Now that I don’t have a studio with everything set up already, it’s getting tough for me to paint in watercolor in between all the baby stuff that I do every few hours. But yesterday, Cate took an extra long nap and I got to do a little painting. I did this for the January Virtual Paintout challenge in Summit County, Colorado. It was a good opportunity to paint a snow scene. I’m thinking I might use this painting for my Christmas card next year. The reference image was cloudy and gray, but I turned it into a night scene. I also took liberties with the trees as you can see.
I sketched these daisies last week after my baby shower (one of them). Yesterday was my other baby shower and now I am swimming in so much baby paraphernalia that I find it overwhelming! I am so lucky because I was only expecting a fraction of what I got. I was going to try to be super minimalist, but now I’m thinking that my baby girl will be pampered for sure.
In my mind I’ve been avoiding the inevitable that I am running out of time to do certain tasks uninterrupted. Now that my life has settled down a bit and I’m done moving, I’m going to try to do as much drawing and painting as possible before the baby gets here. Also, I’ve been trying to do some reading because I probably won’t be doing much of that either.
The other day I sat outside to draw these beautiful lilies. Unfortunately, it was much too hot for me and I was harassed by bees. I did finish my drawing, but I felt rushed. I added the watercolor later, indoors.
While looking through my paper collection yesterday, I found a pad of watercolor paper that had an old drawing in it, from over a year ago. I had made an ink drawing of a Mexico City street, originally intended for the Virtual Paintout, but I had abandoned the whole piece because the drawing had many errors in perspective. I never ended up starting over and submitting anything that month, so it kind of felt like a failure to me. When I looked it over yesterday though, I still liked one part of the drawing, so I decided to do something with it. I painted it in watercolor and then cropped out the part that I liked. Now I have this colorful mini painting sitting next to my drafting table.
This is what I finally settled on for my Virtual Paintout submission for December. It wasn’t a sunny scene like I had originally imagined, but it feels cold and windy more like it really is outside right now. Below is the pencil sketch that I completed before I did the pen and ink drawing. I ended up painting the sky in just watercolor, but if I had decided to draw the clouds in ink, I would have used lines similar to my sketch.
Yesterday I was looking around on Google Street View for a good scene to use for this month’s Virtual Paintout in Rio de Janeiro. I didn’t find a scene that I wanted to use for the challenge, but I did find an interesting tree to sketch. I was attracted to the shape of the foliage and the gnarled trunk and branches. It was especially fun to draw the leaves.
I spent most of the day today adding a Contact Page to my site (it is one of the tabs on the header). I have wanted to add one for a long time, and I finally sat down and did it. It looks really plain and simple, but the contact form part actually took longer than I thought it would. And although I didn’t do anything creative in the art sense, I do think playing around with html and css is pretty creative (especially since most of it is trial and error for me).
Every fall I make some sort of leaf drawing or painting. In fact, leaves seem to be a favorite theme of mine all year long. They seem to have a lot of personality and each one is different, which I love.
While doing a Google image search for “paintings of leaves,” I found the site for Vermont artist Gary Milek. He uses egg tempera, gold leaf and watercolor to create really beautiful and detailed landscapes and florals. He and his wife run a joint gallery and botanical garden called Cider Hill Gardens. I think I will add it to my list of places in Vermont that I want to visit next time I get up there.
This is a view of the Connecticut River as seen from the French King Bridge, one of the many special places in Western Massachusetts. I reworked this colored pencil sketch from last year to make this painting. I do a lot of work in ink and watercolor but this was definitely an experiment in a different style for me. It was a lot of fun, and also a welcome change as I haven’t done a lot of colorful work recently.
I’m heading to the post office tomorrow morning to send this painting off to Norway. I’m participating in the Twitter Art Show organized by David Sandum (@DavidSandumArt on Twitter). David had the brilliant idea to leverage a number of his Twitter contacts to raise money for his local library (for children’s books). I thought this was a great opportunity to help out, and I hope my painting finds a good home in Norway.
(Note: I’m @CAPappas on Twitter if you would like to follow me.)
I had another opportunity to draw Olivia, one of my favorite Whippets, this time in ink with watercolor and colored pencil. My first sketches from this past February were done from life in ballpoint pen. When I was making these sketches I was trying to practice and basically figure out how their heads were constructed. When I made this recent piece I used a photo reference and I wanted it to appear more flat, as if the shapes fit together like puzzle pieces.
This is a small (5 x 7) painting I did from a photo I snapped during my trip to Ogunquit, Maine this past August. This area is a salt marsh where the Ogunquit River meets the ocean. It was really interesting to see how this same scene changed with the tides (it was close to high tide when I took this). I am thinking of remaking this into a larger (11 x 14ish) painting, although I’m still considering if I want to do it in ink and watercolor or some other medium, like colored pencil. I want the grass areas to look really textural, because that is what originally attracted me to the scene. The grass was long and matted and it looked very soft, although I’m sure up close it was anything but.
I love finding new artists! A reader emailed me a link after I posted On Water and I wanted to share. Amy Arntson paints really beautiful and large watercolor paintings of water. I especially like her painting Dark Water 1.
