I have been doing watercolors, pencil and chaulk recently. Some in plein air, some in classes and admittedly, a few from a pile of unfinished in the studio.
Watercolor
I was invited to paint at this beautiful plein air site. It is at a beautiful home’s deck on top of the hill overlooking Wolf Creek in northern Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. Wouldn’t you love to live where this was your view every evening throughout the year? This is why, I love doing plein air so much, I get to do what I love the most outside in some of the most amazing places on earth.
Chalk
A recently done still life done using chaulk.
Pencil
Pencil drawings have always been quite numerous in my line of work. In fact, I used to do a finished pencil rendering of any subject before I would attempt to paint it. I guess with time constraints, that has morphed into doing sketches on final paper surfaces and painting directly from there. I find myself painting very lightly, “a sketch”, then painting the final piece right away in darker values.
Here is another strange still life setup to show the differences of drawing reflective surfaces with other surfaces combined. The base of the arrangement is a stack of plastic water well holders from the watercolor class. Two metal hand cheese graters are leaned on the water well containers. Then, the final touch is a red tomato sat on top. It was a good challenge and all of us stretched our artist minds to get it going in one hour.
This is an ornate black vase with beautiful Japanese paintings of blossoms going up the length of the vase. The way it catches highlights was a little difficult to capture but worth the effort required. A simple white rose is placed in the vase. This arrangement gave us an infinite number of shapes and shades to practice. It was an intense hour-long session that needed some follow up, “studio” time to get it finished up.
This began in a drawing class intended to show how to draw see through glass objects. Starting with a blue towel arranged with wrinkles under the vases. We sat a beautiful crystal curvy shaped vase next to a cube vase with various leaf vines draped around them. An hour later, it is brought home to the studio to sit in a pile of sketches to spend a little time and finish later.