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

Bid in My DPW Auction (Starting Bid $50)

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...

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

Bid in My DPW Auction (Starting Bid $30)

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...

The Perch - Day Twelve of the 30/30 Challenge

The Perch, Watercolor on Arches #140 Cold Press Paper, 6"h x 6"w, 2015 #14

Bid in My DPW Auction (Starting Bid $45)

Day twelve of the challenge -- this is a little painting I did based on a previous plein air piece at the shoreline park of mountain view. In the untraveled back portion of this park you can often see raptors perched on barren deciduous trees that did not survive the invasion of salty water toward shore. Against the pink and lavender evening sky the magnificent bird seems truly free of any weight and terrestrial entanglements...

Marsh Sunset -- A Little Plein Air Painting at Elkhorn Slough

Marsh Sunset, Watercolor on Fabriano #140 Cold Press Paper, 8"h x 10"w, 2014 #13

Bid in My DPW Auction ( Starting Bid $70)

The weather was great and I went out to do some plein air on Friday, and completely "Marsh Sunset" near Elkhorn Slough. Unfortunately, it was very cold once the sun started to set, and the coastal fog came in swiftly. As a result, I was not feeling well over the weekend  and did not get much of painting done... Still, I was happy to finally get back there and paint in nature! It's been too long since I have done that...

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:

Storm over Estuary, Lewis and Clark National Park, Oregon -- 30 Paintings in 30 Days Challenge, Round 3, Day 7

Storm over Estuary, Lewis and Clark National Park, Oregon,  

Watercolor on Fabriano Artistico #140 Cold Press Paper, 6"h x 6"w, 2014 #7

Bid at My DPW Auction (Starting Bid $25) 

I have forgotten how difficult it is to paint big sky paintings -- and how little control you have of the outcome. Paint clouds wet in wet means that you are totally at the mercy of the paper and water. I had three wipe-outs (wash-outs to be exact) for this one and yesterday's painting each, because the cloud simply did not come out to be interesting shapes with enough value change in them when dried. I have resorted a simplest palette of only two colors: Payne's Gray and Quinacridone Burnt Sienna to capture this scene from a reference photo I've taken along the Lewis and Clark trail in coastal Oregon. When painting it I remembered so vividly of the big sky, open water, and evergreen trees standing on the edge of the estuaries. I took the road trip during Christmas-New Year break, and when I arrived at the national park that chilly winter afternoon, there is not a soul to be found around. There are some places on this earth that truly allows one's soul to quiet down, take the rhythm of the flowing water and the roaming wind. The coast of Oregon (which is deliberately kept to be public land by the state law) is definitely one of them. 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:

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:

Under the Autumn Sky - 30 Paintings in 30 Days Challenge, Round 3, Ready, Set, Go!...

Under the Autumn Sky, 
Watercolor on Fabriano Artistico #140 Cold Press Paper, 9"h x 12"w, 2014 #1

Bid at My DPW Auction (Starting Bid $75) 

OK, call me crazy but yes, after much struggle with myself I've decided to take up Leslie Saeta's "30 Paintings in 30 Days" challenge yet again! Needless to say, last year after doing this challenge in September, my blog postings have become sporadic, and I've not finished many paintings since. There is definitely a possibility of "burning out" for a slow painter like me to take up such a challenge. (In fact I got very sick toward the end of the year, possibly because of the pressure I put myself through doing all the holiday shows, and the school work in the Atelier... :-() But my new year's resolution is to try painting more landscapes in a looser style (yes, you've probably heard me saying this on my various blog posts a couple of times if you have me visiting this blog for a while -- on my defense I did try really hard each time! But being "loose" is such an elusive goal for me -- it is the final product that has to evoke such sense, yet in each of the step toward creating a looser, freer, more atmospheric painting a painter has to be very deliberate and really know what he/she is doing! I have to admit I am struggling here...), so I've decided to take up this challenge with that goal in mind. 

In the following weeks of January, I will try to do a little landscape painting each day, and each week there would be a slightly different focus: sky, water, mountains and foliage (trees, brushes and grassland). This first one, "Under the Autumn Sky", is a sky-focused painting. My main goal here is to capture the fleeting sense of light near sunset on a slightly overcast day, and emulate the beautiful cloud shapes that changes every second you look without getting fixated on being "exact". It has started as a Plein-Air Sketch in the Palo Alto Bayland Marsh last fall (yes, during the last 30/30 challenge =_=b...), but I was not quite sure what I was trying to say in the piece, and had to put it aside for a while until I could see it in my mind's eye. In the end I had to revisit the lessons I've learned from landscape master Sterling Edwards and Carl Purcell's workshop, and revise the composition to emphasize the sky area, making sure the foreground marsh and tree line in the middle ground are not too busy as to detract from this center of focus.

A good lesson I have learned from doing this painting is to try to say one thing, and one thing only in one small painting like this. Since I was initially attracted by the sky when started this painting, I decided to stick with it. The other equally interesting shapes and textures, the lovely distant tree line, for example, is better explored in detail in another painting! (That's the beauty of doing such challenges -- you know you'll have another painting to do just the next day! lol...)

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:

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:

Fall over Marsh -- 30 Paintings in 30 Days Challenge (Round Two), Day 16

Fall over Marsh, 

Watercolor on Fabriano Artistico #140 Cold Press Paper , 8"h x 12"w, 2013 #67

Bid at My DPW Auction (Starting Bid $65) 

This is the second piece I have completed from the exercises started at Sterling Edwards' workshop. The initial imagery comes from many evening walks I have done around the marsh lands in the bay area, when the sky gradually turns into a beautiful magenta purple color, and the reflections of bushes and woods in the still waters of the marsh simply glow with a golden hue. Those last minutes before dark, the "in between" moments, the magical moments of the day, when I ambled through the quiet trails around these wetlands, they are all carved into my memories. Those were quiet times to reflect on the day, or watching a flock of birds gliding through low sky and marvel at their agility. Those were moments I felt at one with my surroundings, totally lost but knowing exactly who I am, and why I come to this world. 

I feel truly blessed every time I attempt to record such moments, such experiences with my brush. The action of painting itself recalls the joys of time experienced, shapes seen, sounds heard -- the completion of the picture seems only of secondary importance in comparison. The impressions seemed vague and hard to capture on paper, yet with every brush stroke I was reassured that they are actually part of me, and I will have them in me forever. It's a truly amazing experience... Let a scene simmer in your heart with time, before to bring it in front of the world 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: