Tag: Flower Art

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Art supplies Drawing Flower Art Ink and watercolor wash Life in general Painting Rose Sketchbook Pages Watercolor

Will You Accept This Rose? (War of the Roses Part II)

Will You Accept This Rose? Yes, Finally. Watercolor, 7x5"
Will You Accept This Rose? Yes, Finally. Watercolor, 7x5"

After all the struggles of the previous day, I was determined to succeed in painting a rose and decided to give myself a break. First I rearranged the colors in the palette, putting them in my prefered, mostly color-wheel order instead of helter skelter as they were, and replaced several colors (see below for color chart).

Revised Schmincke Palette chart
Revised Schmincke Palette chart

(WN=Winsor Newton, S=Schmincke, DS= Daniel Smith, H=Holbein):

Top Row: WN Transparent Yellow, S Cadmium Yellow Light, DS New Gamboge, S Cadmium Red Light, WN Permanent Alizarin, WN Permanent Rose.

Middle Row: WN Violet, S Ultramarine, WN Cobalt Blue, H Cerulean Blue, WN Winsor Blue, DS Indanthrone Blue.

Bottom Row: S Thalo Green, WN Sap Green, S Yellow Ochre, WN Burnt Sienna, DS Indigo, S Titanium White (the latter will probably be removed since I’ve never successfully been able to incorporate white into watercolors).

Second to Last Rose Test, ink & watercolor
Second to Last Rose Test, ink & watercolor

The other thing I did to give myself a break was that after I made the second to last rose sketch above from life, I decided to work from a photo of the rose.

Continue reading “Will You Accept This Rose? (War of the Roses Part II)”
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Art supplies Drawing Flower Art Glass Ink and watercolor wash Painting Plein Air Rose Sketchbook Pages Still Life Watercolor

War of the Roses, Part I: Schmincke Watercolor Review

Schmincke Rose Saga #1, ink & watercolor
Schmincke Rose Saga #1, ink & watercolor

On the next test run of my new Schmincke palette that Roz introduced here, I painted some roses on a tablecloth in the sun on the deck. While the Schmincke pan paint is lovely to use, and the palette a good size and design, the colors frustrated me. Their version of rose called Permanent Carmine (PV19) is much redder than the Winsor Newton (PV19) Permanent Rose I rely on for pinks and several other colors didn’t appeal to me.

In the color chart below, the top and bottom rows are the original Schmincke colors that came with the set. I added the colors in the center row by filling empty half-pans from tube paint in the space designed for adding extra pans.

Schmincke palette original colors plus added middle row
Schmincke palette original colors plus added middle row

The colors (abbreviated above) are:

Continue reading “War of the Roses, Part I: Schmincke Watercolor Review”
Categories
Art supplies Drawing Flower Art Ink and watercolor wash Painting Plants Plein Air Sketchbook Pages

Lavatera Clippings In Amaretti Cookie Can

Lavatera Clippings in Amaretti Cookie Can, ink & watercolor,7x5"
Lavatera Clippings in Amaretti Cookie Can, ink & watercolor,7x5"

I love this old can that once held Amaretti cookies. After trimming some branches off the giant Lavatera bush by my deck, I decided to paint the cuttings. The cookie can was the first thing I spotted that would hold water and flowers.

I used the new Schmincke watercolors palette I recently bought on sale at Wet Paint. I love the palette but after a few trials, added and replaced some colors which I’ll write about next time. The Schmincke pan paints worked beautifully in the hot sun, releasing juicy flowing paint with just a touch of a wet brush.

I think the sketch captured the feeling of heat and strong light and the funky little table with a dirty glass top looks just like itself.

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Berkeley Ink and watercolor wash Places Sketchbook Pages Urban Sketchers

Monterey Market and Berkeley Horticultural Nursery

Monterey Market Sunflowers, ink & watercolor, 5x7"
Monterey Market Sunflowers, ink & watercolor, 7x5"

My Tuesday night sketch group met at North Berkeley’s Monterey Market to sketch just before the produce store was closing. My friends started indoors while I stood and sketched the buckets of sunflowers in the parking lot, using a handy shopping cart as my table.

Berkeley Horticultural Nursery, ink & watercolor, 7x5"
Berkeley Horticultural Nursery, ink & watercolor, 7x5"

When the store closed at 7:00 they joined me in sketching the sunflowers. Then I walked around the block to the entrance of the wonderful Berkeley Horticultural Nursery. I saw this crazy Dr. Seuss-like plant along their fence and had to sketch it. Each fuzzy orange-red flower grows out of a stalk that comes up from the flower below it.

The next morning I called Berkeley Hort to ask about the plant. The guy who answered went outside to check and told me it is a Leonitus Lenorius or “Lion’s Tail,” a drought-resistant, sun-loving plant.

You can see Micaela’s market sketches here and Cathy’s market, melon and sunflower sketches here on our Urban Sketchers blog.

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Art theory Flower Art Oil Painting Painting Rose Still Life

Blowsy Rosies

Blowsie Roses, oil on Gesobord panel, 6x6"
Blowsy Roses, oil on Gessobord panel, 6x6"

Blowsy. [Adjective: (of a woman) Coarse, untidy, and red-faced.] That’s just what these roses were when I picked them from my poor neglected rose bush: brightly colored but messy and past their prime; yet they were just fine as my model.

It seems like once I gave myself permission to work on a painting as long as I wanted to, I’ve started being able to finish them more quickly. And it’s not just the small size;  I’ve spent hours and days on other 6×6″ paintings in the past.

It could have gone even more quickly than the three hours I spent on it, had I left some of my earliest brushstrokes alone. I just find it hard to believe they were right the first time, even though that was my goal with this painting: to put down the right strokes with the right color, temperature and value and then leave them alone. (Or scrape off the stroke immediately if it’s wrong and replace it with the “right” one, rather than adding more and more paint, which eventually leads to making mud.)

I also tried to focus on using warm and cool colors to shape the form, along with the dark and light values. I’d also like to cite my inspiration for this painting, Kathryn Townsend, whose flower paintings mesmerize me.

Categories
Art theory Flower Art Oil Painting Painting Still Life

Baby Hydrangea: Little Pitchers Have Big Ears

Baby Hydrangea, oil on panel, 6x6"
Baby Hydrangea, oil on panel, 6x6"

I’d heard that saying before, “Little Pitchers Have Big Ears,” but without giving it any real consideration, assumed it had something to do with Little League baseball pitchers. Wrong. According to The American Heritage New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, “Adults must be careful about what they say within the hearing of children. The saying refers to the large handles (ears) sometimes attached to small vessels…” like this little pitcher.

My other reference for the saying is the refrain in John Prine’s touching song, “Sam Stone” about a Viet Nam vet returning home.

Hydrangea and pitcher preliminary sketches
Hydrangea and pitcher preliminary sketches

I was looking for flowers to paint and this little lavender hydrangea was hiding at the bottom of the bush all by itself. I did the value/composition sketches above and set about painting, completely forgetting the first step that I usually find helpful: doing a quick and simple 2-value block in using thinned paint in one color (usually Ultramarine Blue) first.

I think it worked out OK anyway, and in the next painting I did (still waiting to get photographed) I remembered to do that.

Categories
Art theory Flower Art Oil Painting Painting photoshop Rose

White Roses in Creamery Bottle (and painting process stuff)

White Roses in Creamery Bottle, oil on linen, 8x8"
White Roses in Creamery Bottle, oil on linen, 8x8"

(Available)

Strauss Family Creamery is a Marin County dairy that produces organic dairy products served in old-fashioned glass bottles from happy cows that graze on sweet grass in the hills by the sea. I enjoy their bottles as much as their cream in my coffee.

I started this painting with a goal to complete it from life in one 3-hour session, as so many plein air artists and daily painters do. I had somehow come to believe that I “should” be painting that way too. But while I met my time goal, I didn’t like the results (see original version below). And that’s when I finally accepted that it’s better to take as much time as a painting needs, and relax and enjoy the process rather than try to rush to keep up with someone else’s “rules.”

If you’re interested in seeing how I got here from there, click “keep reading” and stick around.

Continue reading “White Roses in Creamery Bottle (and painting process stuff)”
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Art supplies Bookbinding Drawing Faces Flower Art Ink and watercolor wash Painting People Self Portrait Sketchbook Pages

End of Sketchbook Self-Portrait with Birthday Flowers

Birthday Flowers Self Portrait, ink & watercolor, 7x5"
Birthday Flowers Self Portrait, ink & watercolor, 7x5"

To put the finishing touches on a completed journal, I make a self-portrait for the last page. Since it was also my birthday, I wanted to incorporate my birthday flowers in the painting. So I hung a mirror with a yellow clip  from one of my swing-arm lamps on my drawing table and put the vase of sunflowers between me and the mirror and then drew what I could see in front of me: the flowers in front of the mirror, with me and the flowers reflected in the mirror.

As usual for my end-of-journal self-portraits, I wasn’t willing to measure or try to draw and place features accurately but I think I did capture the feeling of me or the me as I was feeling.

In the next post I’ll show you my new journal and another idea I tried out for sketchbooking minus the sketchbook.

 

Categories
Building Drawing Flower Art Ink and watercolor wash Outdoors/Landscape Painting Places Sketchbook Pages Urban Sketchers

Sketching Ikuko’s Garden

Ikuko's Garden, ink & watercolor, 7x5"
Ikuko's Garden, ink & watercolor, 7x5"

My friend Ikuko invited our Tuesday night sketching group to sketch in her lovely and lovingly tended garden. I picked a spot that was still in the last bit of sun and sat in a lawn chair to sketch and relax. For a change I tried to just be loose and free and it was really fun.

Ikuko's at Sunset, ink & watercolor, 7x5"
Ikuko's at Sunset, ink & watercolor, 7x5"

I was interested in all of the odd contraptions on top of her fireplace and the glowing light of the sunset on the bricks and the windows. I managed to fit almost everything I wanted on the page (with a little rearranging from real life; the mail box was below the frame but I liked it so stuck it in.) I was a little annoyed when I finished the sketch that I’d “messed up” the house numbers (the 2 is too big) but a week later, who cares!

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Art supplies Art theory Drawing Every Day Matters Ink and watercolor wash Painting Plants Sketchbook Pages

Last Day of EDiM: “Fresh” Hydrangeas and L.L. Bean “Flashlight” Hat

Baby Hydrangea for "Something Fresh" EDM #112, ink & Watercolor, 6x4.5"
Baby Hydrangea for EDM #112: Fresh, ink & Watercolor, 6"x4.5"

I’d never been able to sketch this hydrangea plant before because once the teensy little buds open they shed piles of equally teensy little petals and make a big mess. But this one was so fresh I was able to cut and draw it without the mess. (Although it did end up making a mess anyway when my cat ate one of the leaves and then delivered it later to the rug.)

EDM #120 Flashlight (L.L. Bean Pathfinder Flashlight Hat), ink & watercolor
EDM #120 Flashlight (Hat), ink & watercolor

The cue was to draw a flashlight. My favorite flashlight is my wonderful L.L. Bean Pathfinder Cap. It has two LED lights in the brim. One points straight down and is perfect for lighting your sketchbook when painting when it’s dark, and the other points ahead to light your path. You just squeeze a spot on the brim and it toggles between down, ahead or both. When painting in a dark pub it perfectly lit my sketchbook page but nobody could tell where the light was coming from. Someone came over to try to figure it out because it just looked like my page was illuminated.

The hat is sitting on a plaster “Planes of the Head” cast, a tool for learning how to really see and draw heads (good article about this here).

Although I wasn’t a faithful follower of  “Sketch Every Day in May,” it reinforced how much I enjoy drawing. Some of the cues sounded boring but I discovered that no matter how dull a subject may seem, drawing it rarely is.