Sentinel - 30/30 Challenge 2016

Sentinel,

 Watercolor on Richeson Szabo #140 Cold Press Paper, 7"h x 11"w, 2016 #9

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100% of the sale of this painting would be donated to the cause of trisomy in ​honor of the lost child of my amazing artist friend and fellow painter, Brienne Brown. She is so brave and kind and strong in sharing her struggle and contribute to the cause!

I have wanted to do this for a while but some personal circumstances have delayed it. I wanted to paint a painting with the symbol of life, revival, resilience embedded in it, in honor of the life that is lost too young yet would never be forgotten by her loved ones. It is not a lot but I want to contribute my little bit. Every little bit helps in the fight against this formidable rare disease, which has not gotten the attention it deserves in the medical and pharmaceutical society, probably because it is rare and not a lot of profit there is to be made. Imagine the impact a cure would have on the families with a loved ones diagnosed... I can't help but hope that day would come sooner...

Dusk over Marsh - Day Twenty-Eight of the 30/30 Challenge

Dusk over Marsh, 

Watercolor on Arches #140 Cold Press Paper, 6"h x 6"w, 2015 #30

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Day Twenty-Eight of the challenge -- a little plein air piece at sunset, done mostly with my 1" slanted bristle brush. I am falling in love with this big, stiff brush that is not at all capable of doing any details, but carries so much pigment and water and does soft wet-in-wet blending and rough edges both so well! When the sun is setting and the light changing fast, it is really handy! I actually did several different studies before the sun completely sinks under the horizon, but I love this one the most -- it did capture the glorious sky that I saw, which made all the draw grass near shore literally glows with dragon's blood red! Again, this is done in a quiet back corner of the shoreline park of mountain view. I can never get tired of painting the beautiful wetlands in the bay area...

Remnants - Day Twenty-Seven of the 30/30 Challenge

Remnants, Watercolor on Arches #140 Cold Press Paper, 6"h x 6"w, 2015 #29

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Day Twenty-Seven of the challenge -- another little plein air study I did at the ghost town of Drawbridge, near the marshlands by Mountain View. The sky is extraordinarily clear and very intense warm blue in the zenith, with just the slightest bits of pale clouds down toward horizon. The shoreline is cleared of people at the early hour. Because of the heat and drought in the past few months (years?! :-), the grass along the shore is a lovely golden brown color, providing contrast with the cool turquoise water -- I just have to paint it! The dilapidated shack near a broken wooden-plank bridge naturally became my center of focus for this painting, as it has so much character, like an old face full of wrinkles and history. I can't help but wondering who built it, who has stayed in it over the years, coming out between the time after the stars are gone, and before the early dawn light is in, staring into the big empty sky and wondering what is at the other end of the horizon. In the quiet hours of dawn, I feel connected to all that has happened here before, the people who have come, and the days flown by. I put my brush to paper...

Savannah Moon - Day Twenty of the 30/30 Challenge

Savannah Moon, Watercolor on Arches #140 Cold Press Paper, 6"h x 6"w, 2015 #22

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Day Twenty of the challenge -- today I am playing with limited palette again, starting with a concept of nocturnal and aridity, I used mostly Raw and Burnt Sienna with a little Indantrine Blue added to cool down the mixture in distance, and just used a large 1" flat sable brush to make various wet and dry marks to indicate foliage. Linear marks were added later with a rigger or scratched into the wet paint as it dried to suggest branches. The moon was lifted in the end with a stiff-haired synthetic rounds. As I have mentioned before, limited palette makes it especially easy to explore quiet, somber moods, and create a sense of mystery. I added the distant group of trees when evaluating the composition and found my foreground foliage shapes have slowly crept up toward the middle of the picture as I was painting, despite my initial planning and composition sketches warning myself not to do so. And the small, distant tree shapes serve well to break this center-symmetry, providing much-needed pictorial relief. Reminding myself I need to stop more frequently while painting to evaluate the development of the composition and avoid such problem in the first place! :-P Lol...

Day Dream - Day Nineteen of the 30/30 Challenge

Day Dream, Watercolor on Arches #140 Cold Press Paper, 6"h x 6"w, 2015 #21

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Day Nineteen of the challenge -- I started three little plein air pieces of this marsh in the same time, dividing my big piece of paper and drew views from different directions. It was morning and the soft lavender clouds blushed against the edge of distant shore, shifting in and out of the tree tops. I want to capture the sense of cool, moist air and sun light peaking out of clouds, catching on the top of the lush growth of marsh grass. Unfortunately out of the three paintings only this one turned out to be worthy of posting... Oh well, the reality of painting outdoors! I added thick Cadmium Yellows with a rigger for some definite linear marks to contrast with the soft edges shapes of the marsh grass, as well as some wet-on-dry shapes defining the edge of the big tree on the right side. Thinking of repainting this one into a larger piece, but I need to work on the composition and color schemes a bit more...

Marsh Dawn - Day Fourteen of the 30/30 Challenge

Marsh Dawn, Watercolor on Arches #140 Cold Press Paper, 6"h x 6"w, 2015 #16

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Day fourteen of the challenge -- I am really late for this one. I tried a very limited palette of Cobalt Blue and Quinacridone Burnt Orange on this one, going for mood and atmosphere rather than details. I found that with restrictions often comes poetry, such as Haiku, with its extremely constrained forms the wonder of poetry often comes through quite easily compared to free-form modern poems where everything goes. 

This is not a particular scene that I am painting from life, but I have seen it so many times while taking morning walks in different wetland parks bordering evergreen forests -- at the mouth of redwood forest streams, near the river estuaries of Olympia National Park, even along mountain meadows at the edge of alpine forests in a wet season. The lingering fog and the mirror-clear reflection of the forest is woven into my most intimate memories. When I close my eyes, it can just flow out to the tip of my brush. I can almost smell the moist air tinged with the scent of new grass. Somethings you just never forget...

Under the Autumn Sky -- 30 Paintings in 30 Days Challenge (Round Two), Day 20 (Almost Done...)

Under the Autumn Sky, 

Watercolor on Fabriano Artistico #140 Cold Press Paper , 9"h x 12"w, WIP 1

This one started plein air -- around the Alviso Slough. When I am working on the foreground marsh grass area, rain started drifting in. Since I am working on Fabriano paper which allows colors to be lifted easily, I decide to avoid the rain so that the darker tones I have already put in the foreground would not all lift with the drizzle. I may have to go back tomorrow to finish this one, or, I could refer to some of the nice reference images and notes I took from Sterling Edwards' workshop (he is a master for creating interesting foregrounds and design tree shapes) and finish it off in the comfort of my studio. I have not yet decided what to do about it -- again, sleeping on it may not be such a bad idea in situations like this... 

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:

More Fog Paintings...

Here's one of the other fog paintings I worked on yesterday and today. This one is more of a struggle compared to the previous post -- I liked the subtle effects I already achieved in the first wash, but realized that I had to take the risk and put a second, third or forth wet wash on top of it to achieve the depth and subtle muted color needed for this fog scene. The foreground meadow was far too bright and saturated. In a foggy day the meadow may appear very lush green because of the moisture, but to achieve unity in the entire painting, that lushness had to be toned down just a bit since the water vapor in the air would affect even the most close-by objects and blur them a bit too. I did just that in the second pass -- wet the entire painting front and back and laid it on a piece of plexiglass covered with wet paper towels to extend precious time I can use to manipulate wet pigments on the paper surface. I used Cobalt Blue and Indian Yellow to mix the green for the tree line, adding just a tiny bit of Burnt Sienna to mute it further. The yellow and blue separated on the very wet surface, and formed a slight blurry yellow halo around the tree tops, which I really liked -- it reminded me the morning sun shinning behind the foggy forest. I experimented with stiffer brush and denser pigments on the foreground meadows a bit. I think the most scary part -- wet the entire sheet -- is done at this stage. I will add layers of tree lines wet on dry and work on the foreground meadow a bit more to finish it... (Instead of ruin it, I hope :-P)

Spring Meadow, Tamalpais,  

Watercolor on Winsor Newton 140# Cold Press Paper , 6"h x 10"w, WIP 2

I also spent quite a few hours really darkening the background foliages and adding wet-in-wet effects on "Peppermint Rose". Color granulates so nicely on Fabriano Artistico paper surface, but adding the required density of pigments are really painful to accomplish on this paper! I am in a love-hate relationship with it. The soft surface stop to absorb water and pigments much faster than harder paper such as Arches or Richeson, so it's very easy to have dense pigments pooling on a wet surface, creating mud. This one is close to a finish now, I have to be very careful with it...

Peppermint Rose, 

Watercolor on Fabriano Artistico 140# Cold Press Paper, 8"h x 8"w, WIP 6

Work in Progress: Last Light

After painting the the estuary and fog scenes with a muted cool palette, I was itching to splash some warm, saturated colors on paper, and a sunset is always enticing to paint... Think about all the bright reds, oranges and golden hues! The inspiration of this painting comes from a business trip several years ago when I was working as an application scientist (glorified term for after-sale customer support engineer...) in upstate Maine. I remember it was the last evening I stayed there, on the way to the hotel, after a three-day snow storm, the sun finally broke through thick clouds, and back-lighting all the pine and fir woods along the road... Some dead reeds across the snow field were glowing in the setting sun as if they were lid by fire. It was such a breath-taking moment... I pulled over the country road and snapped as many photos as I could while the sun is sinking fast toward the horizon.

Last Light, Watercolor on Arches 140# Cold Press Paper , 5"h x 6"w, WIP 1

Since this is a very small painting (I may do a larger version of it after trying out the composition on this scale), I tried to keep the background woods very simple, just using upright strokes of dark and light colors to hint the trees gradually receding into distance. I have used strong dark cool colors -- blues, greens and purples mingled together for the foreground shadows, and charged thick pigments of reddish-orange for the reed heads reflecting the setting sun. I am not sure about how I should deal with the middle-ground snow field. I'd like to keep it light to indicate sun-lid snow, but I'd also want to integrate it into the dark shapes of foreground and background. Some carefully pondering...