Anatomy of a Watercolor Painting

A while back I had the bright idea of photographing the steps of a simple watercolor painting. I've just rediscovered the series and thought I'd share it with you. I also hope to share more of my paintings in this space over the next year, much like I shared some family heirlooms with you in 2011. So in case you ever wondered about watercolor, read on.

This is not a particularly stellar work of art. I usually paint from photographs, but I just made this up in my head back in November 2009 (though it's loosely based on a field I see on my drive back from Grand Rapids that is often full of beautiful black cows).

Choose your colors and paint samples to see how they look dry. Here all the washes are about the same (aka, the water to paint ratio is the same in all of them—to make colors lighter you add water, darker you add paint).

Here are the washes on my palette. I don't often make all my washes at once (because if you don't use them at once and some water evaporates, it will end up a darker wash, of course) but since I knew I'd be doing this painting very fast, I made everything up at the beginning.

First I wet down the whole paper (which is held to my board with masking tape) and lay in the color for the sky. Darker up top, lighter at the bottom. Often it is easier to do a sky with your board upside down so that the extra paint flows toward what will eventually be the top of the sky.

The field is next. Note that it's not all one flat color. A field has shadows and highlights depending on the plants, the lighting, and if there's a hollow, etc.

Then throw in the base of the treeline using wet-on-wet technique (dropping different colors/washes of paint onto wet paper). This gives it a soft effect. The tendency when first starting out to paint trees and foliage is to try to do individual plants, which never really works out on a landscape. You will find that you have better results if you paint as though you are looking through a foggy window or looking at something without your glasses. Look for the overall effect. Don't miss the forest for the trees, as it were.

Next I added a darker reddish color to represent staghorn sumac, which proliferates at the edge of woodlands and along highways. I started wet-on-wet, let dry, then added more paint on the dried paper, giving it some texture.

Add some more defined trees, including conifers which add a nice contrasting color (green and red are opposites on the color wheel, so green and orange set each other off nicely). Note that they don't all appear as whole trees going all the way to the ground. Some are left as just tips giving the impression of deciduous trees in front of them. Trees that are closer to the viewer are darker. Colors become more muted as they get further away.

To finish off this painting I added dark dried grasses and barbed wire fencing in the foreground and little black cows in varying positions in the middle ground, which is always my weak spot in painting landscapes. I find the background and foreground to be fairly easy and usually enjoyable. But that middle ground always challenges me.

Frankly, even after two years, I'm still not so sure about those cows.

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Lone Oak Leaf

A little something I wrote and painted on the first day of my staycation, inspired by a trip to Fenner Nature Center with the boy. Brisk air, streaming sunshine, and the sweet, slow death of fall.

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My, How Time Flies

In mid-February of 2010 I posted this at my old blog address. It took me awhile to get going on the hand quilting, but by the end of March I was definitely at it. Now it is nearing the end of another March in another year, and I'm still . . . not . . . did you think I was going to say "done?" I'm still not even half way done.

Hand quilting does take awhile, but not a year. Unless you put it away for an entire summer and don't work on it once. Unless when you finally pull it back out again you feel that somehow it will finish itself if you just leave it in your sunroom long enough. Unless you largely ignore it even on the week you took off work to work on it.

Sigh.

The past few mornings I've been working diligently on it. I figure that one really nice thing I could do for my family during my Lenten mornings would be to get the gargantuan quilting frame out of the sunroom by the time we really want to be able to spend a lot of time in that room. The yard is a swamp now, but in a month it will be beautiful and I know that we'll want to spend some time in the sunroom with the windows open. I'd like to have a few friends over to tea in that room, but it's a little hard to have a conversation with someone with eight and a half feet of quilting frame at about eye level. The boy is interested in watching the birds eat from the feeders, and that's the best place for a little guys to see them. Even my husband has been using that room to work on sermons.

So my fingers will continue to trudge along, stitch by stitch, trying to get this silly thing done and out of that room. Mornings, evenings, weekends. I know Zach will be happy when it's done. And so will I.

In other news, my yard is filled with birds enjoying the feeders, including these house finches.

House finches are not natives in this area of the country. They were brought from the Western US to the East Coast as pets and eventually enough of them escaped to produce a viable wild population. So their range includes both the coasts and a ways inland, but you won't typically find them in the middle of the continent. Eventually, I imagine, the two populations will meet somewhere in Nebraska and think, "Hey, you look familiar!"

Besides quilting, which is a fine indoor activity for an adult, today we've been finger painting.

That, my friends, is a look of supreme concentration. In a matter of minutes, the boy produced five lovely works of art. If only I could be so productive in my creative efforts! Of course, they do all look strikingly similar, and quite a bit like his palette at the end of the session.

Incidentally, if you want to be transported instantly back to childhood, the smell of fingerpaints will do it. Smells just like elementary school.

So the rain and sleet come down outside, but inside our little brick house it is warm and full of color, and we can hear the birds singing.

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The Art of Alphonse Mucha

My 2011 calendar features the art of Alphonse Mucha, a Moravian (then part of Austria, present day Czech Republic) artist who painted in the Art Nouveau style in the late 19th and early 20th century. Here is the panel for January.

La Poesie (Poetry), 1898

Even if you've never heard his name, it's likely you've seen some of his artwork. He usually painted beautiful women in flowing dresses with flowing tresses and adorned the perimeter of his works with images drawn from nature: irises, laurel, lilies, birds, grapevines, poppies, etc. His work often included circular motifs, fans, Celtic knots, and geometric designs remeniscent of ancient Greek pottery. The colors he chose were warm and vibrant, his models sumptuous and sexy.

Mucha did a lot of commercial work on commission, including theatre posters (most famously those starring the lovely actress Sarah Bernhardt); advertisements for biscuits, laundry detergent, perfume, champagne, chocolate, and other products; and . . . calendars!

Last year I bought a book called Alphonse Mucha Masterworks that is overflowing with his beautiful artwork and some history and stories behind his commissions. Mucha died in July 1939 after being captured by the Gestapo and coming down with pneumonia during interrogation. He was released but never fully recovered. He died when my house was being built.

At the end of 2011 I plan to keep some of the calendar prints and use them in the decor of my sunroom, a little tribute to an iconic artist who apparently shared my love of flowers and plants and who portrayed beautiful, sensual women (many of whom would today be considered overweight!) in gentle and sometimes powerful ways.

I encourage you to do a Google image search for "Alphonse Mucha" and feast your eyes on his lovely work.

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The Golden Days of Autumn

This is why, come fall, I always want to get back to painting . . .

The problem is I can never do it justice. God is a far more accomplished artist than I.

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