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!

Autumn Glow - Day Sixteen of the 30/30 Challenge

Autumn Glow, Watercolor on Arches #140 Cold Press Paper, 6"h x 6"w, 2015 #18

Bid in My DPW Auction (Starting Bid $50)

Day Sixteen of the challenge -- I wanted to try something different today and started this one on paper without a reference image, just playing with soft washes of contrasting cool and warm colors that are loosely divided into complimentary color families, being careful to leave enough areas of white paper. When the applied washes mingled on wet paper, I titled the painting in different ways to encourage the blending of complimentary colors in certain areas, and prevent them from blending so that higher saturation could be retained in other areas, especially near where the reserved white is, as I could like to design my center of interest near these areas. When this initial wash dried, I looked at the resulted color-value shapes and saw rocks and back-lid foliage in the glowing autumn light in the foreground, and dark woods behind it. So I enhanced this imagery with further glazing on dry paper, careful not to lose all the soft edges created in the first wet-in-wet wash (it is so easy to overglaze and lose all the soft edges before one realizes!). I also lifted light linear shapes hinting stems and branches of fir trees in the dark background, thus suggesting a dense growth of evergreen forest behind the rock and center pine tree. To counter balance the dominating vertical shapes of trees, I added horizontal shapes at the bottom of the image -- interesting shapes in light and dark glazes overlapping each other, be them suggestion of rock ledges, water or reflections. I am quite excited about this project, as it is very different procedure from how I usually work, and forces me to think more abstractly about the balance of values, shapes and lines. It is from inside out, not outside in. Think I will try it a few more times for the 30/30 challenge...

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...

Sudden Snow - Day Seven of the 30/30 Challenge

Sudden Snow, 

Watercolor on Arches #140 Cold Press Paper, 6"h x 6"w, 2015 #9

Bid in My DPW Auction (Starting Bid $50)

Day seven of the challenge -- I am still hanging on there!!! (Truely amazing for me, although I admit only barely... :-P) It seems like the hotter the weather gets, the more I feel drawn to painting images of the chilly winter scene... In this one I really wanted to capture the feeling of sudden change of seasons -- a night's snow fall before the brilliant fire of fall colors have a chance to run their course and gradually diminish. I experimented with very granulating colors such as Cobalt Blue, Ultramarine Blue, Cobalt Violet and Manganese Violet on the snow washes, then scrubbed with a damp, relatively stiff synthetic brush and blotted with tissue to lift out the light shapes on the snow field. By using a relatively soft brush and varying its degree of dampness as well as the pressure applied, I was able to achieve softer and harder transitions at the edge of these lifted shapes. I really liked this technique and decide to try it more in my future paintings. The light facets on the snow-covered rocks were squeezed out with a palette knife before the applied dark colors have totally dried.

Water's Edge, Watercolor on Aches #140 Cold Press Paper, 5"h x 7"w, 2014 #19

Buy It Now from My DPW Gallery ($95)

On a separate note, a painting I created for last year's 30/30 challenge in September (which I was not able to complete but nevertheless is still a great exercise) was chosen as the judge's pick by Carol Marine on Daily Paintworks. I feel very honored to be selected by an artist who I admire among so many great competitors. Thanks Carol! 

Day's End - Day Three of the 30/30 Challenge

Day's End, 

Watercolor on Arches #140 Cold Press Paper, 6"h x 6"w, 2015 #5

Bid in My DPW Auction (Starting Bid $50)

Day three of the challenge -- one of the goals I have for this 30/30 challenge is to try using as big a brush I can manage and carry the painting to as far a point as I could, as I did in the last painting, "Woodland Fall"; a second goal I have is to experiment with non-conventional brushes and surfaces without the worry of "failing", i.e., not turning out a beautiful little painting in the end. 

For this 6" x 6", I used primarily a slanted 1" stiff bristle brush to lay in the soft sky and foreground snow on very wet paper, and added gradually thickened pigments to create the distant mountain with fir trees as well as to establish the general shape of the snow-laden evergreens in the foreground before the paper dried. The advantage of bristle brush is, they really can pick up and carry a lot more pigment (especially if your pigment is not fresh squeezed out of a tube) compared to traditional watercolor brushes, even the stiffer synthetic haired ones. Another advantage of these brushes is that they have very jagged hair, hence it is absolutely futile to try to get any detail out of them when painting. One is thus forced to pay attention to the general tone, color and overall silhouette of each value shape, and design the bigger picture before putting in the details (which would require switching to a different type of brush). 

I did eventually switch to smaller bristle brushes to establish the darker crevices on the rocks, the branches of foreground fir, etc., and used a small rigger brush to suggest some bare branches of deciduous trees as well as shrubs, but most of the painting was done with the big 1" bristle that at times made me feel very awkward and not knowing what I was doing. Overcoming that awkward feeling was very liberating, since I know I am going beyond my own comfort zone, pushing myself to learn more and grow as a painter. The results is not always as exciting as the process itself, but in case of this little painting, I am feeling quite satisfied...

Woodland Fall - Day Two of the 30/30 Challenge

Woodland Fall, 

Watercolor on Arches #140 Cold Press Paper, 12"h x 9"w, 2015 #4

Bid in My DPW Auction (Starting Bid $40)

Day two of the challenge -- I started this painting in Carl Purcell's workshop last year, and was not happy with the results. The emphasis is to use layering of gradually darker values with various brushwork to invoke a sense of growth and abundance without painting each branch and each leaflet separately, but I was feeling very nervous about painting wet-on-dry and was not happy about the shapes of resulted dark and light foliage. So, out goes the "Mr. Clean Magic Eraser" and the whole painting was reduced to faint ghost colors. I painted the new shapes on top of this nice soft stain, using stiffer synthetic flats that are 1" wide, let the brush dance on its edges and corners to create more interesting shapes and edges. Much happy with it now! And this is also why I love the 30/30 challenge -- you get to try different things, knowing if it is not successful this time, tomorrow is another start for another experiment! 

Winter Woods II -- A Limited Palette Watercolor Study

Winter Woods II Study, 

Watercolor on Aches #140 Rough Paper, 7"h x 10"w, 2015 #1

Bid in My DPW Auction ( Starting Bid $65)

I really enjoyed playing with the very limited palette of French Ultramarine, Burnt Sienna and Prussian Blue in this little study, and experimented with combining wet-into-wet and dry-brush to created the texture on the bark of birch trees. I think I might try to play with the composition a bit and make a bigger painting from this little study...

So many things have happened this year! Time really flies... I have just completed the Silicon Valley Open Studio event and it was a blast... And today I learned on the phone that I was chosen as the San Mateo County Fair Artist of the Year again! I am really thrilled to get this award two years in a roll... Yay!

I'm sorry that I haven't been posting as often as I would like to for the past year, since I started painting in oils in the Golden Gate Atelier. This is the first semester of the fourth year I am enrolled at the atelier, and I am making steady progress toward learning the craft of classical methods of drawing and painting from life. I am really grateful for this incredible opportunity, and the fine teaching I've received from my instructors there. I have really struggled very hard to learn how to handling an oil painting brush, as it is very different from painting watercolor (those of you who work in both these media would know :-P). But lately I'm feeling I've finally getting the hang of it -- after a year of almost crying myself to sleep every night thinking it may never work for me. Looking back at my first effort of working in oil (it was truly horrible) I know I've come a long way, although there are way more miles to go ahead of me. I will post a few of my paintings (only in grisaille at this point -- I am not allowed to use color yet) in my next posts and share what I have learned so far. I am finally feeling a bit more relaxed as I am seeing the light at the end of this long black tunnel now...

And nothing better as a celebration than going back to my first love -- watercolor and try out some loose landscapes! Yay! It's like eating candy!...

Tranquility, and Thoughts on "Virtual Painting"

Tranquility,  Watercolor on Arches #140 Cold Press Paper, 9"h x 12"w, 2014 #12

Bid in My DPW Auction ( Starting Bid $70)

Busy with drawing projects at the atelier for the past two weeks, but I managed to sneak in a few painting hours here and there, and finished "Tranquility". It has started in the "30 Paintings in 30 Days" challenge that I took this January, but had to drop due to health issues of a dear family member. It was part of the "water" themed set of paintings. Now that things are back to normal in my household, I am slowly going back to these unfinished projects and trying to tackle them one by one...

I want to convey the sense of utter stillness and quietude in the early morning hours of an overcast day in this painting, and kept on feeling that the shapes of the cloud and distant trees near the foothills needs to be tweaked more, so I have wet and rewet these areas, dried them, wet them again... It's been a lengthy process. When painting landscapes I often find it's not enough to directly copy the shapes present in your reference materials; instead, conscious, deliberate design choices has to be made to makes tree/mountain/rock/cloud shapes interesting. On the other hand, it is so important to imitate the randomness presented in the natural shapes in your design, and take great care to not make them look too "designed", mechanical or symmetric! It's a delicate dance of balance...

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

When posting the work in progress shot of this painting in January I was really very happy with how the various purple/blue/green colors has blended freely on the left side group of trees, as well as the shape of the silhouette of them. However, after finishing the distant hills and woods I realize the value of this group of trees do not quite work -- they are way too light and therefore does not balance the image. After agonizing over it for a few days, I have finally gathered enough courage to lay another layer of wash to darken them, taking care to change the color every time I reload the brush to maintain the interest generated by the color variation in the initial version. I did it wet on dry using a small squirrel quill brush, whose soft hair would not disturb the underlying wash. I am really happy with the decision, as well as the result -- with the darker, more intense blues and purples, the shape of this group of trees in the final image gives enough weight to balance with the middle-ground shapes on the right side, and blocks the viewer's eye from wandering off the right side of the picture, therefore emphasizes the moored boat. 

Often in landscape paintings like this, I find myself spending much more time staring at the painting than actually "painting" on it toward the end stage. It is not uncommon that every one minute of painting time is accompanied by ten or more minutes of looking and thinking. Sometimes after a long period of repeated starting, pondering and evaluation, I would finally decide to not add anything more and just call it done. However, I don't consider this as time wasted -- time spent evaluating the work to be done with a painting so often saves me much heartaches from taking that "one stroke too much". As painters even when we do not have brush in hand, we may still be mentally "painting" a picture on that virtual sheet of paper. And that, I believe, is a vital exercise for my growth as a painter, and time well spent.

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:

Amber Glow -- 30 Paintings in 30 Days Challenge, Round 3, Day 12

Amber Glow,  Watercolor on Arches #140 Rough Paper, 7"h x 10"w, 2014 #9

Bid at My DPW Auction (Starting Bid $50) 

Sometimes misfortune happens in pairs as well -- I managed to finish this little painting last night but did not get a chance to photograph or post it until now, since I had to take a dear family member to the emergency room for his cardiac episode. Please pray for me that everything would be OK... We often do not think about how fortunate we are to have health until we are on the fridge of losing it...

It's very unlikely at this point I will be able to finish 30 paintings in January, but I will keep on painting at least a couple of hours a day. It actually keeps my mind in peace in times of worries... 

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:

Sky in Progress -- 30 Paintings in 30 Days Challenge, Round 3, Day 8, 9, 10, 11

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

With a progressing cold I fell significantly behind on my "Sky" paintings the past few days. I have been painting but since painting sky requires some serious wetting of the paper, I tend to work on several of them at the same time, so that I can continue working on one when others are in various stages of drying. So, here they are, some very close to finish, just waiting for me to put on the details; others just starting, with one or two wet-in-wet layers of clouds and nothing else yet... 

Amber Glow,  Watercolor on Arches #140 Rough Paper, 7"h x 10"w, WIP 1

Shades of Dusk,  Watercolor on Arches #140 Cold Press Paper, 8"h x 10"w, WIP 1

Night Sail,  
Watercolor on Lanaquarelle #140 Cold Press Paper, 3"h x 7"w, 2014 #8

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:

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:

Whispering Wind (30 Paintings in 30 Days Challenge: Day 7) - Sold

Whispering Wind, 
Watercolor on Lanaquarelle 140# Cold Press Paper, 7"h x 10"w, 2013 #9

Sold!

Continuing my experimentation with painting on soaking wet paper for as long as possible... After a couple of days' playing I am feeling more and more free, and went ahead with this without much preliminary drawings. I had fun dropping in reddish and golden brown colors for the shrubbery on wet paper first, then design the branches connecting them after the leaf shapes have dried. I also had plenty of fun doing the negative painting of the grass underneath the shrubs using what I have learned from Roland Lee's workshop. Painting without drawing is scary at times, but the unrestrained brushwork has a lot of vitality and vigor, therefore works well for amorphous shapes such as bushes and tall grass.

You can purchase my 2013 wall and desk calendars here: