Illustration Friday "Focused"

I painted this around the holidays from a sketch I made of my cat starring into the fireplace and it fits this week's  theme of "Focused" quite nicely.

A Little Dog - Charcoal drawing

Here's a recent commission. NOT a watercolor. My client requested charcoal. I started out by blocking in the dark using 2B charcoal pencil and worked my way through 4B and 6B to get even darker. I also worked all over alternating between the dark and highlights and then I'd squint and go even darker or lighter.This little doggie also had some bits of brownish/red in his fur so I pulled out my flesh colored conte sticks that I use for figure drawing. Those added a little bit of spark.

What About Black Watercolor?

Over the weekend, I painted one of my cats who unfortunately is black. I love her coat and she's the loviest cat I've ever owned but when it comes to painting her, it's tricky. When I first started using watercolors, I was a purist. I heard so much about watercolorists not using black that I just accepted that as truth. Of course, there are ways you can mix black rather than using black straight from a tube. A nice rich black can be achieved using alizarin crimson, pthalo green and ultramarine (or whatever dk red, green & blue you have). Recently, I decided to scrap the notion that watercolorists have to avoid black. I also decided to do  my own little test and see what all the talk is about black watercolor. Below is my experiment. I painted lamp black in a square as my "control" and then I mixed up different blacks. See what you think.

I realize all monitors are slightly different but honestly I cannot distinguish a major difference between these in person or on my monitor. Comments?

So I painted Juliet using various mixtures of lamp black with ultramarine, perm aliz crimson and pthalo green just for the heck of it. I do like it when the wash is lighter and you can see hints of another color, but overall the black looks black to me. ;)

Cats Love Sun

For this painting, I wanted to play around with rose madder, cobalt blue and new gamboge because they are wonderfully transparent and great when wanting that sun-kissed look and good when painting white in shadow. I did use a few other colors mostly notably in the background and in places on the porch and cat where I needed to go a bit darker I used permanent alizarin crimson and ultramarine blue.

I'm going to call this "Sunning"

Pardon My Excitement....

What a way to start 2010! I found out today (only because I haven't checked my other email account for 2 weeks) that the first book I illustrated in 2008 was published just before Christmas. I'm starting to feel like a real artist. ;)

Flowers for Jesus

Illustration Friday "Renewal"

I'm really not sick of the snow yet but given the chance to head south.....

This is my illustration for Illustration Friday's theme "Renewal" 5 x 7 watercolor on Arches 140 lb hot press.