Happy New Year! Feliz Ano Novo!

I will likely not have an opportunity to add new posts for the remainder of the year, so I wanted to leave any new or returning visitors my best wishes of a wonderful 2010! Cheers!

Demo at the Depot Art Center, Progress Photos

In a post back in October, I described the demo I did at the Depot Art Center in Littleton. Jeff Owens attended that session, and was kind enough to allow me to share some of the photos he took at the occasion. They allow me to show the progress of the painting in more detail below:

1. Here I am describing my approach. I tried to describe my goals and decision-making process, as well as answer questions, throughout the session.

2. First washes in the sky area. I treated this demo as I would a plein air session. The photo of the scene was pasted on the wall, but the setup, speed, technique and level of detail employed were the same I use outdoors.
I used a quarter size sheet of Saunders Waterford Cold Press paper. It was not pre-soaked or stretched, I simply clipped it to my board, sketched outlines with pencil and started painting.

3. This photo shows the build up of wet on wet colors for the dark shapes of the farm buildings.
I am working here with a Rekab squirrel mop size 6. The palette is a metal watercolor box with both full pans and half pans. The colors were from Schmincke, Winsor & Newton, Da Vinci.

4. At this point, I changed to a size 24 Da Vinci Cosmotop Spin to work on the mass of trees and the details of the fence and other dark shapes that connected the left and right side of the painting.

5. I added the darkest shapes, making sure to blend them together for continuity. I worked carefully to preserve highlights, and to keep the negative shape of the figure.

6. In this photo, I'm adding the details of the figure, with the help of a smaller synthetic travel brush.

I was at the 1 1/2 hour period, so I had to rush to insert some last details and adjust some colors and values.

The final result is shown below.

Golden Ponds II, November

Golden Ponds II, watercolor on hot press paper, 22x12

This is my first painting in more than a month (finally!). I went to Golden Ponds in Longmont with my wife and our baby for a walk two weeks ago, and found the quality of light on this cool late morning irresistible. I took many reference photos and worked on this rendering in the studio over many nights.

I chose this view of the scene, with the rhythmic spacing of the trees, and the bright highlights on the grasses. A multitude of techniques were employed: soft wet-on-wet passages in the background, applications of color over ivory black on the trees, free caligraphy on the branches, watercolor pencils on the grasses, splattering with water on the pond... Definitely fun to experiment with all these techniques.

Here's a detail that shows the varied approaches to the different areas.