Weather Drill

Last but not least I just finished this painting at the end of March. My goal this year is for three blog posts per month, so here is one more to make it three. The name 'Weather Drill' was more politically correct than the original title of the painting that I was thinking of: 'Screw the Weather'. (there is literally a drill surrounded by bad weather). Anyways, just for revenge it actually snowed today.

As an artist you pick up little ideas and techniques from other artists (living and dead) along the journey. I learned a lot from Joy and Starkey, two Canadian watercolour painters, and also Van Gogh, who of course was a famous oil painter from Holland. I also learned a thing or two from Darlington- in this case I was inspired by Atmosfear a painting I made awhile back that was full of pink sky and bad weather. I guess by the time you are being inspired by yourself as an artist it also means you are out of ideas, or a little mad, or both !?

5 x7 " hot press, Watercolour, March 2019

Design Element

Just like I saw it on TV, here is an imaginary plan for a house in the woods. Actually, what I saw (on Netflix) was a show about amazing houses, architectural projects in remote locations. I don't think this house could ever really be made, not to mention banana's wouldn't rain from the sky, but you never know. As I scanned these for the web, I realized that the windows of the building here, are the same as the window of the last painting I just posted (Colourful Ideas). That means my imaginary home in the wilderness has a laboratory on the top floor. Shorter commute at least!

To depict bright colours in a painting it is tempting to dive into the palette and get some pure yellow or red or green, maybe just take it straight from the tube. The results will be better if the composition includes two things, complementary colours, and a near-neutral background. Contrasts are easily understood- if you put red and green next to each other they amplify the visual. Here, I put purple in the background to bring out the yellows, and used a green outline to contrast the reds. The concept of near-neutral is a bit different, that is where you put a neutral version of near the colour that you are trying to amplify. In this painting, the grassy lawn in front of the building contains a mix of the bright yellow, the brick red, and the green, then a bit of water to make it pale. Now, when someone looks at the painting the yellow banana-peel shapes really pop because of the neutral that surrounds it.

5 x 7" cold press. Watercolour 2019

Colourful Ideas

Good ideas are bright ideas, so great ideas are colourful ideas? I was thinking about all the different graduate students I have supervised over the years or from when I was a graduate student and had this vision of colourful, living sculptures in the laboratory. The background of this painting is a surreal laboratory environment, finished in neutral pastel tones. The three objects are kind of like warped cell phones, with bright, contrasting colours inside of them. It is the people who make the discoveries after all, not the lab equipment.

Making blended washes is a good technique to use in watercolour. I have read a book called 'Everything you Need to Know About Watercolor", and one chapter was on colour chickens. The exercise had you mixing two pigments and letting them naturally blend together on the paper to create an interface, resulting in a chicken-like shape. The trick is getting the moisture right, too much and the colours just merge into one wash, too little, and the colours dry without mixing. I used the colour-chicken concept in several places, the obvious being within the three main figures. I also used the technique in the floor by blending red, yellow, and a neutral grey, and blue. Each pigment has its own temperament that will affect how it blends, so it is worth practicing a lot to get the feel for it. Now I am tempted to do a new painting called colour chickens.

5 x 7" cold press. Watercolour. March 2019

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

Floating

Floating into the new year with style I got to use my new Windsor Newton series 7 sable brushes - it really is amazing that they make a difference in the amount of paint they carry and precision of the points. I used different sized brushes for the different effects, the numbers I have being 00, 2, 4 and 6. Having the extra paint in the brush let me do the seamless three-toned wash in the sky in the background, and then the different sized seed pods floating around. The last detail I threw in was the skyline at the bottom, I was going to leave that out because of Chinese art which typically leaves the open space, but then I put the detail in, and kind of regretted it at first. But now I really like the look of it, it kind of looks like New York's east river with some dandelion seeds floating around.

5 x 7" hot press, Watercolour, Jan. 2019