"Almost There" (South Florida Beach with Umbrellas)

I really wanted to use the new Daniel Smith watercolors I got recently and I found a photo of this beach with a lot of color in it. (I don't remember which beach it was--south of Lake Worth somewhere I think.)  I used Bee 100% cotton paper. I did another painting with this paper and I didn't like it, but this time I liked it. It's 140 lb. cold pressed and it's smoother than Arches which is good for small detail like the umbrellas. I used a little bit of masking fluid for the umbrellas so I could paint the water in one wash. I did mess up the line of the beach, but I decided to not try to fix it which would probably make it more noticeable.

I  also used a couple of the Daniel Smith Primatek colors--Rhodonite is great for adding to blues for a soft gray and for pinkish glazes.

Moon Over the Ocean 3

This one I painted for my nephew Dennis since he was the one who sent me the photos. He is visiting here from Florida and his birthday was yesterday. I hurried up and started this last evening and finished it this afternoon. It's slightly different than the smaller ones. I used the watercolor canvas again. It's supposed to be for all mediums, but I'm having a little trouble with blending with acrylics yet even after I coated it with a layer of gesso. I need to use it again and make notes. I think I like the water and waves better on this one, but the clouds better on the smaller ones.

Seascape - Bird and Boat

 

 

No wonder I'm not getting the house cleaned. Here's another painting I did yesterday and finished today. I went to the craft store last week to get some matte medium and of course I had to browse. I found some 5" x 7" watercolor canvas panels and I had to try them. They are smoother than regular canvas board and can be used with watercolor and acrylic. Of course it's a seascape. I thought it would be easy since I've been doing them lately. Still not easy. The other seascapes I did had the waves on the left side. Apparently, that's easier for me to do since I am right handed I guess. I might have to straighten out the horizon line though. Also, the next time I use the watercolor canvas, I think I will put a coat or two of gesso on it.  The paint sinks in too much unless you are using watercolor paint and leave the white of the paper for the white areas.
P.S. There are two photos of the same painting for a reason: The bottom one was a regular scan and a lot of the texture on the canvas shows up as glare. The top one was edited in Windows Live Photo Gallery with "Noise Reduction" and I think it makes a difference by cutting down on the texture glare. I don't know why I didn't think of this earlier. I had fish for dinner yesterday. Maybe that helped.

Moon Over the Ocean 2

I took a break from cleaning the attic and did another mini painting. Here is the second version of Moon Over the Ocean done on ACEO size watercolor card. The paint soaks in a little on the watercolor paper, but it helps make the clouds look more diaphanous or fluffy.  Also, the moon is not paint; it's the white of the paper showing through.

ACEO - Moon Over the Ocean

Since I read somewhere recently that you can paint acrylics on watercolor paper (even if you don't use the watercolor technique), I thought I would give that a try. However, I have a package of Strathmore ATC size assorted papers that I looked through and decided to use the paper made for use with acrylics first (made sense to me). It has a slight texture and is sort of a light cardboard thickness. At first I didn't like it, but after finishing the painting, I decided I did like it. I used a photo that my nephew sent me that I thought would look all right painted small. I might try the watercolor card with the same scene and see if there is much difference in painting technique.

Mini Big Clouds Over the Beach- Acrylic 5" x 7"

I finished a small painting today, a smaller version of "Big Clouds Over the Beach." I guess you could call this "Mini Big Clouds." I wanted to see if I could do another one like it since I didn't make notes on colors, brushes or technique on the larger one. Well, if you scale down the size I learned that you need to scale down the brushes. I had a lot of trouble with the foreground water in this one, but didn't on the first one. Maybe I should stick to 9 x 12" instead of 5 x 7." I could probably keep adjusting things, but decided to just quit while I'm slightly ahead. I did coat the canvas board with several layers of gesso so it would be smoother. I think it helped some. There is still some glare from scanning and I probably should try to take a photo, but I'm not having any luck with that either. I tried Carol Marine's instructions for taking photos of paintings, but haven't found a good spot for lighting yet.

Breezy Beach

Here's another beach scene, but I'm not as happy with it as I was with "Big Clouds Over the Beach." It is smaller, 8" X 8" and done on a different texture canvas board. I did the Big Clouds painting on an older canvas board that is no longer available (Grumbacher) and it was really nice to paint on. I probably need to switch to gessoed artboard, but I have a lot of the regular Fredrix canvas panels in all sizes. I need to figure out how to make them smooth so I can use them. I'm working on that. It's a good thing I used the old canvas panel when I did Big Clouds or I might have given up on acrylics. I also need to make notes of which brushes I used for what and what colors I mixed to get the colors I got. 

Big Clouds Over the Beach - Acrylic 9 x 12

 

I had a difficult time getting back to doing any painting after another trip to visit my son and family over the holidays. I watched several art videos trying to get inspiration and read an art book, "Daily Painting" by Carol Marine. (recommend it). Then I cleaned up my "studio"--half of a bedroom-- and rearranged it some and put together a stand for my laptop so I could look at a photo while I painted. It took me forever to decide what to paint. I'm so far behind on all the ideas I have, but I wanted to do something new and in acrylic paints. It seemed like I had to learn how to use it all over again after I had been using watercolors and oil pastels, but I was determined to be able to use acrylic paints so they looked like oils. I think I may have gotten that result in "Big Clouds over the Beach." At least I was happier with the results since the last time I tried acrylics. The picture is a little fuzzy because the painting was a little too large for the scanner. I tried to redo it, but it is still a little fuzzy.

September Seascape

I did the small seascape again slightly larger on oil pastel paper, the smoother side. I was determined that I was going to learn how to use oil pastels in a more realistic style. I watched a few demonstrations on oil pastel on YouTube and then tried again. I think I learned a few things in the attempt. I used Cray Pas Expressionist, Mungyo and Sennelier oil pastels. The Expressionist and Mungyo sets have a nice selection of colors, but they aren't as easy to blend as the Sennelier; of course the Sennelier are more expensive. The secret to getting a smooth painting is blending. I tried a paper blender, paper towel wadded up, a Q-Tip, and my finger. Using my finger works best for me, but I used a latex glove so I didn't have to worry about absorbing any chemicals that way. I also learned that oil pastels do dry some so if you want to go back and do white highlights, it's best to wait a few hours or overnight to do that. I may have gotten too much green in the foreground.  Since I only have twenty-four colors in the Sennelier set I was limited in my choice of blues and greens. I will need to get more of those if I want to do more oil pastels. Not sure about that yet. My inspiration is an oil pastel painter who does animals very realistically. Her web site is petsinpastels.com and her name is Sarah Theophillus (not sure of the spelling). I also like the seascapes of Oriana Kacicek on the Daily Paintworks website, but her paintings are done in oils. I forgot to mention that I did some underpainting with watercolor, but most of that got covered up anyway.

ACEO Seascape

 

Here's a small ACEO to add to my vacation journal. It's a seascape done in oil pastel on a canvas textured paper from an assorted pack of artist trading cards by Strathmore. It's not from the same batch of vacation pictures as Beach Ballerina. It's from this September's trip to Florida. I think I'm going to have to combine photos for the journal from both trips since I didn't get very many photos this time. (I spent too much time and energy trying to keep up with my sons and their offspring at Disney World. If I stopped to take pictures, I'd get lost.) I really like the blending feel of oil pastels, but they are hard for me to control. I couldn't get the white very white if I tried to go over a darker area. I think, if I try this again in a larger size, I would leave areas where I want to put white, sort of like watercolor. I think acrylic paper would work too. The canvas and acrylic paper have a plastic type coating that lets the oil pastels blend without being absorbed into the paper. I haven't figured out how to put this in the journal since it can get smeared. I would have to find something that wouldn't stick either, like waxed paper.

Beach Ballerina (version2)

 

I decided to do a little more detailed painting of Beach Ballerina on better paper (Arches 140 lb. cold pressed). As usual I didn't quit when I was ahead and tried to "improve" the tutu and I think I got it too dark. I tried to lighten it up by wetting the paper and blotting in places but I had trouble getting the white of the paper back. I then realized that I had used an Alizarin Crimson mix for the pink/purple tutu color and, if I remember correctly, that is a staining color. I also learned that if I wait a few days and let the paper dry very thoroughly, I can use a small battery powered electric eraser and lift off some color. I think I should quit at this point before I ruin it completely.

Seascape No.2



This is the try again seascape, but this time I made it lighter and used a slightly different arrangement. I used regular watercolors, but for some reason, it looks like I used watercolor pencils.

Try Again

I don't know what made me think a watercolor seascape would be an easy "get back into it" painting. Not my best work, but it's a start, again. It's a little fuzzy at the edges because the paper was larger than my scanner. I'm not happy with the waves--I used some old liquid frisket (masking fluid) and didn't mix it up as well as I should have. I couldn't remove it in some places because the coloring in it stained the paper. There were supposed to be white sea shells in the sand, but they came out pink. I might try this again.

Just for practice, "Path to the Beach"

Pastel - 8" x 11"

In the last couple of days I watched two pastel demonstration videos by Deborah Secor. One was on Artists Network TV and one was on Deborah Secor's blog. The one on her blog was a demonstration using PanPastels for a landscape which was mostly clouds. She made it look so easy that I thought, " I could do that!" Ha!  Not so easy. It probably would have been a little easier if I had used the PanPastels, but I just used what I had in the way of soft pastels. Also, I used a pastel paper which didn't have a lot of tooth. For my reference I used a photo I had taken when we were in Florida that included some beautiful clouds. I changed it a little; the ocean was actually the opposite direction. I used to do pastels a lot but I'm a little out of practice. Next time I think I'll use a pastel board or something with more tooth because I do too much layering.    

Florida Beach #1 and #2

Florida Beach #1, 5" x 7"

Here are the beach scenes I just painted. Not too much architecture thank goodness. I really wanted to try using some of my acrylic paints with some different mediums to see if I could get them to act more like oils. I did this one first without using gesso as an extra undercoat. I used some gloss medium mixed with the paint and this seemed to work better--it was a little easier to blend the paints and the finish is a little shinier.

Florida Beach #2, 5" x 7"

Painting #2 is only slightly different than #1 so I could compare results. The second one has a gesso underpainting and I used a gloss gel with cerulean blue and white for a light blue wash under the clouds. The white clouds came out softer because the undercoat was still moist. I would like to be able to paint beach scenes with clouds in acrylic like Australian painter Mike Barr. His paintings seem fresh and effortless. I guess that comes with lots of practice (and talent).