Evergreen Notes - 30/30 Challenge 2016

Evergreen Notes, Watercolor on Arches #140 Cold Press Paper, 7"h x 12"w, 2016 #13

Bid in My DPW Auction (Starting Bid $65)

Playing with limited palette and want to create the illusion of fog in the background. To add warmth in the foreground I used a muted yellow-brown which compliments the overall blue-purple color scheme of the painting. The painting was done from a quick 30-minute study on site when hiking in the high sierras. The way those tall mountain hemlock and silver fir trees dance in the wind left such a strong impression on my mind, that even now I can still just close my eyes and see it...

Sentinel - 30/30 Challenge 2016

Sentinel,

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

Bid in My DPW Auction (Starting Bid $100)

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...

Edge of the Meadow - Day Seventeen of the 30/30 Challenge

Edge of the Meadow, Watercolor on Arches #140 Cold Press Paper, 6"h x 6"w, 2015 #19

Bid in My DPW Auction (Starting Bid $50)

Day Seventeen of the challenge -- I did not finish this one quite in time and it is really late now... Experimented a little bit with the 1" slanted bristle brush again to suggest the background woods and soft grass shapes in the foreground meadow. Got a little carried away with rigger work on the bare branches, but it was a lot of fun! I am still hanging on here -- happy painting everyone!

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:

Stormy Weather -- 30 Paintings in 30 Days Challenge (Round Two), Day 21 (Sorry, WIP Again...)

Stormy Weather,  Watercolor on Arches 140# Cold Press Paper, 11"h x 15"w, WIP 2

I've been painting a lot of landscapes lately, and some of them are getting bigger than the usual size I work on. This one is not finished and now I have to try really hard not to wreck it! I've nervously stood in front of this painting putting on one stroke after another using a really big brush (the size of the paper is 11" x 15", which is not really big, but big for me) when it was changing from soaking wet to almost dry, and I think I've gained another level of understanding of wet water cycle on watercolor paper after this one! I am really excited about all the soft but definite edges I was able to achieve on it...

I feel very lazy comparing to all my friends out there who are really finishing a painting a day -- from tomorrow I will try to finish the piece I am working on again, and get the last two pieces finished! I promise... I think although this has been a great exercise of discipline, it does start to take a toll on me to paint non-stop from morning to late night for more than three weeks. Sometimes I swear that I literally feel my wrist is getting stiff! But, I do not want to be a whiner -- I just really admire those of you who, despite of all the other tasks and obligations in life, still manage to start and finish a painting in a day's time! Hang on friends, we are almost there!... ;-P

Stormy Weather,  Watercolor on Arches 140# Cold Press Paper, 11"h x 15"w, WIP 3

This is what it has progressed to after more work last night and this morning. With three unfinished work going on in the same time, it was actually fairly easy to get a refreshed view switching back and forth between them. I think with a few details on the middle ground trees and some further refinement of the conifers on the left, it could be finished within a couple of hours. I will take extra caution not to get carried away adding those last details...

Stormy Weather,  Watercolor on Arches 140# Cold Press Paper, 11"h x 15"w, 2013 #71

Bid at My DPW Auction (Starting Bid $125) 

I think this piece is now finished -- I was very happy with the negative painting of some of the light fir trees on the left side, as well as the calligraphy to suggest tree branches in the middle ground light colored tree shapes. I did quite a few negative paintings on this one, using the dark mountain shapes behind to set the edge of the middle ground tree that is being lid. The main point of exercise for this one is trying to depict dramatic lighting, and using brushwork to suggest mountain, tree and grass. I have certainly learned quite a bit designing those shapes...

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 Heat, Central Valley -- 30 Paintings in 30 Days Challenge (Round Two), Day 14

Summer Heat, Central Valley,  

Watercolor on Arches #140 Cold Press Paper , 6"h x 9"w, 2013 #65

Bid at My DPW Auction (Starting Bid $55) 

This piece started quite a while ago as a study of negative painting in a workshop with the wonderful landscape artist and teacher Roland Lee. I saw this scene first when driving down to central valley on one of the little winding roads from Pinnacles National Park (at that time still only a national monument). The heat has totally scorched the land. There is only yellows, orches and browns in my field of vision. Now and then, a single, very skinny cattle or horse would been seen lying under valley oak trees, trying to get as much shade as possible from the what little shadow a lone tree could offer. It must be over 100 degrees even in shadow. Every inch in my line of vision is burnt by heat. Even the wind was choking hot, and when it titillated with the dried up grass it almost sounded like the vegetation were moaning out of pain and thirst. An old wind pump was slowly operating on the roadside, draining what little water it could squeeze out of ground into the huge rusty metal tanks standing beside it. I couldn't help but imaging how hot it would be if I put my hand on the shiny surface of those tanks... I can almost feel the thirst on my lips again when finishing this piece last night, although I was sitting in my cool, damp, comfortable San Francisco home...

I guess this is what I love most about painting -- it allow you to recall and relive the experiences that has once moved you, or forever scarred you. The pleasure and pain that has once changed us are, through the movement of a brush, fixed on a piece of canvas or paper for eternity...

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:

Spring Meadow, Tamalpais -- 30 Paintings in 30 Days Challenge (Round Two), Day 12

Spring Meadow, Tamalpais,  

Watercolor on Winsor Newton 140# Cold Press Paper , 6"h x 10"w, 2013 #63

Sold!

My theme for the "30 Paintings in 30 Days Challenge" this week is "landscape with water" -- I guess fog is a form of water hence this painting still fits the theme. ;-) I've learned a lot about using aerial perspective and soft-to-hard edge transition to create a sense of depth from doing this painting, as well as how to create varied shapes within repetition -- it is really hard to make every next stroke representing a fir branch to be of a different size, shape, direction and color from the last one! I don't think I've done an excellent job here -- more practice definitely needed. I've also experimented only using color transition and texture to represent the meadow. Unfortunately it looks more interesting in person than on the photo...

For those of you who are in the bay area -- tomorrow (Saturday, September 14th) and the day after tomorrow (Sunday, September 15th) will be the "Meet the Artists Day" event for the exhibition at Filoli Garden - "Nature’s Many Splendors: Farms, Gardens and Woodlands"! You are all invited to this special art-festival-like weekend, to 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. And I will be doing demo there! 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.

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:

Falling Snow (Thoughts of You Fall Quietly upon Me...), & Slowly Proceeding forward with Spring Meadow, Tamalpais...

Ok, ok, I am admitting... Like everyone else I am addicted to the new HBO series "Game of Thrones". And after watching the snow-covered mysterious northern countries of the Starks for weeks, anxiously waiting for each new episode to appear on the TV screen every Sunday, I thought I'd pay my homage by doing some small paintings of snow scenes on Sundays. 

Falling Snow (Thoughts of You Fall Quietly upon Me...),  

Watercolor on Arches 140# Rough Paper , 7"h x 8"w, 2012 #30

Sold!

This Sunday's episode gives me a profound sense of loss and loneliness, which prompted me to try to capture the same feeling in this little imagined scene. I imagined it outside someone's window in the northern woods, and the thoughts of the host slowly drifting away to a distant place to be with someone she cares deeply about with the snow veiling the worlds surrounding her little by little... Life in the northern woods, where the life changes following the pattern of the seasons. A distant past, another life...

It was fun painting this one. I experimented with diluting the paint mixture little by little when painting each of the foreground trees from top down to create the effect of snow being blown by wind and drifting near the ground. Paper towels came in handy in wiping away the last bit of thin mixtures near the bottom of the picture to make them completely disappear. I played with calligraphic strokes on the dried weeds near the ground, and on the bare branches of the little tree in the foreground. A limited palette of Cobalt Blue, French Ultramarine, Brown Madder Alizarin, Burnt Sienna and a little bit of Raw Sienna was all that's used. Sober mood calls for muted colors...

I'm also progressing cautiously with my fog painting, "Spring Meadow, Tamalpais". I painted wet on dry using very fluid mixture of Cobalt Blue, Indian Yellow, Burnt Sienna and a little bit Sap Green, paying attention to vary the proportion of colors in the mixture when painting the tree shapes to make it more interesting. Near the ground, I thinned the mixture again in the attempt to capture the effect of ground mist often found in foggy mountain meadows. Again, paper towel came in handy here and there for lifting and wiping out... I am trying to be cautious about how many layers of trees to put in -- a small picture surface can quickly become too busy if I get carried away planting trees ;-). But one or two more layers may still be needed...

Spring Meadow, Tamalpais,  

Watercolor on Winsor Newton 140# Cold Press Paper , 5"h x 9"w, WIP 3

Two Small Landscapes: Season Change (Finished), & Tamalpais Meadow (WIP)

I've felt a bit experimental lately and ventured out to paint more wet-in-wet landscapes, some successful, others disastrous. To manage the drying time and achieve the soft, wet, flowing look that I love about watercolor landscapes, I've shrunk my paper size significantly for some trial-runs before to attack the larger sheets -- quarter sheet for me is large at my current skill level of managing wild wet washes, I'm not greedy in my expectations :-P. And I do fall in love with some of these small jewels from time to time -- sometimes a trial run has the kind of freedom and freshness that a well-planned, well-executed larger piece lacks. There is a delicate balance between spontaneity and careful planning that I am still struggling to grasp...

This is a card-sized "experiment" I did trying to figure out how to create those fluffy white clouds   I've so often seen when travelling in the high country of Colorado and Utah. I did it in two wet cycles in this piece -- first wetting the who image with clear water, and drop in Ultramarine and Cobalt Blues to indicate the sky behind the white clouds; while this is totally dry, I rewetted the white area and dropped in a very light mixture of grey made by Cobalt Blue and Burnt Sienna. The most important and difficult thing here is to try to not let this grey flow to the edge of the white space , so that you still have some white left between the blue of the sky and the grey of the cloud that's facing away from the sun. I played with calligraphic strokes while creating the spruce tress, paying attention to increase the value and saturation of color gradually from the background trees to the ones which are in the foreground. I liked the slight melancholy and sober mood of the resulted piece, and may do a slight larger piece of a different format of it in the future.

Season Change (High Country Snapshot I),  

Watercolor on Arches 140# Cold Press Paper , 5"h x 3"w, 2012 #25

Bid at My DPW Auction

This is another piece I've started in the same fashion, trying to find out how to find fog-covered coastal hills. It's a view I so often see and marvel at while hiking in the Mount Tamalpais State Park in winter and spring mornings -- while the entire view ahead is veiled by beautiful silver fog, there would sometimes be a patch of meadow cleared of fog because it is not covered by oak and redwood trees (the respiratory action of these trees actually create huge amount of vapor in the air, and therefore make the fog denser). I'm struggling to recreate the quiet, moist, fresh air in my memory on paper in this one, and so far I've only done one wet cycle on the paper, painting from background forward as the paper gradually dries, leaving more and more obvious brush marks on the paper, ending with the dry-brush mark of muted brown underneath the tree shape near the center of the picture. At this stage I am more concerned with color temperature relationship and the abstract aesthetics of  brush marks -- the variation of shape, size, edge quality among these marks. Glazing over dry paper and tidy up these marks can be done without much difficulty later, as they are all quite soft and diffused. I love this stage of watercolor painting -- it's both exciting and nerve-wrecking, demanding 120% of the painter's attention. I'm feeling like walking on a tight rope while doing these wet-in-wet piece, which is a good change of pace from the more carefully planned floral paintings. Time to go back to the studio. Ciao!...

Spring Meadow, Tamalpais,  

Watercolor on Winsor Newton 140# Cold Press Paper , 6"h x 10"w, WIP 1

  

Work in Progress: Dancing Tulip (Almost Finished, Really...), & Class with Jeanne Vooden

I'm still painting away for the upcoming tulip art festival in Oakland, adding denser pigment wet-in-wet on the leaves to create a glow of spring yellow-green. When finished, the leaves would be the only true light-colored shapes and contrasting with the deep burgundy-purple flower. I am a little worried that they would attract the eye too much and draw the attention away from the main flower, but I do like the reddish purple vs. yellow green color scheme. We'll see how it goes. I also added more of the same color on the upper left corner of background to hint foliage in the distance, and to balance the movement of color throughout the image.

Most work I did was on the flower pedals. I found Fabriano Artistico Cold Press paper very very hard to glaze on -- even the staining colors seem to lift easily. And when the pigment density is too high, it seems that they don't get absorbed into the paper at all, just floating on the surface and being pushed around by the next brush load of pigments. I'm a bit annoyed at this stage, but decided to carry on -- after all, almost all mistakes made on this paper can be corrected easily with lifting! I guess I just have to learn the art of dancing with the devil...

Dancing Tulip,  Watercolor on Fabriano Artistico 140# Cold Press Paper , 5"h x 7"w, WIP 4

What made me super excited today was I got to start my six-week class with the amazing artist Jeannie Vodden! She paints with beautiful, delicate mingled fluid washes of very limited palette -- most often just one red, one yellow and one blue, letting the pigments mixing both on palette and on paper to create a rainbow of hues. Her method involves very patient glazing and our class project this time was a landscape. I am showing my humble efforts here -- it looks so pale and subtle, but it's already three washes on wet paper! -- The first one going down from the sky region and covered almost all paper, changing color from the Cobalt Blue Sky to the light yellow-green of meadows, then to the pink flowering bush, all finished by applying a combination of Permanent Rose, Lemon Yellow and Cobalt Blue on pre-wetted paper. The second wash strengthened colors on the left bank wet-on-dry, and the third partially covered the right bank in the same manner, carefully painted around the tree trunks and distant rooftops. It's very different from my usual painting method, and I can't wait to see how it would turn out... 

Spring Run,  Watercolor on Arches140# Cold Press Paper , 9"h x 12"w, WIP 1

 

Work in Progress: Summer Heat, Central Valley and Winter Mirage (Master Study)

More landscape practice today... And I have to admit I am more and more hooked. I took out another piece that was started in the same Roland Lee workshop as I mentioned in my last post, and tried negative painting again in the foreground grass land... This time I was quite happy with the result. The almost monochromatic yellow-brown palette was chosen specifically for the impressions I got driving on the winding roads down central valley in the heat of June and July... Every inch in view is burnt by heat. 

Summer Heat, Central Valley,  

Watercolor on Arches #140 Cold Press Paper , 6"h x 9"w, WIP 1

After several hours' careful painting around little shapes, I felt that I needed a change and took out a fresh piece of paper, completely soaked it with water, and laid it on a piece of plexglass, which is non-absorbent and therefore slowed down drying to the minimum. I flooded in the sky and snow colors and charged the bright orange hues when the paper gradually dried. When the paper completely lost its sheen, I dropped in the tree and shrub shapes with smaller, stiff brushes. Until this stage, everything was painted in one wet cycle. I have very little control of the process and cannot lift much without affecting the colors which had been flooded in first. It was very scary, but exciting in the same time! I love watercolor in its free-flowing state...

Winter Mirage, Watercolor on Arches #140 Cold Press Paper , 6"h x 9"w, WIP 1