Category: Art

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Urban Sketching

I’ve had a recent obsession with fountain pens, dip pens, pen and ink, and watercolor sketching. I’ll probably post my thoughts on fountain pen paper later. But all this led me to the world of Urban sketching – which I like because it leans into some of my strengths, namely, playing with ink, being impatient, and accuracy not mattering as much as mood and gesture.

I’ve talked to some friends and we are planning to check out some local Urban Sketch clubs but in the meantime I thought I’d see if my current mixed media sketchbook could handle a little ink/watercolor. This was fun! I decided I liked purple. All the linework is done with purple india ink (although I know it looks black). Paper is Canson XL Mixed Media 160g. It buckled under the wash but dried flat enough again.

A street scene from a tutorial
My friend’s horses this winter
Sunrise before kayaking on New Years Day 2024
From a photo of our trip to France in 2018

I’m also taking a composition class online from an artist I admire. I may post those images here as well eventually. So far we’ve been focusing on ‘going slow’ and ‘being careful’ – my weakness!

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Daily Art – color!

Using paint is intimidating but I know I’m not comfortable with a brush yet and I’m also not comfortable picking colors so I need the practice. Here’s the last two months. Most of these are very small.

Set 1: pen and ink sketches with watercolor.

Set two – oil sketches on paper

still life
madrone bark
sunlit trees
Deer Lake
Mushrooms

I purchased two tutorials by Tim Packer on how to draw the sun shining through trees.

Tutorial 1
Tutorial 2
My own painting using the method in the tutorial
Posted on by — Leave a comment

Daily Art – Black and White

In September I decided to restart doing one sketch or painting a day, every day. I get thrown off by life or, specifically, camping sometimes but I’ve been overall good about it and I feel like it’s getting easier with less effort. Half of these are from my own photos, about half from photos on Unsplash and one is a copy of a Georgia O’Keeffe.

Part of what I mean when I say it’s getting easier is that I have fewer obvious failures. This is not everything I did in the month but I didn’t take photos of the stuff that really didn’t work at all – the rate of failure like that has gone down.

From a Georgia O'Keeffe painting.
Posted on by — Leave a comment

Oil Sketches

Going even smaller than a study, I have some Arches oil paper and I tried making very small (less than 4″ paintings on it to test colors or techniques.

I think the winter scene needs a bit more of a focal point. The kelp & fish: I brushed my hand over it while it was wet and blurred the lower left corner. Violet tree: I like it. I’m not sure if I’ll have trouble adding detail if I make it bigger, but probably not. Lower right: not happy with this at all, but that’s why it’s a sketchbook.

Posted on by — 2 Comments

Pitcher Plants

Last year I bought a sundew plant to help with fungus gnats and fruit flies – and it worked great. I felt inspired by some of their photos (my house is already filling up with plants, but I still want more.) In any case, Predatory Perennials gave me permission to use some of their photos as reference.

This is a 6×8 oil on panel. Hopefully there will be more soon.

Pitcher Plants
Posted on by — Leave a comment

Still Painting

I’ve been spending a lot of time doing quick sketches and practicing monsters. Monday I’m going to swoop through the thrift store to look for oil paintings that look like they need to have monsters added to them, failing that I’ll look for inexpensive frames to use for other paintings. These are all very small. they still take me longer than just one day, but I’m working on it.

Maribel – the Fjord Horse. 6×6 oil on board
Glass cup. 6×6 oil on board
value study: for a future oil painting
Posted on by — Leave a comment

Sunflower

More attempts at ‘daily painting’ although this took me more than 1 day. I tried it because I think of flowers as being very difficult and I guess I wasn’t wrong, this gave me some trouble.

8×10 oil on panel

I got my brother in law to spend a couple hours cutting down new panels into tiny sizes and I hope this will encourage me to paint more often without worrying so much about ‘what if I botch it?’. Wish me luck.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

A Painting a Day?

As with most things, the way to get better at painting is to practice. I know this, but I’ve still been avoiding oil painting for a while. Why? Because the last thing I painted I thought was pretty good and then as soon as I start anything and I don’t feel like it’s going to turn out as well as that I abandon it.

Obviously I’m not going to improve this way. I’ve been watching videos for inspiration and hit upon Carol Marine who has a book called Daily Painting: Paint Small and Often To Become a More Creative, Productive, and Successful Artist. This isn’t quite a resolution, but I am going to try to paint small, but regularly. I’m going to try to not worry too much about making them perfect, but get them down and then move on to the next.

I had a watercolor of this octopus sketch already in my notebook. Here it is as a 6×8 oil on panel. Sorry about the glare, photographing the paintings is not my strong suit. And I haven’t figured out a good way to sign them yet.