Oregon coast

I know it's been  awhile since I last posted, but I have been making art.  I just find it time consuming to scan.  Today I decided to use my mini IPad to take photos so I could upload to my blog.  Sometimes the photos appear in my I cloud on my computer and sometimes they don't.  Obviously whatever bug  my I cloud had, it seems to work today.

 

I've been working out of a small notebook 7"L by 4.5"W.  When open I have a whole 9" to work across.  With this painting I just used my Princeton Neptune  1/4" dagger to paint with no drawing done before hand.

Birds hanging out on the branch

As long as I'm been painting in watercolors, I've never really thought about sketching with watercolor pencils instead of using a pencil or pen to get a line drawing.  On this drawing I sketched a rough outline of these two birds, then I laid down the various details with watercolor pencils.  I used a wet watercolor brush to blend in the color. To add more depth, I added watercolor paint. 

 

I used my Stillman & Birn Beta series journal, Caran d'ache watercolor pencils, and finished the drawing off with Daniel Smith watercolors.

 

 

 

 

 

Bella as a puppy

I recently bought a Stillman & Birn Beta Series 7 x 7 journal.  I've been reading good stuff about Stillman & Birn, so I wanted to try out the paper in these journals to see how they handled watercolor paint.

 

The paper is thick with lots of tooth. I can paint on both sides with no bleed through, which is nice.  Overall, I really like the paper in this journal.

 

 

 

 

 

Peony

For the last several months I've been taking this on going botanical painting class online with Billy Showell.  The month of August lesson was on drawing and painting a Peony.  I loved the step-by-step instruction, but also liked  seeing her actually apply the watercolor and some tricks to achieving the same results.