Bicycle in the Snow

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10 x 13 in  -  25 x 33 cm     Watercolor    

Painted for a two hour challenge on PaintingFriends.com it does not look too bad. The challenge is to pick and then paint a white subject from a small set of reference photos.

As aways there is a two hour max time limit. Of course with this style of painting I was well within that, comming out at bit over an hour.

The ref I picked comes courtesy of the Morguefile.


(Update Oct 2014 now in a private collection Georgia USA)

High Key Araf

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14 x 10 in  -  36 x 25 cm     Watercolor

Araf is a colleague. Very photogenic and with a great smile. I hoped to catch the smile in the painting and I think I have. The rest of the picture has tuned out a bit more high key than I was planning for.

Well at least I get a few marks for effort.

Reflection on the Thames

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14 x 10 in  -  36 x 25 cm     Watercolor    

This quick quarter sheet painting was done as a demo for an article on reflections that can be found at PaintingFriends.com

I took this reference in late autumn in the early evening the sun as a way to my right and so the fronts of the houses that face the river are glowing in the sunlight.

Color Arches

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8 x 11 in  -  20 x 28 cm     Heavy Body Acrylic     While this was done as a two hour challenge it was also done as a bit of fun. A side brief was to attempt to use a lot of colour.

This is a reference kindly supplied by Desiree.

Garden Rose

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10 x 14 in  -  25 x 36 cm     Watercolor     This was done for a two hour chalenge on PaintingFriends.com.

I don't think I quite managed to pull it together on this one. I can't decide whether the dark background should have been reduced or increased it certainly is one of those paintings that looks better as a smaller image.

Many thanks to Desiree for the use of the reference image here.

Desiree's Paradise

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9 x 7 in  -  23 x 18 cm     Heavy Body Acrylic    

This was done in around 50 minutes for a 2 hour challenge set at PaintingFriends.com.

This is the Ref supplied and show here with kind permission of Desiree.

I have very little skill at using heavy bodied acrylics, but you won't get anywhere if you don't make an effort to improve. One exercise I did while trying to paint this was that of counting the strokes.

I painted background prior to starting the count. After that you count every stroke you make. The idea is to train yourself, in a medium in which you are trying to show the strokes of the brush, to only paint strokes that do something that have a purpose.

I painted this with 179 strokes, not counting the background.

Fat Pegion

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9 x 7 in  -  23 x 18 cm     Liquid Acrylic    

Done for a two hour challenge. I think I have to admit that this one is not a success. It was the first outing of some newly purchased liquid acrylics. While they act like watercolour I was unable to mix colours to form the darks I am used to mixing.

This is the reference, it is actually one that I took in Italy earlier in the year.

The reason why I am showing this failure here is because I have come to realise that if you only show your successes the pressure becomes far too great. Much better to be honest to oneself and the audience and show that not everything comes out quite as it should.

Maggiore Reflections 2

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8 x 11 in  -  20 x 28 cm     Acrylic     This was done as part of a two hour challenge. It is in acrylic and to be honest I'm not that pleased with it. I should have been more particular when painting the sky. The brushstrokes I are good idea but I should have been far more thoughtful as to what blues and what whites got placed where.

I should then have continued the same stroke pattern on the building then it might have had a better outcome.

This is the reference slightly cropped from the original. Taken on Lake Maggiore in April this year.The challenge used one of my own references taken on Lake Maggiore few months ago. I did a watercolour of the same view a few paintings back.

Thumbs Up - Cuban Style

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10 x 14 in  -  25 x 36 cm     Watery Acrylics    
This is painted with acrylic paints. I don't have any liquid acrylics so I watered down some normal thick acrylic paint. I found that none of the colours I had treated in this way would make a good darks. So I was forced to try to add some of my darker colours like black.

Not surprisingly this has contributed to the rather murky and to the rather murky darks. This is the classic reason why beginner watercolourists are urged not to use black. It's not that black is a bad colour is just that, when used in mixes, it is seldom successful.

The reference was taken in November 2006. One of the things you notice when you visit Cuba is that it is a black country ruled by whites.

Of course the official statistics say blacks are in the minority but how many statistics from the Cuban Ministry of information would it be sensible to believe.

Adendum
There is a close up of the thumb, which is the part I am most pleased with.

After all that is the subject of the picture.

Cottage on the Hill

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10 x 14 in  -  25 x 36 cm     Watercolor     I started this painting with the intention of pushing the colours up a level or two in intensity. When I came to doing it my nerve failed and I fell back on following the reference more than I had intended. Perhaps it was just a lack of imagination.

This is the reference.

Taken at the end of May this year.

Sweet Peas and Succulents

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14 x 10 in  -  36 x 25 cm     Watercolor    

I attempted to do this with a Charles Reid approach. I knew this would be a difficult reference to work from.

I have had some success with this approach in the past see this previous blog entry.

Back then I was careful to only have a few flowers in the composition.

This time I was much more ambitious. The right side got a little over worked and the dull base is clearly, not a pleasure to look at, despite it following the reference quite well. There must be a lesson in composition hidden in there somewhere.

While I know this can be said of most of my paintings. I think it is true with this one that if you get back far enough it does start to hold together.

Street Figures, Study

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10 x 11 in  -  25 x 28 cm     Watercolor     At first I planned to do this as a full painting but then I came to realise that I wasn't really interested in the full scene on the reference photo.

The ref photo was taken in Normandy in June this year. I did not set myself any particular restrictions. The painting is quite detailed with a lot of use wet in wet to get the darker tones. While the brushes I used for this are quite large they do have very fine points on them.

The Ford at Kersey

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14 x 21 in  -  35 x 53 cm     Watercolor     I have come to see that what I am striving for in my painting is to be both loose and where possible be a one touch painter. By one touch I mean never going over an area twice, unless of course, that was part of the original plan.

I took the reference photo on a "Paint with John Yardley" week in 2007.

You can see there that the painting is mainly one touch. I agree there a quite a few places where a "second go over" would make it better. Like the three center rooves. But I if let myself correct these sorts of things then I will never learn to mix the paint strong enough first time.

So the plan is to stick this on the wall and so have me staring at my mistakes to prod me to better things.

Maggiore Reflections

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10 x 14 in - 25 x 36 cm Watercolor This was another two hour challenge held at PaintingFriends.com

I concentrated on trying to get the refelection to look OK and to do it in the time allowed.

This is the reference slightly cropped from the original. Taken on Lake Maggiore in April this year.

I took 5 mins thinking through the possible issues in the painting. The main thing, seemed to me, was to get the tones is right in the reflection. I noticed that the reflection of the bright walls are lighter than the real walls that are in shadow.

I took 20 minutes on the drawing. While drawing I knew perfectly well that some of the windows that I was draw would not have any paint on them so I was just using the pencil mark to indicate that there was something there. I have noticed John Singer Sargent do this in some of his watercolours and if it's good enough him then it's good enough for me.

I finished in 1 hour 35 min. Yes I know I could have touched up a few places. A few more darks around the line where the land and sea meet would be an improvement. But I had basically done what I set out to do so the painting is, for me, "finished".

Flag at Grand Central

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8 x 6 in  -  20 x 15 cm     Watercolor    

A quick 'sketch' from a 2 hour Challenge at PaintingFriends.com

This is the ref as supplied to the challenge.

The first layer was raw seinna and umber to get the yellow background. Then some wax resist to get the lines in the ceiling and what would become the stars in the blue part of the flag.

A phthalo green wash comes next. Once that is dry fellow blue and the cad red in the flag can go in and you are done. The whole thing took around 50 minutes including a couple of long periods of drying time for the yellow and green washes.