Saturday, January 30, 2010

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.

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

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.

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

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. ;)


Friday, January 15, 2010

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"

Thursday, January 07, 2010

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

Sunday, January 03, 2010

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.


Drippy Daffodils

6 x 6 in. watercolor on Aquabord Daffodils are one of my favorite flowers and dozens of little clusters have been appearing in my yard s...