Sudden Snow - Day Seven of the 30/30 Challenge

Sudden Snow, 

Watercolor on Arches #140 Cold Press Paper, 6"h x 6"w, 2015 #9

Bid in My DPW Auction (Starting Bid $50)

Day seven of the challenge -- I am still hanging on there!!! (Truely amazing for me, although I admit only barely... :-P) It seems like the hotter the weather gets, the more I feel drawn to painting images of the chilly winter scene... In this one I really wanted to capture the feeling of sudden change of seasons -- a night's snow fall before the brilliant fire of fall colors have a chance to run their course and gradually diminish. I experimented with very granulating colors such as Cobalt Blue, Ultramarine Blue, Cobalt Violet and Manganese Violet on the snow washes, then scrubbed with a damp, relatively stiff synthetic brush and blotted with tissue to lift out the light shapes on the snow field. By using a relatively soft brush and varying its degree of dampness as well as the pressure applied, I was able to achieve softer and harder transitions at the edge of these lifted shapes. I really liked this technique and decide to try it more in my future paintings. The light facets on the snow-covered rocks were squeezed out with a palette knife before the applied dark colors have totally dried.

Water's Edge, Watercolor on Aches #140 Cold Press Paper, 5"h x 7"w, 2014 #19

Buy It Now from My DPW Gallery ($95)

On a separate note, a painting I created for last year's 30/30 challenge in September (which I was not able to complete but nevertheless is still a great exercise) was chosen as the judge's pick by Carol Marine on Daily Paintworks. I feel very honored to be selected by an artist who I admire among so many great competitors. Thanks Carol! 

Water's Edge -- Continue with the 30 Paintings in 30 Days Challenge...

Water's Edge, Watercolor on Aches #140 Cold Press Paper, 5"h x 7"w, 2014 #19

Buy It Now from My DPW Gallery ($95)

Leslie Saeta's "30 Paintings in 30 Days" Challenge for this September is officially closing, and I sort of fell off the wagon again in the past few days due to preparation for the start of my atelier's new semester. I will be starting to paint in oil this coming semester! I am so excited and terrified at the same time... Luckily, I have you guys -- my wonderful artist friends who are veteran oil painters! Well, be prepared... I will be bugging you guys with tons of questions (many of which very silly I'm sure... :-P)

I experimented with this water lily painting on how to most effectively paint shapes that has only very subtle color variations and next to each other -- I tried to paint some petals one at a time, carefully model the roundness of them by adding deeper and deeper reds when I was painting each petal; some other petals are painted as one shape with slight warm/cool variations of reds, then crevice darks are added between petals after the underlying colors are dry. I tried both and wanted to find out how to avoid leaving a very harsh, dark edge at the border between two petals, which is the result of wetting an area then adding dark colors wet-in-wet. I find when I paint one petal at a time, it is easier to clean the edge of each petal buy running a damp stiff nylon brush along where the dark pigment accumulates, then blog the area slightly with tissue. When painting multiple petals at once, the petals painted at the same time have better connections and looks more natural, yet the edge between sections painted at one time and another always looks quite harsh. I am still struggling to find a good method and make the connection of areas painted sequentially more natural... If you have some good tips, please share with me, my friends!

Enough rambling for now! I should really get back to my watercolor table... In the mean time, if you have an image of a beautiful landscape, or a flower you like, or anything you might want to see painted, please email them to me at arena.shawn@gmail.com. I will paint them and post them here. From every 10 paintings I make from them, there would be a random drawing, and the lucky winner get to take a original back home for free! Interested? Then send me your photo!

You can now buy high quality Giclee prints of many of my sold paintings, both on paper and canvas, as well as some note cards with my paintings here:

Heliconia Dance

Heliconia Dance,  Watercolor on Arches #140 Cold Press Paper, 7"h x 5"w, 2014 #11

Bid at My DPW Auction (Starting Bid $105) 

After finishing "Soar II", I realized that I am really missing painting flowers -- or, from a design point of view, missing working on brilliant colors, and more detailed shapes. Since I have a couple of floral that have been lingering in the studio for quite some time, I decided to get my focus out and finish them!

So, here is the first one I have managed to finish over the weekend, despite of my lingering cold and stuffed sinus (in a way painting actually helps to distract me from the physical discomfort -- it is almost meditative when I am doing the finishing 20%!). The reference photo of this painting is from Chris Gardner who runs a lovely blog of her own photographs of a variety of flowers, and has kindly allowed me to use her pictures as reference photos. I really loved the curvlinear movement that dominates the photo, and decide to use wet-in-wet dynamic lines to further emphasize that. I have also tried to play up complimentary red-green color scheme, using bright, saturated red to emphasize the Heliconia flower, and muted yellow-green and blue-green foliage in the background as "supporting actors". To avoid monotony in the "green, green, green" background, I have dropped in Ultramarine and Winsor Red wet in wet in small amount here and there to add some "zing" factor to it. I am quite happy with the final result, except for the fact that it has taken way too long to complete it! Now it's time to move on to the next painting...

In the mean time, if you have an image of a beautiful landscape, or a flower you like, or anything you might want to see painted, please email them to me at arena.shawn@gmail.com. I will paint them and post them here. From every 10 paintings I make from them, there would be a random drawing, and the lucky winner get to take a original back home for free! Interested? Then send me your photo!

You can now buy high quality Giclee prints of many of my sold paintings, both on paper and canvas, as well as some note cards with my paintings here:

The Big Freeze -- 30 Paintings in 30 Days Challenge, Round 3, Day 6

The Big Freeze,  Watercolor on Arches #140 Cold Press Paper, 5"h x 7"w, 2014 #6

Bid at My DPW Auction (Starting Bid $25) 

With the large part of the country freezing over the Arctic Vortex, I thought winter stormy sky should be an appropriate topic of my 30/30 painting yesterday. Here's my painting of Day 6 -- "The Big Freeze". Theme for this week: "Sky".

In the mean time, if you have an image of a beautiful landscape, or a flower you like, or anything you might want to see painted, please email them to me at arena.shawn@gmail.com. I will paint them and post them here. From every 10 paintings I make from them, there would be a random drawing, and the lucky winner get to take a original back home for free! Interested? Then send me your photo!

You can now buy high quality Giclee prints of many of my sold paintings, both on paper and canvas, as well as some note cards with my paintings here:

Emerging after My Long Period of Absence... Some Fall Colors in Winter, Some New Finished Paintings, and My Last Holiday Fair of the Season

Fall Colors, Little Cottonwood Canyon, Utah,

 Watercolor on Arches #140 Rough, 12"h x 9"w, WIP 1

Finally painting again! From October to December the Atelier work turned out more demanding as the projects get harder, and I will finally start chalk and charcoal next semester! It has seriously eaten into my watercolor painting time, and the busy holiday fair season did not help either -- between getting prints and small gift products ready for the shows and doing my charcoal drawings from life, I did not have much breathing room in the past few months... Hence the lack of new paintings here and no update on my blog (shame on me...) -- but, no more excuses, I am painting again! Yay!

Quicken Aspens, Park City, Utah,

 Watercolor on Arches #140 Rough, 8"h x 12"w, WIP 1

Here's a couple of landscapes I have started in Carl Purcell's workshop the past summer (really? It has been so long?...) and like everything started during a workshop, they did not get finished. I've started five of them and the closest one is about 70% done, but none of these. Maybe it is just me -- I always feel quite rushed in the drawing part whenever I am attending a workshop, and was not quite happy with the hard-edged shapes of the foliage on all these tree paintings. To me, a foliage clump in a painting needs to have very interesting and well-designed but natural-looking shapes and a blend of hard, soft and broken edges to really make it look like "foliage" instead of just "choppy brush strokes", and mine in any of these paintings certainly did not meet the standard. 

Quiet Meadows, Sonoma Pasture, 

 Watercolor on Arches #140 Rough, 12"h x 8"w, WIP 1

Not to worry -- off to the faucet! Arches paper can really take some abuse and that's why we love it! When the paper is soaking wet and the half-finished painting is not completely erased but with a lovely ghost image left on the paper, I took out the reference materials from the workshop and started to lay in colors wet in wet. Then I let them dry -- and I've liked these altered images much more. Next step is adding more definitions on dry paper, which involves some serious thought process on designs. Busy paintings filled with various shapes and colors (such as these depicting woods, forest, undergrowth, etc.) really needs succinct silhouette of the center of focus and some quiet areas to let viewer's eyes rest. For example, all the foliage clumps in "Quiet Meadows, Sonoma Pasture" are too symmetric and similar in size, which  is a residue problem from the not-carefully-thought-out initial drawings during the workshop, and therefore needs to be redesigned. I will do some sketch to figure that out... 

Summer Glow II, Watercolor on Arches #140 Cold Press Paper, 5"h x 7"w, 2013 #81

Sold!

Here's a couple of paintings I've finished but never had a chance to share with you on my blog. The first one is a second version of "Summer Glow"... All because I was stupid enough to want to repair a small smear damage on the first one, and you know what happens next -- the repairs have completely damaged the first version and the only thing I could do is to repaint it... I should have learned my lessons of not messing with a finished watercolor by now... Sometimes I really wonder what I was thinking...

Soar II, Watercolor on Arches #140 Cold Press Paper, 6"h x 6"w, WIP 1

This one is actually finished and sold to a collector in England. I just did not have a good photo of it -- accidentally dropped my camera and broke it so now I only have my ipad as a camera, which is seriously not adequate to take images of finished paintings... (WIP photos, maybe, but not finished works, especially not when a piece is flying out and I may never get the chance to see it ever again...) So I will be posting the finished image when I get my new camera, I promise ;-)

Finally, since I did quite a few holiday shows this winter, and the holiday fair season is drawing to a close, I thought I'd give a shout-out here for my last fair of the season... It is a very cool venue: I will be selling my Watercolors, Giclee Prints, Holiday Cards, Calendars and MORE in the SF Bazaar Zoo Lights Event at San Francisco Zoo Entry Village Circle, located at Sloat Blvd. & the Great Highway this weekend (both Saturday and Sunday), December 21st & 22nd, between 3:00pm and 8:00pm. So if you find yourself in the city over the weekend, or want to take your kids to see the animals in the San Francisco Zoo under the evening lights, drop by and get some beautiful, hand-made, animal-related art gifts for your holidays!

Especially for this fair I have designed and made some holiday cards (yes, they are year-round good but I made this set of eight especially for the winter season). These little ones are printed on 3.5" x 5" sized Strathmore watercolor cards, and a set contains 8 different winter snow scenes, with name of the painting and my info printed at the back of the card. I have named it "Winter Wonderland" and will upload it for sale to my etsy shop soon, at a price of $20/set. I also have the same set of a larger size -- 5" x 7" for $25. Drop me an email if you are interested in having one!

In the mean time, if you have an image of a beautiful landscape, or a flower you like, or anything you might want to see painted, please email them to me at arena.shawn@gmail.com. I will paint them and post them here. From every 10 paintings I make from them, there would be a random drawing, and the lucky winner get to take a original back home for free! Interested? Then send me your photo!

You can now buy high quality Giclee prints of many of my sold paintings, both on paper and canvas, as well as some note cards with my paintings here:

Summer Glow, Crimsonscape, and Art in the Park

Summer Glow, Watercolor on Arches #140 Cold Press Paper, 5"h x 7"w, 2013 #79

Sold!

I was quite busy over the past weekend, trying to finish some paintings for the "Art in the Park" event held in the central park of the lovely tri-valley city of San Ramon. And the show was a true blast! Not only did I meet some old collector friends, gained some new ones, I also got to meet a lot of wonderful artists working in a whole range of media from monotype and collage to pastel over traditional Chinese ink painting... The quality of artists are the highest among all the art fairs I have participated in, and they did a fantastic job organizing and marketing this event, providing booth sitters and helps for setup/take-down for people who are alone in their booth (like me) for free, and bringing some quality collectors who are not only knowledgeable about the process and difficulties involved in making a piece of art, but kind and appreciating in their personality. One of my collectors even stayed at the end of the event to help me pack my tent, since my hand was accidentally injured during the morning setup... I can't say how much I am thankful to them, and all the other wonderful people I met during the event!...

Crimsonscape - Red Poinsettia, 
Watercolor on Arches 140# Cold Press Paper, 6"h x 6"w, 2013 #80

Sold!

"Summer Glow" and "Crimsonscape" are two of the paintings I have sold during the event, and I have learned valuable lessons from the experience of selling them: sometimes it is not the best practice to go full out to greet your collector and try to strike small talks with them -- that could totally seem too eager to sell and thus scare away an interested customer. Instead, respect your collector's personal space, and let them look at the art at their own pace, consider about them, compare them, and only try to provide information when being asked, or after they have lingered in front of your booth for a while, and seems a little puzzled and in need of some information from you, is probably the best practice. Bring a painting with you to work on is also a good idea, so that people who are collecting your art would have an opportunity to see how they are created, and ask you questions regarding your process if interested. Also, working on your paintings can prevent you from staring straight at your potential customers when they are trying to study and compare your paintings and make a decision. That kind of stare can make both you and them quite uncomfortable and at times can become a unintended hint of "Please buy something or leave!", which is appreciated by no one.

I think for face-to-face sales like those made in an art fair, we as artists get a rare chance of meet and get to know our collectors, and make some good friends by sharing our life experience and love of what we do, why we do it with them. If a sale results from such communication, it's great; if it happens that the pieces showing are not exactly suited for them, we can still plant the seed of friendship and possible future sales. The most important part of making and selling art to me is to reach out and start a conversation regarding the good things of life, the beauty and kindness I experience everyday, a lot of times from totally unexpected encounters and total strangers. I am grateful for all of them, and really hope that through the art I create, I can share such sense of gratitude with everyone I cross path with...

In the mean time, if you have an image of a beautiful landscape, or a flower you like, or anything you might want to see painted, please email them to me at arena.shawn@gmail.com. I will paint them and post them here. From every 10 paintings I make from them, there would be a random drawing, and the lucky winner get to take a original back home for free! Interested? Then send me your photo!

You can now buy high quality Giclee prints of many of my sold paintings, both on paper and canvas, as well as some note cards with my paintings here:

Braving the Storm -- 30 Paintings in 30 Days Challenge (Round Two), Day 18

Braving the Storm, 

Watercolor on Fabriano Artistico #140 Cold Press Paper , 5"h x 7"w, 2013 #69

Bid at My DPW Auction (Starting Bid $30) 

I've not painted many boats -- don't get me wrong, I really love them. Living on the coast and literally less than three miles away from the ocean, I almost come across them on a daily basis -- from gigantic ocean liners to tiny speed boats. But what impresses me most are the elegant sail boats that one is guaranteed to spot on a good sunny day in the San Francisco Bay, their smooth curved body braving the green-blue waves, their white sails catching east wind, zipping by at lightening speed. With the American Cup underway now in San Francisco, top-of-the-line sail boats from all over the world are accumulated in the bay waters, truly a treat for the eyes of those who love this gentlemen's sport. It's really about time for me to tackle this subject!

The idea of this painting comes from a stroll along Crissy Field (part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area), while all of a sudden the wind just started to blow and these huge, threatening dark clouds gathered from all directions. It seemed that a down-pour is about to happen at any moment. Suddenly a light-color zipped into my field of vision -- a sail boat catching the strong wind and flying on the water, seemingly oblivious of the coming storm, instead just enjoying the strong push from the wind that is blowing harder and harder every minute. It was just the blink of an eye before it disappeared into the distance, and I could not get out of my camera in time to snap a picture, but that imaged was carved into my memory, and recalled out today.

A lot of times, when we really looked, our minds are better than the best camera -- it filters and chips away the non-essential, and what's left is the most important and what attracts us to the subject at first.

You can now buy high quality Giclee prints of many of my sold paintings, both on paper and canvas, as well as some note cards with my paintings here:

Misty Dawn -- 30 Paintings in 30 Days Challenge (Round Two), Day 10, and Thoughts on How Artists Create Art

Misty Dawn, Ruby Beach,
 Watercolor on Richeson Zoltan Szabo #140 Cold Press paper, 5"h x 7"w, 2013 #61

Sold!

Since I was going through the reference photos I took on the trip to Ruby Beach, Washington when doing "Sea Stacks, Ruby Beach" a couple of days ago, I couldn't help but picking out a few more favorites to work from, hence this little one today (and a few more to come). Lucky for me, it still fits in my theme for the current week: landscape with water (ok, ok, yesterday's piece was landscape but without water, I got it :-P... I just got carried away designing those trees and finished it in the end...)

It has been a long time since I took the trip, but I stood on that beach from dawn (which was nice and sunny) till past dusk (which gradually got very cloudy and finally started to rain -- as I complained in the post about "Sea Stacks, Ruby Beach", looked, listened, smelled, pondered, drew and painted, even took a nap! The place with its unique windy, salty atmosphere was well burnt into my memory. Had I not spent such precious time lingering in a place like this, but only snapped a photo and left, I probably wouldn't have felt being suddenly transported back again when my eye accidentally scanned across the reference photo I took there at dawn. I remembered how the warm mist gradually rose from water as the sun slowly climbed up, as if the spirit of the land was waking up along with the warmth provided by this source of life. I remembered the amazing rosy golden glow around everything behind the veil of fog, and the purple-orange shadows of the back-lid sea stacks standing against the rising sun...  I just had to get it down on paper.

After finishing this piece I started pondering about the creative process -- what an artist, every artist goes through after being hitting by that overwhelming sense "I have to paint that!!!"... First comes looking: a sensation; seeing a piece of nature and saying, "There is a beautiful tree", or "I love the light reflected on water's surface". We as artists start to be aware of the "present". Eyesight reception stirs up a chaos inside us. Something has to be done. Then it all quiets down to a more pure, condensed perception: the artist acknowledges him/herself the existence of the scene, and a deep, more real "seeing" is retained within our memory with every extra stare, providing a storehouse of visual data for us to mull over and over, ponder and digest, which finally may be integrated into a "concept" -- a perceived experience with intention. At this stage we as artists have gained an awareness of what stood in front of us in the totality of personal experience. It has become axiomatic, and can be held as a scheme in our mind's eye as an integration of similar units whenever we want to recall it. It matures, and waited to be executed, carried out as a visual statement about the experience -- experience not as what happened to us but what happened in us. And as we finally do that, the finished work becomes separated from us, the artists by time and space. It enters a life of its own, to stand or fall, no longer within our control. There is often a sense of deep vulnerability felt by the artist when such a product makes its public appearance, as for so long we have lived with it, held it deeply in ours minds and hearts, being tortured by its will of coming out of us, worrying that even after giving it our best effort, the result still could not stand up to the beauty we see in our minds' eye... 

It is such a painful, labored exhilaration, an addiction, a powerful experience that we repeat again and again, everyday. The most powerful and most vulnerable position: the position of the creator. 

... And that, is exactly why I am doing it again today.

You can now buy high quality Giclee prints of many of my sold paintings, both on paper and canvas, as well as some note cards with my paintings here:

Summer Glow -- 30 Paintings in 30 Days Challenge (Round Two), Day 6 (Not Quite Finished -- Again?!...)

Summer Glow, Watercolor on Arches #140 Cold Press paper, 5"h x 7"w, WIP 2

OK... I wouldn't exactly call this one "finished" -- but it is not because I am slacking off! I have struggled over this little piece more than anything I have ever painted... You know that "ugly stage" that every painting seems to have to go through, when you tell yourself that you don't exactly know where this is going? For this painting, that awkward stage has lasted almost from its beginning to this point. 

The reference photo of this painting shows a lovely white water lily glowing against several large, mid-dark valued leaves, with no obvious value variations within each leaf shape, or between different leaves. In other words, it's an image of very contrasting small light shapes of the flower petal, and large, uniformly-dark shapes of leaves, with no actual mid-value shapes in between. It seems I have found this problem not challenging enough, and decided that I don't want to just paint the white flower "as is", with mostly neutral grey shadows. Instead, I have decided to try out the multi-color blending and glazing method from Jeannie Vodden, and make the white petals and shadow areas on them "more colorful".

The problem is, when I had the best intentions starting out, I did not exactly have a clear vision of how the finished painting would look like. "Colorful" itself is a very guideline to say the best... As a result, I ran into different problems almost right from the start with colors, and struggled with it for several months. After putting it away and taking it out, staring at it and thinking really hard, I have realized that my first mistake with this painting: I did not decide a dominant hue (or family of hues) for the white petals from the starting point. Since white flowers do not have an apparent hue to their shadows in most lighting conditions, my water lily almost had the entire rainbow of colors evenly spread in its shadow areas. No dominance leads to a cacophony of colors, not a symphony, and it never looked right.

The second problem is the value of the shadow areas on the flower -- I have initially made them almost as dark as the reference photo (which had no mid-value shapes to start with), and they just looked wrong, as if somebody poked a black hole in the center of the flowers. After squinting a lot and again thinking really hard, I have realized this (which an initial value sketch could easily point out, but, alas, I wanted to "get down to the fun of painting" too fast when starting... :-P). After some scrubbing and lifting out, glazing back, lifting again -- finally I have ended up with the value of the flower center in a mid value range, between the lightest petal area and the really dark leaves behind the flower. Now there seems to be a bit depth and the flower center seems to recede a bit back in space, and everything just looks more "right"... Well, the color of the center petals became a bit dull and less saturated because of the repeated lifting and glazing back, but the correct value relationship is more important than all the other aspects of painting, and made this version just looks more believable. 

I am quite proud that I have stuck with the suffering and figured out what the problem is, and what I need to do to make it work. Due to the limitation of the paper -- you just cannot keep on putting on colors and taking them off, even when working on the tough Arches -- I may not be able to totally realize my vision for this one from its current stage, but next time, when facing with a similar problem -- white flower with very dark backgrounds, without much intermediate value shapes in the reference image, and when I want to again try to make the white "colorful" and not just straightly paint the grey shadows I see in the reference material, I will have a more clear vision of what to achieve, what to avoid, what has to be tackled first, from the starting point. Now for this one, I just have to finish a few darkest shadows and crevice darks on the flower, and the reflections of the petals. There is a bit of work, but not anything conceptually hard, so with a couple more hours here and there, it should fall into place... 

In the mean time, I have again spent five hours sitting in the art fair, which gave me ample time to some other watercolor sketches and studies. This time I want to just use texture - brushed on, spattered, imprinted with various textured materials, sprayed by clear water... you name it -- to create a sense of ground and growth (i.e., grass and bushes) without actually outlining any tree shapes with pencil. Again, it was great fun, and very different from what I usually do.... I am seriously thinking that I need to do this more in the future.

Wild Growth, Watercolor on Arches #140 Cold Press paper, 6"h x 10"w, 2013 #57

Bid at My DPW Auction (Starting Bid $20) 

OK, I think I've had quite a few days with flowers... (Ok, I did not quite finish the flower pieces I was working on for the past few days, but I will in the coming days! And I did spend a solid day on each of them, trying very hard to finish... But sometimes paintings have a will of their own! :-P) Starting tomorrow I will begin a new theme for the challenge -- landscape with the element "water" in it. I think it will be quite exciting... Stay tuned!

You can now buy high quality Giclee prints of many of my sold paintings, both on paper and canvas, as well as some note cards with my paintings here:

Sunkissed (in Progress), and Some Thoughts about Glazing

Sunkissed, Watercolor on Fabriano Artistico #140 Cold Press paper, 5"h x 7"w, WIP 2

As I gradually glaze the deeper, richer tones on this one (another one getting ready for the Filoli "Meet the Artists" event!), and add a few blue/purple here and there to indicate shadows, I recall that I was such a stickler about the rules of glazing when I just started painting in watercolor -- no opaques over transparents, using staining colors only as underpaintings and avoid glazing with them... 

Now, after practicing wet-on-dry glazing and mixing a rainbow of colors using only three randomly picked primaries, following Jeannie Vodden's instructions, I have finally reached a point that I've started to discard many rules about glazing, no long caring whether transparent or opaque paints were applied underneath or on top. I have realized that problems often occur when too many layers of paint are applied too thickly, resulting in not enough transparent areas being left to set off adjacent layered areas; and all opaques would look transparent when thinned enough -- they are watercolor paints after all!

I've gradually come to an understanding that rules can be used as a guide when needed, but following them rigidly without carefully thinking about the "why"s each time would only hamper, not help your painting in the end.

You can now buy high quality Giclee prints of many of my sold paintings, both on paper and canvas, as well as some note cards with my paintings here:

Some Old Progress, Some New Starts, and Thoughts about the (Layering) Process...

Still working on finishing some older projects for the "Meet the Artists" event in the Filoli Show. I'm a bit stuck on this one (I realized that I have posted some of its earlier progresses on my facebook page, but not yet here on my blog) -- I feel the shadows on the water-lily need to be a bit darker to give dimension to the flower, but worry if I darken it, the entire painting would be way too dark -- it seems the leaves on the background are already getting to dark. What do you think?...

Summer Glow, Watercolor on Arches #140 Cold Press paper, 5"h x 7"w, WIP 1

When not sure how to "conclude" a certain project, I usually turn to a new one and making a fresh start -- nothing liberates the mind more and gives it more energy/stimulation than beginning to create and solve a complete new set of problems! I've started a couple of portrait and figure master study projects this way, which have led me to reconsider carefully the "paint by layers" process of watercolor (which I realize that I have actually never mastered). I am trying to do these paintings more consciously, and more structured, trying to block each of the major shapes (face, hair, clothes, etc.) with its lightest tone first before adding any middle-value forms later and applying any darks, and trying my best to resist the urge to put a second layer anywhere until I've put the first layer everywhere. Of course, the first layer does not have to be a flat wash -- I mingled a couple of analogous colors on the boy's face, and his jacket has quite a bit of color and value changes painted wet-into-wet when doing the first layer of wash...

Out Fishing (Study of Jan Kunz), 

Watercolor on Lanaquarell #140 Cold Press paper, 15"h x 11"w, WIP 1

When painting the initial underlying wash, how careful should the application of color be? I think it depends on the following factors: 1. Is your style casual or painstaking? 2. Is your subject even, smooth or rough in its texture? Does it contain quite a bit of color and value variations? 3. How much of the first layer would be visible after the application of the second, third, and the rest of subsequent layers? Is a "bloom" or uneven spot really going to be visible after all the other layers are applied? 4. Is there anything that needs to be painted around, and if so, how complex is the shape that needs to be painted around when applying the first wash? And most importantly, immediately after the first layer is painted (or better yet, before doing this first wash), I try to ask myself -- is there anything I should do while this layer is still wet? Any variation of the color (subtle color shifts), touching in a pattern of soft-edged marks and so on are best done while the first wash is still wet, which leaves the window of application very narrow. It's both nerve wrecking and exhilarating!...

You can now buy high quality Giclee prints of many of my sold paintings, both on paper and canvas, as well as some note cards with my paintings here:

Exhibition at Filoli Garden, and Thoughts on Chinese Painting Philosophy

Fighting with my jetlag and trying to finish some small pieces for the exhibition at Filoli Garden - "Nature’s Many Splendors: Farms, Gardens and Woodlands". The show runs from August 27th through October 27th, at the art gallery area in Filoli Garden, which is located at 86 Canada Rd in the lovely town of Woodside, California. The garden opens every Tuesday through Sunday from 10:00 am to 3:30 pm. Besides the art exhibitions, Filoli's other attractions include a lovely greenhouse with constant blooming flowers, and more than 600 acres' nature preserve with beautiful grassy hills and woodlands abundant with wildlife -- from turkey to deer. It is a great place to spend a family weekend to hike, bike, play and relax. There would also be an "Meet the Artists Day" event during the weekend of Saturday, September 14th and Sunday, September 15th. On this special art-festival-like weekend, visitors can meet the artists in the show, watch them doing art demos, chat with them and learn what has inspires them to create their art pieces. Framed pieces, prints, note cards and other items will be for sale both during the show and at the "Meet the Artist Day" event. I will show my main piece in the next few day's posts. For now, I'm working on a few other pieces that will be available for sale during the show and at the "Meet the Artist Day" event, and I will share the progress of some of them here with you, my friends:

Fire Dance,  Watercolor on Fabriano Artistico #140 Cold Press Paper, 6"h x 6"w, WIP 2

"Fire Dance" has been in the works for quite a while, off and on since the end of last year, and is nowalmost complete. I am currently adding darks to the center flower in focus to model its form. I thought the background may need another coat of darker mingled colors to bring the flowers forward, but not very sure. What do you think, my friend?

Orange Freesia, Watercolor on Arches 140# Cold Press Paper, 6"h x 6"w, WIP 2

For "Orange Freesia", I am still playing with thing glazes and wet-on-dry mingling of color for modelling. I am fighting the temptation of going too dark too soon and using saturated color in one go wet-in-wet, because of the delicate and subtle colors that I have in vision for this particular painting. Also trying to play with abstract shape more in the background -- like playing with a puzzle -- it's really quite a lot of fun!

Heliconia Dance,  Watercolor on Arches 140# Cold Press Paper, 7"h x 5"w, WIP 4

For "Heliconia Dance", I have put it away for a while and just recently started working on it again. Looking at it with a fresh eye, I think it still needs a final application of wet-in-wet on the background to soften it, and add some "punch" of darks -- to reach that balance between "too similar to the photo reference" and "too abstract from the reference"... Ah, maybe I should start from the beginning of the story: Last night I was reading ancient Chinese literature, and one passage of art critique says, "If a (realistic) painting is too identical to the scene in front of the artist, it is not great art because it's kitsch; on the other hand, if it is just haphazard slapping of color on paper without enough reference or similarity to the scene that inspired it, it is also not great art because the artist is on the suspicion of trying to hoodwink people with insufficient skills and gain fame that they don't deserve. Therefore, the best type of (realistic) paintings always walk a tightrope between "similar" and "dissimilar" to its original inspiration." (bear with my terrible translation -- the original was much more poetic: "画太似为媚俗，不似为欺世。画之大妙也，在乎似与不似之间。") 

Reflecting on my own painting practice based on this standard, I think I am still leaning too much on the "too similar" side to my photo references. Therefore, I've decided to consciously challenge myself to break away from this tendency, and design my shapes -- especially those away from focal areas and in the background -- more deliberately, not so "carbon-copy" of the shapes in the reference material. It takes some effort to get used to new working methods, but I'm very excited about all the different possibilities this may lead to... For the starters, it makes the painting process much more exciting! 

You can now buy high quality Giclee prints of many of my sold paintings, both on paper and canvas, as well as some note cards with my paintings here: