint at it!

Okay, so now it's really getting horrible... I put a few darks back in...

...and decided that I had played with it enough.

So, I stepped back and really looked at it. Was there anything I liked about it? Maybe that one tulip at the top on the left hand side.

SIMPLIFY!

I sketched one tulip...

I inked one tulip...

I painted one tulip...

I finished one tulip...

What I learned...sometimes I just have to get all that preliminary 'stuff' out of my system so I can paint the thing that inspired me...

An addendum: I took photos of this process to class. One suggestion was to add more darks to the original 'mess'...

It still doesn't work... I'm framing the single tulip!