Friday, April 24, 2015

Watercolor with music

The Year of the Spark lesson with Lynn Whipple is a further exploration of responding to music in the creative process.

Watercolor paintings with loose drawing... to music :-)





Mixed media - watercolor, graphite and ink

Tuesday, April 21, 2015

With the music

Lynn Whipple is teaching the Year of the Spark lesson for the second half of April... using music to influence mark making.

I don't have music playing while I work in my studio unless I am doing chores (cleaning and tidying up for the next project).  When seasons permit, I prefer to listen to the birds' songs or soft rainfall.  Or I like to listen to recordings of nature or lectures by people with engaging speaking voices.

For this lesson, I chose music that had a slow to medium tempos with occasional tempo changes.

The "music" warm up sketches:






Monday, April 13, 2015

Westie

Many years ago I had a West Highland White Terrier.  Westies are small, sturdy little dogs with wide set ears, soft dark eyes and coal black noses.  My little guy was like so many others of the small terrier breeds - he believed he was bigger than he actually was :-)

On our "walkies" we would pass by horses in a fenced pasture.  My little guy would trot up to them and one particular horse would lower his face.  My boy would put his front paws on the lowest rail and s-t-r-e-t-c-h until they touched noses.

I was thinking about Hamish McD when I sketched this:

7B graphite


Saturday, April 11, 2015

Friday, April 10, 2015

Mixed media painting: "The Secret Writer"


This is one of those paintings that comes from out of the blue:


Watercolor, pastels, charcoal, ink, graphite, gesso, litho crayon.

Wednesday, April 8, 2015

Mixed media textured gesso...on wood :-)

More Year of the Spark class work - this lesson is from Carla.  And I recorded a couple of in-process steps this time.

Phase 1 - sketch on wood and gesso ("texturized"... is that a word?):

The beginning of many layers...

Phase 2 - color

Watercolor

Final - massaged the background with Carla's "rub and buff" technique and added details:

Details in graphite, ink, conte crayon and charcoal.

And Carla always begins each lesson with a warm-up exercise.  This time it was one-liner drawing of the same face:

Inked.




Friday, April 3, 2015

Mixed media scenario and sunshine Remy

From yesterday's post about waiting for things to dry, this is what was keeping me busy.  It is called "The Discovery of the Three Orbs":

Watercolor, pastel, charcoal, graphite, NeoColor II, colored pencil

A snowstorm blew through yesterday, but today the sun is out and the sky is blue. The snow has almost disappeared.

My beautiful Remy in the sunshine.

Time to take a break for "walkies" :-)

Thursday, April 2, 2015

Word art while waiting

for intermittent layers of masking fluid to dry.  There is no rushing it - a heat tool just fries the fluid.  But these mini-intermissions are okay.  I have gotten into the habit of keeping my marker and paint pens at the ready... and I created some word art.  

I had a couple of themes in mind - space and favorite words.

Space:

Acylic ink, metallic ink, pastel, gel pen

Favorite words, this is one:

Acrylic ink, metallic ink, pigment marker pen

And then out of nowhere, this phrase:

Metallic ink, pigment marker pen

And by then the latest layer of masking fluid was really, really dry :-)