Roses Watercolor Painting

Here is the watercolor painting of roses that I completed yesterday from my Karlyn's Kit.

I think my underpaintings and backgrounds are fine, but painting the flower petals and leaves is going to take some practice.  I have a DVD, two books, and several more Lessons in Bags/kits from Karlyn Holman to help me improve.

I ordered a product from Daniel Smith called Watercolor Ground.  It is supposed to allow you to repaint areas after you apply it.  That might save some paper!

I'll probably start a few more backgrounds while I've got supplies all over the kitchen.  That will save some drying time next go-round.  You have to work in stages on these paintings to allow drying time.

Meanwhile, I need to get back to quilting on the longarm this week.  I have a baby quilt ready to go, and quite a few charity quilts for the guild.

Watercolors Again

Before the Christmas holidays, I took a couple classes at Art of the Carolinas.  I finished both paintings from the classes I took. Then I invested in some good watercolors and brushes.  I bought my brushes from Karlyn Holman's gallery store.  She has her own line of brushes.


Yesterday, I got my painting supplies back out and took over the kitchen table.

The weather was finally above freezing, and my sweet husband was outside washing my car.  Not that it needed it- hasn't been washed since before Thanksgiving!  Kasey watched out the window.  Her reddish-gold hair shines in the sun.

The last time I painted, I had started a second hollyhock painting, just like the one we did in Karlyn's class, but on a quarter sheet of watercolor paper instead of half.  I had done background underpainting, stencil and collage.  I used the Negative Hollyhocks "Karlyn's Kit."


I added negative painting around the drawn shapes, and then painted in more dark shapes resembling leaves, stems, and buds.

Then, I painted in the leaves, stems, and flowers.  I did not refer to my previous painting or my photos, books, or DVD of my instructor, Karlyn Holman.  I just did it. I wanted to see if I remembered what we did in class.

Not too bad!  I sort of covered up my "path of light," but I did better on "losing the edge."  Using good paintbrushes helped.


Here is my first attempt next to the second attempt.

The second attempt does not have the glow of the first one, but I like it.

You can purchase line drawings with painting instructions and step-outs from Karlyn Holman.  I purchased several at Art of the Carolinas back in November.  I had already traced the line drawing for Negative White Roses onto a full sheet of Arches 140-lb. cold-pressed paper. 

 First step:  wet front and back of paper, and add light colors for an underpainting.
Next: sand watercolor pencils over a stencil to add interest to background.
Third:  tear small pieces of Japanese paper and add randomly over painting.  When all this is dry, glue the paper down with Yes! paste.


Pretty!

Here is a close-up of the Japanese paper collage.  It picks up color from the background paint and the paste.  Karlyn also sells the  paper at her store.

Next, do some negative painting around the shapes.  Draw some more leaves and buds and negative paint around everything with a darker green mix.

Now I am ready for the flowers!

First the Mailbox, then the Basketball Goal...

You may recall me mentioning our ice storm this week, and posting a picture of our icy parking pad at the base of the driveway.  There was some melting the past couple of days, and the roads are clear.  All the houses on the opposite side of the street are on the high side, and are all clear of ice.  Our lot slopes downward, and there is still ice at the bottom of the drive.

It does not look like it from the street.  It sure fooled the Fed Ex driver who decided to back down the driveway this morning.

Not only was he stuck in the driveway for about an hour.  He also took out our basketball goal.

We decided that was not a bad thing, because the goal was old and rusty and rarely used since the boys moved out.  The driver was relieved to hear that he did not have to pay to put it back up.  I did not know that Fed Ex sub-contracted their drivers.  This guy would have had to pay for any damage.   For that reason, he did not want to go out of pocket to call a tow truck.  He and Charlie chipped and hacked away at the ice with my garden spade and a pitchfork, of all things, until the truck finally got enough traction to make it back up the driveway.  Kasey and I watched and breathed diesel fumes.

In addition to being unsightly, that basketball goal was a magnet for vehicles backing out of our garage or driveway.  I'm glad it's gone.

Well, not exactly gone.  He didn't offer to haul it away.  It will probably sit on the side of the driveway until it's covered with kudzu.

Anyone need an ugly old basketball goal on a slightly dented, rusted metal pole?

Enough with the early Saturday morning accidents, already!

2010- The Year in Quilts

Sometimes, I feel like I am not very productive as a quilter.  Truthfully, I did not complete very many of my own quilts last year.  The reason?  I quilted quite a few for other people!  I just added some pictures to my Webshots album for 2010.  Here is a slide show that I hope you will enjoy.

2010 Longarm Quilting

The Sketchbook Project, Part 2

Here are a few more pages from my Sketchbook Project notebook.  The theme was In Flight, which I basically altered to include anything with birds or butterflies or dragonflies.  Some of the pages did not feature any drawing at all, just some collage work.

One of the new toys I got last year was a Big Shot die cut machine.  Some might frown on these as being totally non-creative, since the shapes are cut out from a template.  But, I enjoyed making them from different papers and fabrics, placing them on different backgrounds, and working on compositions.

On the left I have used the same shape in a positive and negative image.  The backgrounds are painted with acrylic ink and stamped.  I like this warm palette.

The two dragonflies on the right are cut from some fancy embossed paper I got from Cheap Joe's.  I like the cool blue, green, and yellow palette.

These pages again feature a positive and negative image on the right.  The left side has stamped and embossed butterflies from a stamp.  I added Pearl-ex powder.  They don't show up too well in the photo.

Here is something a little different.  I collaged an image of a hummingbird on the left, and used a piece of wide lace on the right.  The background has thick, textured gesso painted in several shades of blue and green.  The reason for so much gesso is to cover up the stuff underneath it that didn't exactly work.

Here is another hummingbird, one of my favorite birds.  I got a new gold-leaf marker and went a little crazy. The daylily, bird, and butterfly are all collaged images.

A final hummingbird is this guy with wings spread.  These pages have a lot going on, including painted and stamped backgrounds, painted dryer sheet, batik fabric squares, collaged labels, and text and markings that are I practiced from my Hand Lettering book  by Marci Donley and Leann Singh.

One of the classes in the 21 Secrets journaling class is about Chinese paper-cutting.  I decided to try a papercut butterfly.  I used a black and white scrapbook paper, and then colored in the squares.  The background is cardstock which I painted with Micaceous Iron Oxide Paint (Golden).  This paint gives a sparkly finish that is just beautiful.  I got a tip about this paint from Sharon House.

This page features some of the painted Lutradur from my playday with the Anything Art bee.  The Audubon  flamingo was in the newspaper in a feature about the exhibit at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh.  The Lutradur was painted, stamped, burned with a textile tool, and zapped with a heat gun.  Underneath is a layer of fiery orange-red paint and also some rub-on glittery birds that looked just horrendous.  Sometimes our first ideas just don't work, but they can be used as a first layer.

This peacock image was from an ad for Sharp color televisions.  I painted the backgrounds in blues and greens.  The right-hand page is again a piece of painted and stamped Lutradur.  I added dots of gold paint to imitate the yellow spots on the peacock's tail.  You can see that I used decorative scissors to cut away some of the page edges, giving a peekaboo effect of color.  Yesterday, I mentioned that some of the pages are perforated near the center seam.  I added a piece of blue painter's tape in the same shade of blue to keep the pages intact.

Finally, here is a watercolor landscape that I painted directly onto the Sketchbook pages with no preparation of gesso, etc.  I may have mentioned that I hated this paper, and found it very unfriendly to wet media.  Most of my pages were collaged, using Soft Gel Medium, Collage Pauge, or rubber cement.  On this page I used a travel set of Pelican water colors in pans.  It was done "En Plein Air," while sitting at my picnic table in the mountains and looking at the hills across the street.  I tried to capture some of the gorgeous colors of the sunny autumn day.  The flock of geese were added later.  I have never seen a flock of Canada geese in the mountains, although they fly over my house here in central North Carolina at least twice a day.  They like it here so well that they have ceased to migrate back to Canada at all.

That's about it- thanks for letting me share my sketchbook with you.

The Sketchbook Project

For the most part, my journal for The Sketchbook Project sponsored by the Art House Co-op, Brooklyn Art Library is complete.  Three days before the deadline!  Here is the size of the Moleskine journal when it arrived.  A flat little book with horrible paper that is not friendly at all to the mixed media artist!

Here is a side view of my completed journal.  Big, fat, juicy, and colorful!

Here is the cover.  I painted it black, using a very shiny micaceous  paint.  I added a bright butterfly image from an ad straddling front and back covers.  I think I will give it one more coat of paint.

My chosen theme was "In Flight."  I decided to use birds and butterflies to fill my pages.  I cut out and used some sketches from a small notebook on a few of the pages.  This bluebird is one of several that I drew and colored with colored pencil.

Here are a few of my favorite pages.  I tried out lots of different materials and techniques.

The two paintings below were done as part of the Collage Lab  (by Bee Shay) lessons on using gesso.  On the left, a dragonfly is stamped with gesso tinted with paint.  On the right, I painted the petals with gesso.  Both of the paintings are on cardboard.   I peeled back the top few layers to make it a little thinner.  The background pages are made by drawing with crayons, then painting over the crayon with watercolors. An old Kindergarten technique! 

Here is another spread that includes colored pencil drawings from another sketchbook of mine.  I drew and colored the pileated woodpeckers that we frequently observe at our mountain cabin, and sometimes see here at the house in Wake Forest.  I used a North American Field Guide as a reference.

They are collaged onto a background that includes painted napkins and paper towels.

The next one may look familiar.  I made a color copy from my other Moleskine journal of this original drawing/collage.  I used Neocolor II water soluble crayons to color the background pages to blend.

This drawing is based on a day last summer when my granddaughter, Lily, was running along the creek and butterflies were surrounding and chasing her.

Speaking of Lily, her artwork is part of the journal, too.  She calls herself an artist at age four, and we spend a lot of time coloring and painting together.  I always have a little sketchbook in my purse, which is often put to good use when we go out to eat.  I think she signed her name when she was only three...it does not look quite right!  I love children's artwork, and hope the viewers of this notebook will, too.

The backgrounds are colored with water-soluble crayons, and the marks along the border are art deco symbols from the book, Hand Lettering, by Marci Donley and Leann Singh.

Some of the fanciful butterflies that I drew and Lily colored are also on the inside back cover.

The background on the left is tissue paper surrounded by two kinds of decorative duct tape. The pages are perforated near the inner edge, and the tape should keep the pages from coming out of the book.  Plus it's pretty cool!

I included one more copy of art that is in my watercolor field notebook.  I cut up the copy and pasted it into the notebook, repainting and adding new text.  This was the day that a flock of goldfinches showed up at the feeding station at our mountain cabin last spring.

I'll show some more pages in another post.  Thanks for going along "In Flight" with me!

Icy Weather

This winter has been been very unusual weather-wise for my area of the southeastern US.  It has snowed at least four times, and dumped some ice on us yesterday. Here is the skating rink formerly known as the bottom of my driveway.

At least the sun came out today, and the temperature has soared to 34 degrees, so maybe it will go away.

Now that I have experienced six decades of life, I am trying to be careful not to slip and fall.  That makes it hard when you are trying to walk the dog in the ice.

I try for clumps of grass sticking up so I don't go crashing down.  Here is some lavender in the ice.

Did I pick a great time to bring home a new dog, or what? 

I have been putting the finishing touches on my Sketchbook project.  It needs to be postmarked by January 15.  I probably won't participate in this again, because it is a lot of work, and I'll never see this journal again.  But I have had fun trying lots of techniques and surrounding myself with colorful pages.  I hope it will be finished and dry enough so that the pages don't stick together when I mail it.