watercolor and painting ideas
For a brief period in spring, the lilacs bloom and fill the surrounding area with their delightful fragrance. Blooming in either pink, white or lilac(!) the cone-shaped bunches of flowers drape elegantly from the ends of the new growth.
What are your favorite spring blooms?
Today was one of those rare days when everything came together nicely.
The Doodlewash theme for the month of June is “Outdoor Fun” and today’s prompt is “Sunshine.” As I thought about how to depict the sunshine (which we didn’t have much of today) I thought of a photo that my husband had taken on our walk through the bog a couple of days ago. The sun was shining through the trees and creating dappled shadows on the boardwalk.
My two favorite online watercolor instructors each recently posted videos showing how they paint sunlit paths, Angela Fehr in “Spring Landscape” and Steve Mitchell in his kickoff of a “30×30 Direct Watercolor Challenge.” So, after watching these, here’s my sunlit path:
May the sun shine brightly on your path today!
A couple of days ago, my husband and I visited a bog.
There are many different plants in a bog due to the moist, sometimes wet, and acidic soil. I was primarily attracted to the ones that were flowering at that time, as you will see by my sketches.
When I haven’t gone out to paint en plain air I usually carry a sketch pad and pencil case with me, just in case there’s something that captures my attention and begs to be captured. My usual procedure is to start with pencil until I have the basic placement of the image on the page. I switch to the pen as soon as I am comfortable. I’m still surprised by how much detail I can get down in a few minutes. Watercolor is added after I get home, after erasing the pencil.
What has captured your attention lately?
My husband and I spent a couple of hours at a botanical garden yesterday. The roses weren’t blooming yet, but the garden was filled with large, shimmering, purple allium (A. giganteum), a flower related to garlic.
When one moves to a new home, it is interesting to find what floral gems spring up from the ground, having been planted by previous residents. We have had a wonderful flower make its appearance each year in this home, but until this year I haven’t taken the time to paint it before it faded. It actually took me a couple of years before I looked up the name to find out that we had bluebells planted in a corner of the garden.
I had to grab a few painting moments between rainstorms. Welcome Spring!
Dakota is my son’s cat, a sweet calico that he and my daughter-in-law adopted a couple of years ago. Dakota has kept us entertained while her “staff” have been at work during our visit. Here she is enjoying a few moments in the sunshine.
We’ve been having a lot of wind recently, with cold fronts blowing away our brief warm spells. Today we had some snow blow through, but not enough to stay on the ground, so this is from my imagination.
I made this tutorial in order simplify painting a tree for my watercolor students. There are many ways to paint a tree, but this one has given me the greatest success in teaching how to think about the light-to-dark process of painting a deciduous tree.
This exercise uses three main steps for painting the tree.
I left a space on the left for my students to paint step 1 while looking at the example. Then they can use my first stage painting to practice step 2, and my step 2 to practice putting in the trunk and branches.
This is an exercise that I suggest you DO try at home!
It is my pleasure to introduce “Camilla Serafina” who is here to dance for you. Can you hear the haunting flamenco music?
While we are digging out after this weekend’s blizzard, she is on her way to Florida, to dance in the New Score Chamber Orchestra’s auction fundraiser.
Many thanks to my husband for his help in completing this project!
I wrote in December that I had been given a decommissioned violin to turn into a piece of art to be auctioned off at a fund raiser for the New Score Chamber Orchestra. As I looked at and held this instrument, the idea that resonated most with me was that of a flamenco dancer.
So I stripped the violin of its remaining strings, pegs, and tailpiece and purchased some black and red fabric.
My husband built a stand for the violin, both to hold it upright and to give it the illusion of having legs under the skirt.
The bow became the arms, with the frog and the tip acting as hands.
Metal plates screwed into the joints allowed me to pose the arms at the angles I wanted. Then the plates and screws were hidden under electrical shrink tubing.
A souvenier fan from my niece’s wedding was cut down and painted to become part of her costume. Here you can also see two of the pegs and part of the tail piece that became her face.
Amazingly, as soon as we attached the arms, she took on the persona of a dancer.
Now to dress her!
I made a petticoat to hold the ruffled skirt away from the box stand and then began making her ruffled dress. I have made clothes for myself and my children, usually from store-bought patterns, but I don’t know of a pattern company that has a dress pattern for a violin, so I was on my own. As I was debating gluing fabric on the front, back and sides for a bodice, my daughter mentioned that she would miss the sound holes if I covered them up. In what was actually a simpler option, paint would became the top of the dress with a ruffle to further define the bodice and a ruffled skirt glued on below.
