Monday, December 15, 2014

Merry Christmas, a little early

Its still 10 days away, but the next week will go by in a whoosh! of activities, so I thought I'd post now and have that one small thing crossed off my 'to do' list. (That didn't sound very festive, did it?)

Oh, I'll get festive. Sometimes it takes me a while. Its like before you've had coffee in the morning, and are not at all awake, then all of sudden you come to life and can function. That's how I am with Christmas. I kind of start the season all draggy, then at some point it kicks in and I'm good.

I finished my Christmas art! This is "Kitty's Christmas Tree". Its my first foray back into watercolors after a pretty long hiatus, and I had a blast. Of course I had to add some colored pencil to it too, for detailing. I could have done more, but decided to leave well enough alone.

And no, I did not count how many pine needles there are. If you are some sort of savant (like Rainman) you may do it for me if you like. 


In addition to all the usual busy Christmas things to do, I'm getting a new fence put up in the back yard. They were supposed to start it today, but it was raining too much. (Wait, did I just say "raining TOO MUCH"?) Yeah. Drought for how many years, and now we've had storm after storm. Crazy. So hopefully tomorrow it won't be too bad and they can get going on it. 

Tonight I'm putting up the tree, and am anxious to see how my newest kitty, Tracy, will behave with it. He's so young, and a real climber - I have a feeling it won't last long in the vertical position! Fingers crossed. 

I hope all of you have a peaceful, healthy, joyous, warm, cozy, happy, (what have I forgotten?) Christmas or Winter Solstice or whatever else you may celebrate!


Tuesday, December 09, 2014

Back to watercolors


Its been a while since I've done any real painting with watercolors. I've been busy being a colored pencil artist for a while now, with some detours into digital, but have been wanting to go back to watercolors, so here I am.


This piece is my Christmas card, a little behind schedule, but on its way now. I'm working on illustration board (Strathmore 500 series) which is my all time favorite surface to work on. I get cranky with watercolor paper because I can't stand when it warps when wet (even if its stretched and taped down), and illustration board doesn't do that. The only drawback is that you can't transfer art onto it with a light box (its too thick to be 'see-through'), so its back to old-school transferring methods - tracing the drawing down over a graphite transfer sheet.



Here is my glamorous set-up. That's a fancy ceramic yogurt cup for the paint water, held steady by a roll of packing tape. Hey, it works. My drawing table is at a slant, so I have to keep stuff from rolling down. The parallel ruler on the bottom keeps most things from rolling off altogether.



I use a combination of Winsor Newton, Holbein, Daniel Smith, and Turner watercolors. I'm not really a purist - whichever brand has the color I need is what I use. I tend to stay away from the really grainy ones if I can help it, unless I'm doing something with special effects. I like a more even kind of pigment. Sometimes I use gouache (opaque watercolor) too if I need to. Here I've squeezed out some Winsor Newton Hooker's Green, Permanent Sap Green, and Green Gold. So far all I've use on this piece is the Permanent Sap, in various strengths.



And here we have some Christmas tree needles. There will be a lot more of them by the time I'm finished. A LOT.



We're due for an apocalyptic storm tomorrow and the next day. 60-70 mph wind gusts, and 3-4" of rain. This, after years of drought. I think last December it rained one day for about 10 minutes, and the rest of the time we had sun sun sun. The year before, too. Now, we're getting the opposite, and its too much! They're warning the power will go out, trees will fall over and all sorts of awful things will happen, so I thought I'd better blog something in case I'm offline for a while. Let's hope its not as bad as they say!