One Year/100 Paintings #34 - “Pear” using photo reference from Unsplash.com. Painting made using watercolor mixed with white gouache in Moleskine 8 x 5 watercolor album.
One Year/100 Paintings
One Year/100 Paintings - #32 - Olive Oil and Olives - painted from a reference photo by Roberta Sorge on Unsplash.com. Watercolor and gouache in 8 x 5 Moleskine watercolor sketchbook, painted on my lunch break.
One Year/100 Paintings
#28 - One Year/100 Paintings - Perennial Plant - watercolor and gouache in Moleskine watercolor album. We went to visit my sister in Florida, and she had a vibrant orange perennial plant in her landscaped garden (she wasn't sure what it was called). I was drawn to the leaves on the plant, but I will say in my attempt to paint it in a more abstract manner, I have not achieved the vibrancy of the leaves in this painting.
One Year/100 Paintings
#27 - One Year/100 Paintings - Red Pepper - Grumbacher Opaque Watercolor. The third of three pepper paintings that I made while having coffee and breakfast at McDonald's on a Saturday morning a few weeks ago. Painted from Morgefile.com reference photo.
One Year/100 Paintings
#26 - One Year/100 Paintings - Yellow Pepper - Grumbacher Opaque Watercolor. The second of three pepper paintings that I made while having coffee and breakfast at McDonald's on a Saturday morning a few weeks ago. Painted from Morgefile.com reference photo.
One Year/100 Paintings
#25 - One Year/100 Paintings - Green Pepper - Grumbacher Opaque Watercolor. The first of three pepper paintings that I made while having coffee and breakfast at McDonald's on a Saturday morning a few weeks ago. Painted from Morgefile.com reference photo.
One Year/100 Paintings
#23 - One Year/100 Paintings - Plein Air painting with the Urban Sketchers Baltimore group using gouache and watercolor in a Moleskine landscape watercolor album. I'm very pleased with the impressionistic look of this painting though maybe the red ball in the water is a bit distracting. This was an absolutely beautiful day for painting, the weather was just cool enough for a light jacket and there was a breeze coming off of the water.
One Year/100 Paintings
#21 - One Year/100 Paintings - trying out a new urban sketching painting style - gouache mixed with watercolor. I've seen this technique demonstrated by Marco Bucci (though much more skillfully and with years of practice!) This was painted in a pocket Beta Series Stillman and Birn sketchbook. I like the look of the painting, different than my usual ink and wash style of sketching. The photo reference is from Morguefile.com.
Sketchbook Summer Completed!
Brandon Dayton threw out a challenge on his YouTube channel, which I subscribe to, for the month of July 2017 called Sketchbook Summer. The challenge was to fill and entire 8 1/2" x 11" hardbound 110 page sketchbook (which is 220 pages when filling both sides of the page) with sketches. I initially attempted to do this while also working on the World Watercolor Month Challenge for July 2017 of painting in watercolor everyday.
I was able to get to day 14 of both challenges, when I simply could not keep up with the demand of working on both of them, so I put aside the watercolor challenge and concentrated on filling my sketchbook. I did finish the Sketchbook Summer challenge on July 31st, that is to say that I managed to put something down on every page of the sketchbook. It was difficult to think of things to draw everyday, and I did take a day off here or there when I was simply too exhausted to sketch after working a full day and an almost three hour commute. There were other days where I could unleash my creativity and go all badass on the sketchbook and burn through pages, and other days were a real struggle. This forced me to think of ideas, no matter how bad, and put them down on the page. As a result, I now have some good starting points for other sketches and drawings that I want to explore and create in a more finished form.
I may go back and ink in some of the drawings or maybe just redraw them and ink them on other paper. This has prepared me for once again taking up the Inktober Challenge in October, coming up in a couple of months. I will use my 2018 Sketchbook Project Sketchbook for the daily challenge of drawing in ink and trying several techniques. I may also have an overall subject or theme for the project.
Next up in Create-A-Thon 2017, a yearlong creativity project, I will be using Prismacolor Colored Pencils with Premieré Dual Tip Design Markers to create finished drawings from Sketchbook Summer sketches.
World Watercolor Month
A very busy July for Create-A-Thon 2017! I have several creative challenges that I'm working on this month, one of them being that July is World Watercolor Month. I thought I would take the challenge of painting in watercolor everyday this month to get back into using my watercolors on a regular basis. Though I haven't been blogging that much so far this month, I have been very busy working everyday on my artwork.
I took a week of vacation in the beginning of July and while not trying to plan every minute to be filled with one thing or another, I did have a few projects in mind for my vacation. Because I'm working on several other creative challenges this month, I thought I would try to keep the watercolor challenge manageable by limiting myself to 6" x 4" paintings everyday. Last summer, one of the YouTube channels that I subscribe to, thefrugalcrafter Lindsay Weirich had a very useful tip for making your own watercolor blocks. I had purchased two 9" x 12" Arches Watercolor Pads at Plaza Art when they had a half price sale last year with the intention of making my own pocket watercolor blocks. I wanted to use them with the same Sakural Koi Watercolor Field Kit as mentioned in Lindsay's video to carry around for watercolor sketching when inspiration strikes. I was able to get the watercolors for about $5.00 with an A. C. Moore half off coupon and a reward club certificate.
I took one of the Arches Watercolor pads and cut it down to 6" x 4" sheets, totaling enough sheets to make four 10 sheet blocks. I then clamped the sheets together evenly on top of a heavy cardboard backing with clothespins and glued the edges with a hot glue gun as shown in the video. I cut down scrapbook paper that I had in my stash to cover each of them to make 4 cute little watercolor blocks.
Here are some of the paintings I've made so far this month (some are on Fluid Paper as well as Arches).
