More Watercolor Florals

I'm still working with the original palette, but am now adding red clover to my catalog of flower and leaf types.  I was inspired by some actual red clover blooming alongside the road.  I had never seen it before, and stopped to get some samples.  The red color was spectacular, leaning slightly to the blue side of red and becoming more vibrant toward the top of the blossom.

This is a slightly larger piece than before, being 8" x 8".

Green Wolf

This post is out of sequence, but oh, well!

Today I finally found the time to try painting a few little animals inspired by watching Tracy Verdugo's on-line class "Animal Antics."  By the way, I highly recommend this class and anything from Tracy.  She's a wonderful teacher with a delightful personality. And her art is fabulous, so look her up!

Her technique for these little creatures is to work on watercolor paper with Daler Rowney acrylic inks.  First, she paints the animal shape with clear water, then drops in bits of ink which spread and swirl on the wet paper, but don't cross the line into the dry paper unless you draw them there with a brush or - her favorite - a wooden skewer.

I did eight little animals, but this is the only one I liked.  I finished it with the gold edge, the little white dots, and the gold spiral in the sun and gold and white dots for the collar.

I enjoyed this process and, clearly, there is a lot to learn.  Instead of working with a lot of different animals, I think I'll proceed by doing lots of wolves and then moving on to another kind of animal.  Looking forward to it!

Then Off on My Own

Next, I decided to do quite a few more small paintings in an attempt to move away from Danielle's style and develop one of my own.  This is the first such piece and is quite small - 3 1/2" by 5 1/2".  I'll use it as the center of a 5" x 7" card.

One of the elements of Danielle's technique is to use a 3mm pencil to add tiny details and lines once the painting part is complete.  I've done a little of that here, but prefer to make my lines with a small liner brush.  So, in the future, I'll probably drop the pencil.

I like this little piece.  I like the looks of it, and it's so fun to do!

Learning from Danielle Donaldson

I discovered a wonderful site for on-line art classes, JeanneOliver.ning.com.  I bought a class from her, "Compass Hearts," taught by Danielle Donaldson.  I liked Danielle's work and was interested in working with watercolor for a while.

The piece about is inspired by her class, but it is not really the class project.  Some of the motifs are similar to hers, but the bear is mine.

Danielle gets her color palette from scrapbook papers she chooses for the rings and hearts.  She embellished the watercolor paper (I used Strathmore Mixed Media paper which worked really well) with floral-inspired watercolor motifs.

I really enjoyed it and will work onwards from here.

Polar Presence

The final class I took at Art and Soul was with Kitty Miller.  We worked on canvas with a variety of DecoArt and Golden products.  I worked on three pieces.  The first I completed, and it was a fancy background with fish.  The second, I did the fancy background and based in an octopus.  This one, I only did the background for.

I didn't like either of the first two pieces, so I threw them away when I got home, but I decided to finish this one with a polar bear.  I added the painted swirls and glued spangles over the background.

So in the class, we mainly worked on the backgrounds, using stencils, alcohol to move the acrylic paint around while it was still wet, and lots of wet-in-wet and splashing work.  It was fun, but I don't think I will adopt any of the techniques that were new to me.  The results are a little brash for my tastes.

But on the positive side, Kitty is a great teacher, full of enthusiasm and knowledge that she is happy to share - altogether a good experience.