watercolor and painting ideas
Last night’s full moon had me thinking of the beautiful evenings we have had while anchored in a secluded anchorage on the Eastern Shore. And the times when we have been sailing and watched the sun go down in the west and the beautiful full moon rise in the east.
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!
A friend and I were playing with watercolor, making simple designs that would work well for making into Christmas cards. It wasn’t until I was putting on some finishing marks with a pen that I discovered a couple of birds who had flown down to roost on the wreath!
It’s the time of the year when gift-wrapped packages appear, eliciting anticipation and excitement; when carols are the background music in retail shops; when poinsettias and cyclamen provide color in potted plants.
May your day be filled with beauty and friendship!
We don’t have snow here, yet. It’s not even officially winter, but I am thinking ahead and painting some snow scenes. I have purchased some iridescent medium which can be used mixed in the watercolor paint, or brushed over top of it. I use it to add some sparkle to the snow, but these images don’t show the sparkle.
On one of our extended trips this past summer, we pulled into a marina at Knapps Narrows to re-provision the boat. As we were getting started again the next morning, I looked across the creek to one of the warehouses where watermen sell their crabs. A young man was working, stacking the crab baskets and lids, helping to tie up the boats as they came alongside, and loading baskets. I was intrigued by the strong sunlight and shadow shapes. By the time I went below decks to get my camera and returned, the young man had finished and gone inside. However, I took a couple of pictures of the building, docks, baskets, and other boats in the area and put them together in this watercolor.
The cooler weather of autumn has all of the crabs scrambling along the deep channels of the Chesapeake Bay, headed toward the mouth of the bay where they will burrow into the sand to wait out the winter. So, here I am, painting from photos and memories.
One summer morning when we had overnighted on the boat, we were awakened by the enthusiastic cries of crabbers following their chicken-neck line. There was an exclamation of either glee or woe with every crab that came up, glee when it was big enough to keep, and woe when they had to throw it back. But the loudest cries were for the big crabs when “Jumbo!” resounded across the otherwise quiet morning waters. It became apparent from their accents that two of the crabbers were visitors from eastern Europe, and we enjoyed their delight as we watched them over our morning coffee.
One of my students likes the splatter trees that I have been doing, but she wanted to keep the leaves in clusters of more discreet colors. So we started experimenting and came up with this tree of unusually colored leaves (and a few watercolor drips).
I painted the leaf clusters first and let them dry. Then I mixed up a dark color for the trunk and grew the trunk and branches amongst the leaf clusters, going behind the lighter areas so that they come forward and going through the holes in the tree and over the darker areas in the leaf clusters.
I’m guessing that this might be an autumn tree since the leaves are falling on the ground and some of the branches are starting to get bare.
What colors have you seen in leaves recently?
