Cloudscapes

Watercolor lends itself so well to painting clouds (and water).

Watercolor and tape

I have a book that suggests all kinds of ideas and techniques to start the creative process. This painting began with a wet-in-wet background and then strips of tape randomly placed while the objects were painted. There were more layers and the tape got moved around and I painted overlapping flowers in the background. This is the end result - fresher and more interesting I think than if I'd just set out to paint a still life.

Illustration Friday - refresh

There's nothing like jumping in water to refresh you on a hot day.

Painting surface

The surface you paint on makes a big difference to how the paint behaves, at least with watercolor. I applied two layers of gesso to my paper, the second including some blots and splatters and brush marks. The watercolor tended to pool and puddle much more than on regular paper. Some of the texture visible in the barns is from the gesso but in retrospect I wish I had done more of that to see what happened.

Building fun

This was inspired by a show at the Williams College Museum of Art of 3-D architectural models that students had created. I loved the variety of the models as they were lined up next to each other but they needed some little people to explore them.

Experimenting

I did a quick little painting to see whether only using the more expensive Winsor and Newton gouache paints would result in stronger colors than mixing them with my cheaper ones. I think it did. The top image is how it looked just after washing off the ink. The second is after removing more ink in Photoshop. I thought maybe the top one had more character and the second one had lost some vibrancy so I increased the Brightness and Contrast to get to the third one.Which do you like best?

Illustration Friday - space

Nothing makes you as aware of the vastness of space as a moonlit night full of stars.