Fiery Sky -- WIPs (Again!), 30 Paintings in 30 Days Challenge, Round 3, Day 5

Fiery Sky,  Watercolor on Fabriano Artistico #140 Cold Press Paper, 8"h x 10"w, WIP 1

Classes at the atelier resumed on Monday, which means I only have 3-4 hours at most to paint now on weekdays. Combining that with my recent sickness due to the cold (although we do not have a frigid temperature compared to most part of the country...), I did not complete this painting yesterday. It is very close to a finish and I am working on it, playing with my new favorite brush -- the slanted bristle 1" to put in shapes suggesting of foliage with minimum strokes. 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:

Autumn Colors... 30 Paintings in 30 Days Challenge, Round 3, Day 4

Bon Fire,  Watercolor on Arches #140 Cold Press Paper, 10"h x 4"w, WIP 1

With theme of today's painting being "Foliage", I could not decide whether to work on a tree or a field of grass. Being the ADD artist I am, I ended up doing the exact wrong thing -- being way to ambitious and decided to work on two paintings in the same time, one a small vertical format study of an autumn maple tree, and the other the exploration of textural and wet-in-wet manipulation of color on a golden wheat field of countryside. I liked the progress of both, but with the day fast drawing to an end, and the obligation of having to drive down to the south bay to hang some of my work at Brian's Restaurant in Los Altos for a little two-person show arranged by my local Los Altos Art Club (LAAC), I realized that I might not be able to finish either of them today! I don't want to just rush to an end since I liked both of them at this stage, and want to take time to tweak shapes and colors, doing a little calligraphy here and there, and a lot of gazing in between. We'll see how I am doing! I would do an update before going to bed... It's going to be a long night...

Fields of Gold,  Watercolor on Arches #140 Cold Press Paper, 9"h x 12"w, WIP 1

Update: I did not finish this painting until the morning of the next day, but I was happy about the extra time I got to explore the shapes and space divisions by the branches. One thing I found about making small twigs looking real is to lighten and cool down their color toward the end. Of course a little dry brush work also goes a long way!

Bon Fire,  Watercolor on Arches #140 Cold Press Paper, 10"h x 4"w, 2014 #4

Bid at My DPW Auction (Starting Bid $35) 

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:

Wild Growth III -- 30 Paintings in 30 Days Challenge (Round Two), Day 23, and What One Do in Days of Frustration...

Wild Growth III,
 Watercolor on Winsor Newton #140 Cold Press paper, 5"h x 11"w, 2013 #73

Sold!

Today is a very frustrating day in the studio -- you occasionally (or perhaps like me, more than occasionally) get them and just about nothing seems to work. I started a couple of paintings only to wash three of them right off the hose, the new paper I tried is against everything I expect it to do, and all my drawings look unnatural and stiff... It's already late at night and I have nothing to show for today's work, while I have actually worked really, really hard for an entire day! 

In the end I decide to go back to the basics -- take a simple composition and just try to make interesting textural marks on the paper. I started three new and small pieces this way, not thinking about how to finish them, and just allow myself to play... Since there is no reference image, I just painted from my imagination, and perhaps from imagery have recently created or visited. The first one of these followed the pattern remembered from "Wild Growth II" and evolved into a field, the second one became a high mountain peak in sunset, and in the third one the sun has completely set behind the mountain, leaving only purple-grey sky and a faint orange glow. (I am still working on the other two so they will be shared in my post tomorrow.) By not concentrating on the process itself instead of on creating a piece of work that is "beautiful" to showcase on the challenge page, I was able to make something that I am happy about, again.

Perhaps this is a lesson I should have learned long ago, but still learning again and again everyday -- I am painting to enjoy the wonder of creation from heart as the foremost goal, not to compare to all the other wonderful artists out there. Sometimes, something small and unassuming is just what I need. Out of its simplicity lies what my heart is craving for on that particular day. Sometimes I do need to listen, more carefully...

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:

Wild Growth II -- 30 Paintings in 30 Days Challenge (Round Two), Day 9, and Some Thoughts on Beginnings

Wild Growth II,
 Watercolor on Winsor Newton #140 Cold Press paper, 4"h x 11"w, 2013 #60

Sold!

Today is a good day at the studio in terms of actual work that's been done: I have laid out different maker's different surface-finish of paper, tried all of them out by starting a new landscape wet-in-wet on them. So... There were a lot of messy starts -- not one of them finished since a quarter-sheet soaking wet requires some time to dry naturally, hence I was running between projects. For wet starts like this I also stand up and paint, which means at the end of the day, my legs are about to give out. But it was exhilarating, since I can see a few possible good paintings start to emerge, and I have also discovered some good techniques for certain makes of paper that I did not know how to paint on before.

But I did not forget about the challenge! I developed one of the sheets (ok, only part of it) into this little study of texture of field and shapes of dark conifers. It was painted more abstractly than normal, since my focus was to test out how different texture-creating procedures would work on this particular type of paper when it is gradually drying. Of course, only textured, undefined large span of field requires some smaller, more defined areas with hard edges to contrast with it so that the whole picture could work, hence the conifers, which were painted first as abstract combinations of shapes made by deliberately varied brush strokes. The whole painting process is very brain-intensive, and I felt totally exhausted coming out of it, but also filled with sense of pride and joy, because I have challenged myself and learned something again. 

It is Glasworthy who said, "The beginning and endings of all human undertakings are untidy: the building of a house, the writing of a novel, the demolition of a bridge and eminently, the finish of a voyage." So true.

These new starts I made today would become finished paintings in the next few days. I am so excited and could not wait until tomorrow to work on them again!...

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: