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.
This is a quick reminder that I am hosting a giveaway of the first three issues of The Beany by Michael Nobbs until August 26 at 9 pm EST. Click here to enter.
This is my submission for the Virtual Paintout centered in Prince Edward Island, Canada for August. So far this month there have been a lot of beautiful pieces posted on the blog. My submission is fairly simple, but I enjoyed drawing and painting it. Recently I have been doing a lot of running around so it was nice to just sit and draw and zone out for a change. This particular watercolor paper is not the best for pen though, so I might just use it for plain watercolors next time. I did this while listening to episodes of the podcast Artists Helping Artists. It is very informative and uplifting and I highly recommend it.
I hope everyone had a great weekend and has a productive week ahead. Be sure to check back here later on this week because I am going to be posting details about a giveaway that I will be hosting. I’m excited! These are some cool videos that I came across recently. I hope you enjoy them.
I found this video via Steve Penberthy. It has some great shots of artist Don Colley doing some urban sketching in Cleveland and is worth watching if you look past the fact that it is really a long commercial for Faber-Castell PITT artist pens. I really like Don Colley’s large format sketchbooks and I think I’ll be on the lookout for something similar.
I found this movie trailer via the blog A Brush with Color. It has been awhile since I saw a good foreign film (I don’t mind the subtitles) and this looks like something interesting. This is the type of movie I will reserve for watching alone on a rainy day with a cup of tea perhaps.
And now for my cautionary tale:
I was driving (alone) down the highway last weekend and I pulled over into a “scenic rest area” and sketched this view with my new pens. It was in the middle of the day and I locked my car doors, but I got nervous for some reason so I got out of there really quickly. I did the watercolor from memory when I got home. I found out later when talking to someone that this particular rest stop is infamous for “anonymous encounters” (yuck!). This is a good reminder, especially for single women, to not risk your safety when out and about, and to trust your gut instincts. After this I decided that I’m going to take someone with me when I go out sketching in public places. When I am drawing and mentally absorbed in what I am doing, I am probably not as attentive as I should be to what could be sneaking up behind me. These days you can’t be too careful with all the crazies roaming around!
I cut it close again with this month’s Virtual Paintout. It was mainly because I was going to lots of summertime parties and cookouts on the weekends which ate into my usual art time. I had some trouble finding a view that I really liked in Hong Kong as well. I’m usually drawn to nature type scenes and I think that I was expecting to find something exotic and unusual. In reality, I thought most of it, except some tropical plants, looked like places in the US. I ended up painting some trees and brush on the side of the road that could have been almost anywhere. I did try to be more “free” with my watercolors in this piece though. I hope it doesn’t come across as sloppy, because that was not what I was going for.
I miscalculated in my last post on how many pages I had left in my watercolor sketchbook. I realized that I had some paintings on the back sides of the pages (I don’t use both sides of the page in my sketchbooks). Now I only have one more page to finish until I start my new watercolor moleskine!
I have a small 7 x 10 inch watercolor sketchbook that is in progress right now. I have only four pages left and after that I have a new moleskine watercolor sketchbook to start. I am a little nervous because I have never used one of their watercolor sketchbooks before. There are always people out there who don’t like something about moleskines, whether it is the paper, or the binding or whatever. Nina Johansson even started a Facebook group petitioning Moleskine to make a portrait format watercolor moleskine.
Speaking of Nina Johansson, she just had a show of some recent watercolor paintings and she has been posting them to her blog. It is a really lovely series of paintings, featuring Swedish homes and landscapes. She also uses a lot of abstract geometric shapes and stenciling. Definitely check it out if you haven’t already.
On an unrelated note, I’ve added Google Friend Connect to my sidebar to make it easier for you if that’s the way you prefer to subscribe to blogs. Also, for anybody in the US who is needing (or wanting) some new art supplies, Dick Blick is running a special offer until July 26, 2010 with free shipping on orders over $69.
To all my American readers, I hope you all have a wonderful Independence Day weekend. And to everyone else, I hope you have a great weekend as well. For myself, I hope this year is as good of a time for me as last year was. I will try to get some good sketching time in.
I’ve been feeling really discouraged about the state of my country these days. It seems that everything is falling apart, and not just the economy. If you have a family or some good friends, please take care of each other because you can’t depend on anybody else these days.
I did this more than a week ago for May’s VPO and even though I do like how it came out, I kept telling myself that I was going to start over and do another version that I liked better. I have so many things that I want to paint and draw these days that I have been taken up with something else instead though. It seems like I would be better served just leaving things as is sometimes, instead of trying to make them perfect.
I did this the same size as last month (5 x 7) in the spirit of making my VPO pieces consistent. I looked around for quite awhile before coming up with this scene. I made some other sketches, one of which you can see here, but I really liked the swamp feel as seen in this view.
I also posted this image on Sketching in Nature, the group blog hosted by Cathy Johnson that I participate in. These days I am doing more nature sketching, so expect to see more of me there in the coming weeks, and I usually won’t double post those sketches here.
To celebrate the last day of tax season yesterday, I sat in the garden and did this sketch in the evening while sipping a cup of tea. It was a little chilly, but it has since dropped 20 degrees and it is supposed to rain (and maybe even snow) this weekend. I’m glad I took the opportunity to get outside a bit. I did the watercolor part afterwards, inside.
Because of the yucky weather, I have some inside projects planned for this weekend. I am working on a small booklet (mini zine) and I have a couple of sketches done for that which I will show you on Sunday.
Here is my offering for April’s VPO based out of the Canary Islands. I was feeling a little experimental when carrying out this piece, hence the multicolored designs all over the place. I did it on a 5 x 7 watercolor block that I found while cleaning out my art supplies a few weeks back.
I’m thinking that I might do all my VPO pieces in the same size and media so I can frame them all together when I have a nice collection. Speaking of framing, I just signed up for a workshop on matting and framing this coming June. I am excited about this because I have a lot of pieces waiting to get framed and I’d like to see them finally on display.
This is my submission for March Virtual Paintout, which was based from Stavanger, Norway this month. What I loved about the location was the combination of green grass and blue sky found out in the more rural sections. It felt very springlike and inspiring to me. This particular view reminded me of something I might find in a children’s book illustration.
I made this picture using dip pen and watercolor wash in a 7 x 10 watercolor sketchbook. I’m not horribly pleased with this piece because I find it to be a little fussy and I wish I had tweaked the composition a little differently. I do think that I could possibly rework however, and I’d like to try it in colored pencil at some point.
