Friday, June 11, 2010

Painting Little Jewels

I am having lots of fun wrinkling up wet watercolor paper and then dropping or painting with watercolors--I then let it dry a little and go back in and do a little negative painting - My paper does not hold up to this technique very well I'm using a student grade 90lb -I am going to try some other papers - 

I'm not very familiar with negative painting techniques and sometimes I  just define an area or two - but talk about loose - this is very very loose - two of these pieces I have done in other media I think I blogged them if so I'll post a link to my original versions - I have no idea if these are any "good" but I do know that I enjoy making them and looking at them so I guess that is all that counts for me- these are all small 3"x5"-
This is rock creek I did it in colored pencil as a thank you note to my uncle here

I tried this scene in pastels here  I like this version better.

Saturday, June 5, 2010

another try at Pastel landscape

Still working on getting looser and how to do leaves against the sky so the leaves and the sky do not look choppy.  I do not like the leaves and sky area in this and it is not fixable so I think I need to do some small practice studies so I can figure out how to get the look I want.  I tried a watercolor underpainting on wallis sanded paper on this piece.   The watercolor caused the paper to buckle even though I had taped it firmly - next time I will dry mount and see if that holds the paper flat while wet - it did flatten back out when it had dried.  As usual I overworked this so the entire underpainting is gone-   there were several areas that would have been lovely had I restrained myself and  let them peek through the pastels - this is small 8" x 10" -  It has been so long since I posted on blogger things have changed and I can't figure out how to left align the text - there it's fixed-

Thursday, June 3, 2010

Mangoes and Crayons

I spent the day in my studio - Worked on a pastel landscape I had started last month - and then decided to work with crayon - I've always loved the colors on mangoes and I had two in the kitchen - For some reason I feel very relaxed when I work with crayons and the best part of crayon is you have to quit before you are ready to because plain paper will only take so much crayon - 5"x7" on plain paper