Winter Solstice (30 Paintings in 30 Days Challenge: Day 3)

Winter Solstice,  Watercolor on Arches 140# Rough Paper, 5"h x 7"w, 2013 #3

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You know it is not your day when you wipe out the third painting in a roll from your paper/canvas -- and today just seems to be one of these days. I started out trying out complete some landscape paintings I've started last year, but end up trashing them by fiddling too much. Frustrated, I took a "Mr. Clean" eraser sponge and wiped everything down to a ghost image on white paper, and started over. Buy the time I did my third wipes the touch Arches paper is showing signs of fatigue -- and I know it is a good time to stop: when your Arches paper is tired of your abusive sponge, it is a sign that the day is really not going right for you as a painter.

So, after some chores (depositing painting to a gallery, taking my car to a tire repair show to take out that old nail that has caused leaking for the past three months, and filling out application form for a new round of art fairs -- i.e. delaying starting a new as much as I can), I finally sat down and decide to face my daemon. I took a small piece of paper and did this simple snowy scene just to practice all the basics of painting wet into wet -- surface moisture level on the paper, pigment density in the brush, timing. As simple as the image may look as a finished painting, I was reminded yet again how unpredictable a wet-in-wet process can be, and how watercolor can have a mind of its own. It took me two practice runs and a wipe-out (again) to finally land on one that does not look overly fuzzy or fiddled to death, and a better three hours have passed before I realized.

(Just for fun -- here's one of the trial versions that hasn't gone quite right...)

Winter Solstice (Version 2), 
Watercolor on Arches 140# Rough Paper, 6"h x 8"w, 2013 #4

I was truly humbled by the experience and any notion that I have acquired some sort of control over this medium has by now totally gone -- and I was reminded that how quickly skills acquired previously through intense practice can go rusty if I do not practice them diligently. And surely enough, in my recent rendering of flowers I have start to get a bit too obsessed with getting the results look exactly like I have envisioned them to be, and not doing as many wet-into-wet sessions as I used to. So here I am, almost back to square one, learning everything again -- I guess that is exactly the point of these daily exercises: to force you to look into the things you have neglected and skills that you have once owned then lost, and pick them up by practicing them daily.

You can purchase my 2013 wall and desk calendars here: