Marsh Abstract

In class last week Jerry Stitt suggested an exercise for working loosely by choosing a subject and painting it as quickly as possible.  I decided to try it but had no definite subject in mind, concentrating more on mood and color, thinking more in the abstract. I used burnt sienna, Indian yellow and neutral tint to create this watercolor in about 15 minutes. I started with the sky since I love painting dramatic skies. It was going to be a simple sketch with a few distant trees and a small foreground. The trees grew a bit more than I intended since I was working wet-in-wet on hot pressed paper. The foreground resembled a lake at first but I thought it a little boring, so I added some texture to make it look more like a marshy scene. I was quite please in the end with the result.

Something Completely Different

Getting away from my atmospheric watercolors I decided to have another try at florals - something that does not come easy to me.  I'm not a realistic painter so I prefer to create a semi-abstract rendition of flowers. I follow a number of watercolor blogs where the artists seem to paint flowers so effortlessly - wish I could say the same for me. I've been practicing the past two weeks and this is the best I've managed so far. I won't mention how many I've discarded. I made the mistake in this piece of throwing in some black India ink. I like the way it spreads because it is insoluble in water. However, I don't think it adds anything to this piece so I will have another attempt and leave out the ink. I used cadmium red, indigo, new gamboge and India ink.