Watercolors - Happy New Year's Eve

Another year under my belt. Literally! I don't own belts anymore. Painting isn't aerobic.Wouldn't it be great if every time I picked up a brush I burned off 100 calories! We'd have many more artists if that would be the case.

This is a nude watercolor I did a few years ago. I went to a class in Montpelier being given by Billy Brauer. More about him later. I was the only artist using watercolors. I'd notice other artists taking peeks at my work as the time passed. Seems they don't see many people using watercolor in life drawing classes.

Billy is an accomplished oil painter and his name known in many art circles.We've known one another since I took my first life drawing class from him back in the mid 70's. So it was fun being in one of his classes again. I wish Montpelier wasn't over 30 miles away, and I was comfortable driving that far in winter and at night, because I would love to go to classes all the time.

Notice all the different colors needed to create skin tones. There is a lot of painting wet into wet in order to soften edges creating roundness. The background is pure imagination on my part. Laying on a blanket looking out at water and sky?

Watercolor and Winter

It doesn't look like this up here yet. But it will. Skiers paradise. Big challenge for watercolor artists.

I painted this from a photo during the winter of 2001. I was border- line insane anyway, so why not? This painting was a lesson in patience. There is absolutely no way anyone should attempt to do this outdoors. I know people do set up and paint watercolors outside in the winter up here. But this winter scene uses the white of the paper for all the whites and I doubt anyone could stay outside long enough to pull this off before freezing to death.

There are a minimum of 4 layers of color applied over 2 layers of masking. I added my German Shepard Dog, Sadie, at the end in order to give the viewer something to measure the whole scene by. This painting is also large by my standards. It is 22 X 30 inches, known as a full sheet.

Of course, once I put my dog in the painting, I couldn't put a price on it and so the painting now belongs to my son.

Watercolors_ to paint or not to paint

There are so many moments when I would just love to have nothing else to do but paint. Then there are plenty of moments when I have nothing else to do but I also don't have the slightest desire to do anything.

More often than not, life just gets in the way of having large chunks of time to spend uninterrupted making art. I wish I could arrange the time, and myself, so that I would know in advance that I have a minimum of four hours that will be just for me to set my butt down and feel like painting.

This is one of many reference photos that I have told myself I will do a painting from. I was walking with my friend taking our dogs out to the end of her field behind her house in Waitsfield. It was one of those rare days of perfection. The tree jumped out at me as if I were wearing 3D glasses. But it was the fence that convinced me to take the photo. I love old fences and without the fence this wasn't all that interesting an image to me. You agree?

2008 was a lousy year for trying to get outside to paint. Spring and Summer were non stop months of rain. I drove around with my supplies in my Jeep but never took them out. Mother nature decided to bless us with a glorious Fall and it lasted for a wonderfully long space of time. Seeing the beautiful, outrageous, colors is one thing. Painting them is another thing altogether. Sometimes it seems impossible that what I am seeing is real and if I painted what I am seeing somebody might want to have me locked up for being insane.

Those leaves have been replaced with snowflakes and that is another story.

Watercolors - Early Years

I thought it might be interesting to look at some early examples of works from the workshops I took. For reasons unknown to me I don't have the common fear of painting the sky. However, like many newbies I didn't have a clue how to paint the greens. Each one of these paintings has one color in it that does not exist in nature, Thalo green. This is a staining dye and must be combined with another color for it to be believable as a color in nature. For me this was lesson #1 and I have struggled with painting greens ever since.

In this painting I got very involved with the foreground and without thinking zapped those trees with thalo once again. I even managed to put thalo in the distant mountains!

This was painted before the other two examples. I did get the hang of mixing greens eventually. In this image I handled the tones/values correctly but my, oh my, look at those ugly green lollipop trees. I guess I was really impressed with the clay pot in the right foreground too. Not only does it stick out like a sore thumb it is also holding an impossible tree.





One other thing you should know about these staining dye paints, not only do they stain the paper, they will stain just about any porous surface/material. I have a friend who was not paying attention to the fact that her long necklace was dangling into her palette and when she stood up straight she ended up creating a permanent abstract painting across the chest of the pale yellow blouse she was wearing.

Watercolors-watermark test

I painted this as a result of reading about using Art as a way of healing the soul. Since I was trying to find my way out of a bad turn in my life, I figured it was worth a try.

These eyes have been doodled by me for years beyond count. I decided to paint them and just let myself go. I haven't shown the piece outside of friends and family before now because it seemed too personal and strange. While I still see it as strange, it doesn't bother me to share it any longer. Maybe someone else will identify with it.

The question is: Did I put a watermark on the piece or not?

New blogger - Old painter

It is my goal to present some of my artwork, past and present, and talk about how I became an artist, and how it relates to my lifestyle here in The Mad River Valley in Vermont. (A tiny state up in the North East in the United States for those of you who may never have heard of it before.)

Since I am 62 years old, I will undoubtedly end up chatting about friends, books I've enjoyed, the locals, the visitors, my dogs, and anything else that inspires me one way or another. I am new to blogging and hope you will forgive me if I make some silly mistakes getting started. Being self taught in the use of computers, with the help of a very dear friend, I have decided to leap into this world of blogs. Perhaps some of you will enjoy reading the ramblings of an old woman who has done a fair amount of different things and is now a Granny and a painter of watercolors, I hope so.

Watercolor - Becoming a Painter

Being a painter of watercolors began as a fun thing to try my hand at and later became a substitute for taking anti-depressant drugs. It wasn't that I had never painted before, it was that I'd never been a care-giver for the elderly before. I'd been dabbling in a bit of drawing and making an attempt to paint for a little less than a year when I had taken on caring for two very old in-laws, both capable of driving any sane human to want to take extreme measures. I needed a good reason to run away from home for a few hours whenever the opportunity came my way and painting was my salvation. At the time I believed I would have my own life back within, at most, a year. It would be six years (1994-2000) and many workshops and paintings later before I ended up on Wellbutrin anyway. Just to give you an idea, one of the visiting nurses commented that she'd been doing her job for over 30 years and that Auntie was the worse patient she'd ever had to deal with and my father-in-law wasn't a charmer either. So I am convinced that rediscovering my artistic side, along with taking meds, kept me from running into the woods howling like a banshee.

At first I just drove 30 miles to Montpelier, the capital of VT btw, to pick up some very basic watercolor tools/elements/necessities and have a look see at what was available up here in the boonies. I purchased a few tubes of paint, a couple of cheap brushes, a portable easel, and some paper. I dug out my old sketch books and pencils and dug in. Then I got some good books and just followed the directions. Wasted a fair amount of paper and paint in the process but it is a good thing to get used to if you want to take a stab at watercolor painting. A good place to look for supplies on the net is www.cheapjoes.com