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.
The concept of posting photos on Fridays is nothing new, but Ann’s post made me give it a second thought. I’ve been wanting to take more photos these days, and I think I will join her. The sky was truly breathtaking this afternoon and I had to run to get my camera in time to capture it.
Hurricane (tropical storm) Irene proved to be a real non-event for my family other than our power going out for one hour. There was a gentle, steady rain with almost no wind. I’ve seen the lake more choppy on a sunny day in fact. It was generally just a gray, yucky day. Thankfully, I baked up some tasty whole wheat blueberry-oat scones that morning.
Below is a watercolor I made last year of the Deerfield River as seen from the Bridge of Flowers. It is so sad to think of it as such a destructive force. I still have some reference photos of the bridge itself from that trip and I’ve been thinking of making a painting to remember it like it used to be. I’m sure they will fix it all up at some point, but it will be a long time and will take a lot of money.
I based this drawing on a blurry photo I took at dusk. It was more of a pen test than anything else, really. This drawing is of a certain place on the shore where geese like to gather. There is a crumbling stone wall and the remnants of an old foundation next to a grassy area. My favorite part about it is the silhouette of the trees against the sky. I might do another version of this some time, except drawing the water differently.
I tried out my new pen on a different sort of paper here. The paper is highly textured, which I wouldn’t ordinarily use for ink, but I thought the pale pink would go nicely with my gray ink. There was a bit of feathering but this paper is very absorbent so I did not have to worry about the ink not drying. When writing or drawing on a paper like this, the most important thing to keep an eye out for is little bits of paper getting stuck in the nib and causing ink spatters or dragging.
One thing I was pleased with was that I thought this pen was nearly out of ink but I was able to make this whole drawing (with hundreds of tiny strokes) and have yet to refill the pen.
After taking a break from the Virtual Paintout for five months, I decided to give it another go. This month, the location is New Zealand, which is a great place for finding beautiful landscape scenery. I’m really happy with how this painting turned out because it seemed so easy for me to paint, which is rarely the case. I almost completely forgot about the time and just had fun painting.
Although I dislike when bloggers constantly apologize and make excuses, I do feel bad for not posting sooner. I haven’t been sick, per se, but I’ve certainly been feeling “sickly” for the past month or so. Even though I still have pretty much no energy, I decided that it was time that I try to get back into my normal routine again. I took out my watercolors today, and had more fun than I remember in a long time.
I made this sketch last night while thinking about how nice it would be for the snow to start melting soon! Over the past few days, I have been doing some watercolor and colored pencil paintings, but I want to look them over some more before posting.
Yesterday, I did some cleaning up of my work online by deleting two of my old blogs dating back to 2005. I know that nothing is gone forever once posted online, but it felt good to purge some things from the past that I don’t necessarily want to revisit. Plus, most of the traffic was from bots and Google image searches. I also had a number of images ripped off or used for hot-linking. I am not planning on deleting anything on this blog, but I am also more thoughtful about what I post these days.
I still have my work archived on flickr, but I am considering making some of those images private. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how I am representing myself and I don’t see the value of having a lot of older and lower quality work available for public viewing.
Do you edit your portfolio from time to time to remove work that doesn’t represent you any longer? I would love to hear what you think.
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 playing around with some watercolors while looking for a scene to paint for my Virtual Paintout submisison. Afterwards I finally settled on what I was going to paint and I spent most of today working on it. I think I will hold off on posting it for a few days though, in case I paint something better in the meantime. I am really indecisive these days!
I am just starting to feel semi-decent again after being sick (read: invalid) for the past week. I haven’t had a bad cold for a few years so I guess I was due for one!
I only had the desire to start drawing again yesterday. I started off only wanting to do a “quick sketch” of a scene I was thinking of for the Virtual Paintout, but then I ended up spending a lot longer on it than I had thought I would. I think it is too depressing with that ominous tree and all, so I will move onto something else that I will spend more time on. The hard thing about this month’s Virtual Paintout (set in County Clare, Ireland) is that the landscape is so beautiful that it is hard to decide what to paint.
The concept of posting photos on Fridays is nothing new, but 
