Summer Projects!

I'm really starting to get the hang of painting with watercolors. Or at the very least I'm becoming more comfortable with them. So much so that I'm starting a few projects (and I'm bored, it's summer vacation).

My first project will be for a friend. She's given me her name in Chinese characters and one of them stands for "orchid". Seeing as how I love to paint flowers, I'm going to paint a branch of orchids and then write her name in characters on the painting. I've yet to figure out the composition but here are some preliminary sketches.

I like the second one better since it gives me more space to write her name. And I like to leave some of the paper blank instead of filling the whole thing with color.

My next project has to do with poetry. See, I love short poems. I admire those who can write a meaningful, or even cryptic, poem in just a few words or lines. William Carlos Williams is one of the poets that I admire for that. I painted his poem, "This is Just to Say"; the title of the poem is also the title of the painting. I'll be selling it hopefully, once I figure out a price anyways.

WIP

Final piece

I was so happy when I saw that watercolor works just fine on Bristol Vellum. I was kind of scared that the paper wouldn't be strong enough. But I'm so glad that it held and that the colors went on smoothly.

More Watercolor Flowers

Again with the flowers. Seriously, I don't think I can stop. They're just so much fun to paint. Maybe I should branch out to birds or trees or other plants or people. Or at least acrylic paint.

Daisies

Maybe next time I'll try a different subject. Maybe....

A Flower Garden

Free time + love for watercolors + near infinite amounts of paper and flower pictures = watercolor flower extravaganza.

I've been looking through Jean Haines' book Atmospheric Watercolors (which I highly recommend) and in looking through her work and techniques, I've found inspiration for paintings. That book has inspired the several watercolor flower sketches that you've seen in previous posts as well as those in this post. I'm obviously having tons of fun (and finally using my sketchbooks) experimenting with watercolors. It's been an exercise of patience though; waiting for the previous layer to dry before adding another layer can be difficult. But here are some sketches and one actual painting on Blick's Aquabord of flowers.

These I call Summer Flowers. I've decided to only post details of the whole sketch because I didn't like how the whole thing looked together. This was just more experimenting with watercolor and ink.

This sketch is White Flowers. My first hand at painting the negative space to allow the flowers to come through. I also experimented with making the paint drip by painting with the sketchbook held up. If I could break this apart, I'd have the two flowers on the right be their own painting.

My favorite sketch so far. These are just yellow flowers in a bunch. I like the sketch as a whole but I really love the above detail. That's a painting all on its own.

More yellow flowers. This one is on the Aquabord, but it's not my favorite. I want to work on it more but I'm afraid I'll overwork it. At least from this one, I know what works and what doesn't.

These flowers are called Aubretia. They're white but I liked how the sketch looked with them being a light bluish purple. 

And there's my little flower garden so far. Most likely, I'll be painting more flowers in the future.

Pages from an Artist's Journal Part 3

I really seem to like drawing/painting flowers for some reason. Maybe because they can be so easily abstracted? And painted really quickly?

But anyways, here's a painting of a magnolia. They are one of my favorite flowers, and I actually didn't know they grew in Boston until recently. The pink trees that blossom with the full flowers every spring are magnolias! I thought they only grew in Georgia. I both love and hate how transient they are. Since spring is such a short season in Boston, the magnolia blossoms don't stay out for very long, like a month or two. Sometimes, they stay for an even shorter time if it rains and the petals fall off (read: much, much sadness for me).

Following are a few watercolor and ink sketches. I wanted to see how I could mix two of my favorite media together. The watercolor paint adds color to a black and white ink drawing, and I like how they look together. I do a watercolor wash first to get the color down, then I draw in pen and ink over it. It's like it combines loose color with tight drawings. And the dripping paint is my favorite part.

These flowers are almost fantastical aren't they?

Not my favorite painting of a bird, but I was just getting the hang of doing a wash first then a drawing over it.

These are watercolor paintings of cherry blossoms. This is the wash I did before drawing over it with pen and ink.

Detail of wash

Detail

Detail

I really like the first detail, the one focusing on the actual cherry blossoms. I might be doing more of these kinds of paintings, they're fun.

Also, be sure to vote on the poll on the sidebar! It's basically just asking what type of artwork you'd like to see more of.

The End, The Beginning

After looking through an old planner that I used during my senior year of high school, I found this little gem. It's basically a poem about leaving high school and going to college, how it's both a beginning and an end. To capture that concept, I made the poem a palindrome. The punctuation is different of course but the lines are in the same order, just reversed. Originally, I just wrote the first part and the reverse reading was understood for me. But I figured it'd be much easier to read if both the original and the reversal were written out with the correct punctuation. 

For the most part, the different readings have a different tone (not sure if I succeeded in that or not, I was mostly making sure that the poem made sense in both directions). I revised it a bit from what was written in my planner, the wording was a bit off at times and needed to be simplified.

And don't worry, I am enjoying the college experience.

The End, The Beginning

The end.
I never thought it'd be
here so fast.
College came
with stress.
Trying to remember everything,
collecting my life story, I'm always
remembering every test, every success, every grade. It's 
so impossible, 
can I leave my comfort? It's
who I am. But
with college, I'm not
the old. I'm new.
Now is
college, and high school
is done. Here comes 
the beginning

The beginning
is done. Here comes
college, and high school
now is
the old. I'm new.
With college, I'm not
who I am. But
can I leave my comfort? It's
so impossible.
Remembering every test, every success, every grade - it's
collecting my life story. I'm always
trying to remember everything.
With stress
college came
here so fast.
I never thought it'd be
the end.

Pages from an Artist's Journal Part 2

Watercolors are such a wonderful paint. I know I say this for just about everything I work with but it's true, watercolors are wonderful. They're quick and easy - many small sketches can be done with them - and they make painting anything so much fun. By abstracting the subject matter, I can play with how I move the brush over the paper or with how the paint moves on the paper.

I call this small sketch "A Trio of Lilies". I see these flowers mostly in people's yards. They're very pretty and very orange; they also stand out from their typical green background. I splattered a burnt sienna/ultramarine mixture to mirror the spots that are usually on lilies. I could probably stand to learn to control where the paint goes.

This is "Hibiscus". It's another watercolor sketch, and I used a reference photo (found here). This one was also fun to do. I was a little more patient with this one since I painted in layers; I waited for the paint to dry and then painted another layer on it. This might end up being a sketch for a final painting at some point.

Pages from an Artist's Journal

What better way to be inspired and be creative than to start an artist's journal? To be honest, I've been thinking of starting one for a very. Long. Time. I've bought a ton of sketchbooks and sketch pads just to start an artist's journal because I knew that once I did, I could actually see my creative process and practice some techniques. Usually, I'm averse to creating unfinished artwork or doing technical drawings. If I'm going to practice, I'm going to practice for a finished piece of artwork, not in sketchbook. I mean yes I do draw occasional sketches but it's usually with a finished piece in mind, rarely with the intention to just sketch and practice.

So now you can see my process as I experiment with different kinds of media, different kinds of techniques, and different kinds of subject matter. These are all done with something under it first, an underpainting of sorts. I hate looking at a blank, white piece of paper. I need some kind of ground to give me ideas. So for each one, I either painted over a sketch or painted a light wash first before doing something on the paper. Not all of these are going to be awesome (I'm actually not too fond of the first one) but they'll all help me see what works and what doesn't.

Scary isn't it? It's an orange lily that I did with acrylic paint. You can see the original sketch underneath; it was a portrait that I wasn't too fond of. So I painted over it.

My favorite one so far. I'm not exactly sure why, I just like working in charcoal maybe. But in case you were wondering I did accidentally-on-purpose single out the eye. The circle around the eye is the only one not painted on with water. This was done over another less-than-satisfactory sketch that I did in ink.

I was basically just experimenting with watercolor and pen. I wanted to see how I would do lettering with it. I concluded that the black outline wasn't the best. It would have looked cooler in my opinion had I just done it with watercolor. But I had fun painting it!

So expect more art journal postings later. Maybe I'll do a series or something so I can have a definite idea of what I'm going to do.