Another small painting from Google Street View in Elba, this time experimenting with my new Derwent Coloursoft colored pencils. I like the soft feel of these pencils and they come in a lot of natural looking colors, but I have trouble distinguishing different colors from one another.
I tend to draw with a ton of different colors strewn all over the table, but that won’t work with these pencils. The color swatches at the end of the pencil don’t seem very accurate, and the leads don’t look like the actual color on the paper. Being organized and having a scrap paper on hand for tests is critical for me, because I had a few accidents when I started using the wrong color.
My only other (small) gripe is that the pencils are too large to fit in my electric sharpener. Luckily, I have a manual one that works. Otherwise, I LOVE these pencils.
This is nothing like what I normally do, but I rather like it. It was fun to work on, which is the main thing I want out of my artwork these days. It reminds me of some kind of fantasy land from Haroun and the Sea of Stories or some other fantasy novel. This is my submission for February’s Virtual Paintout on the Island of Elba. It’s a beautiful island, and Napoleon was lucky to be exiled there!
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.
This is my submission for this month’s Virtual Paintout, located on the island of Sardinia. Looking around on Google Street View, I thought that this would be the perfect vacation spot for me. I love the dramatic landscape, and the sea is so beautiful. I would love to go there for a week or two and paint lots of watercolors.
This is my submission for the July VPO which is on the Island of Jersey. I usually don’t wait so long before submitting my painting, and I finished just in time. I started this picture earlier on in the month, but didn’t get around to finishing it until yesterday. I painted in watercolor first, and then went over it with the colored pencils. Finally, I used the colorless blender to brighten up the colors and smooth them out a bit. Since I was working on watercolor paper, I couldn’t hide the tooth of the paper, but I’ve always liked this effect because it allows me to get really bright colors. I wasn’t trying to be especially realistic with the colors and was going for something happy and sunny instead.
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.
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 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.
