Beach Boogie

From a snow fight to a dance on the beach! This was also a painting done from a cutting of a larger painting similar to the last post, called Snow Fight. There was a bit of red, yellow and some blue left so I could produce this design. I really didn't know what the scene would be, and then I thought about being on a beach. There are several cartoony characters having fun there, and some Brazil-inspired houses on the steep cliff side. I kind of like the reduced colour scheme, maybe it is something I can use in the future. At the moment I am trying to to a new version of "The Conversation." but it is not going too well. In the end, these little throw-away studies may turn out to be the most interesting things. Guess I will keep them!

5 x 7" hot press, watercolour, February 2019

Snow Fight

This is what it would look like if two giant robot aliens painted with a McDonald's colour scheme had a snow fight while a turtle-snail looked on. It is a long story indeed, especially how this painting came to be. I did a painting called "The Conversation" a while back and wanted to show it in the new poster frame but it was too big, so I trimmed off some of the superfluous edging of that painting to get it down to 24 x 36" which left some 5 inch bits. The sky in this painting here is the old sky from the other painting, while the snow was the blank paper around the old painting. The other thing here was that I was trying to use up the remainder of the paint on my palette before cleaning it off, but the only colours remaining were yellow and red. That is called the creative process. 

hot press 5 x 7" watercolour. February 2019

Lemon Study

Just in time for summer I have some swamp land in Florida to sell, complete with air conditioned habitation tubes. I made several versions of Lemon Sunset, large and small, most of them are posted on my blog. This one was a test run of the new brushes I got recently, to see how they handled in various styles and circumstances. The big difference is in how sharp they are for detail, which is usually the case for a new brush, but these ones give me the feeling that the tip will stay sharp for a long time to come. The other thing I notices was how much paint they carry on one continuous brush stroke. That made certain effects more feasible, for example the charged-shadow of the trees on the hill top, they were done wet in wet. I think my next large work will be another attempt at Lemon Sunset, why not, eventually I will get it right, right? At the moment I am re-working "The Conversation" an old painting I did on large format (36 x 44"). I trimmed it down a bit, cropped you could say, but then decided to repaint the whole thing on the back side with a new composition that better reflects the idea I had for that painting. I am making a series of small studies for "The Conversation" reworked, and will post them when I get a good one.

5 x 8" hot press, watercolour. Feb. 2019