Relic in the Moonlight and Fog

I just finished this painting for the watercolor class I am teaching on Monday evenings. Every series of 6 sessions I teach has to have one truck painting since, as I have said before, I am obsessed with old trucks. This particular truck has made it into several of my paintings, it is a 1938 Chevy truck - and it has been green, black, blue and now a sort of rusty color. I like this 1938 truck - I am the same age as this truck since I was born in 1938 seventy-one years ago yesterday. Maybe that is why I am so connected to this truck - we share a birth year and this is my homage to my own mortality. We are both relics. Anyway - I love this truck. This painting is 1/8 sheet of cold-pressed Arches which has been cropped to be a little narrower. I am currently hung up on indian red and indigo - so - guess what? This painting is basically indian red and indigo. I hope my Monday painters enjoy painting it as much as I have.

From the Archives

The Artist

15" x 22"

This is one of the painting from my "archives". There are some reasons I like it and some I don't. I limited my palette to two colors in this one - indian red and indigo (with a touch of burnt sienna) and I like the limited color scheme. I also like the way the face and the hand turned out. What I don't like is that I got carried away with salt and spatter - there is WAY too much texture in this painting. I can see it now - couldn't see it then:(

Italian Street Scene

This painting of a secluded, narrow little street in Italy was painted from a photograph given to me by a friend, Patty Magoto. I painted it for a watercolor group, Aquanet, of which I am a member. The painting is 10" x 8" and was painted on Canson 140 lb. watercolor paper with an assortment of transparent watercolors.

The Conversation: Three Ladies in the Sauna

This painting was done on 1/4 sheet of 140 lb. watercolor paper which was covered with gesso and then stamped with old lace curtain pieces given to me by a friend to use as texture. I used transparent watercolors, and the pigment collected in the gesso texture giving the painting an interesting effect. A split-complementary color scheme was used on this one - yellow, blue -violet and red-violet. There are different ways of determining color combinations - especially complementary and split complementaries, but I use the method I learned in college which uses the color wheel based on the 3 primary colors red, yellow and blue and their mixtures as shown in the color wheel above. In order to get a split-complementary color scheme, you select a dominant color (in my case, yellow) and directly across is it's complement, violet; then you use the colors on each side of the complement for the split-complementary color scheme. Another favorite split-complementary color scheme of mine is blue, red-orange, and yellow-orange.

The name, Three Ladies in the Sauna, came about because my Thursday painting friends thought it looked like the rear ends of 3 ladies talking in the sauna.

This is a painting I just completed for the September project where everyone paints from the same photo- the first photo is the picture everyone is using and the second is my version of the photograph. The challenge in this one for me was to show the water droplets on the pears. I wasn't certain how I would do this and finally decided to use the salt effect. I am not sure how much it looks like water drops, but I was happy with the way the painting turned out. It is painted on 1/4 sheet of Canson Tientes watercolor paper (cold-pressed) with transparent watercolors. I try to do the monthly projects because I think they challenge you and helps to develop self-discipline:)

Rock

This is a painting I did of my dear husband, Rock, some time ago, following a watercolor portrait class I attended given by Jane Angelhart. She is such a good painter and instructor and I learned a lot during the class. At the time, Jane was an instructor at the Andreeva Portrait Academy in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She taught us to be very aware of the effect of light on the face and was very adventurous in the use of color. This particular painting is painted on 1/4 sheet of 300 lb. cold-pressed watercolor paper. Rock is not nearly as stern as he appears in this painting, but actually it is a look he often has - it is just misleading as to his true character, which is very sweet and loving. :)

This painting was done some time ago in a class I was taking with Marge Brandt of Wapakoneta, Ohio, a great watercolorist and watercolor instructor. This was my first truck painting! Some of you may know that I am obsessed with old trucks and have posted some of the paintings on this blog in the past. Well - this is the truck that started it all! I am not too fond of the job I did on the truck, but I am proud of the rolled bales in the front and I think the forground is much stronger than the back of the painting. I should probably cut it in half and frame the bottom:) Of course, that is one of the weaknesses in this painting - it is really two paintings - top and bottom, with nothing to connect the two. I can see it now, but totally missed it then. I look back at these older painting, and I can really see how I have changed in my style of painting.

Time for Harvest

I love the colors in the autumn - and I also love the straw and hay when it is rolled into these cylinders and they are positioned in the fields at random, just waiting for winter until it is time to bed and feed the animals. This is a small painting - painted on 140 lb. Arches cold-pressed watercolor paper. I remember the first time I saw hay rolled this way - about 28 years ago we were in Canada driving along the north side of Lake Huron - the country was beautiful- the hay in the fields had been cut and rolled and it was a new experience for me, never having seen it rolled before. Now it is a common sight here in Ohio...one I still think is beautiful.

Monument Valley #2

This is the second painting of Monument Valley from photographs by Susan Roper. The colors in this one are not as intense as in the first painting, but I like the "monuments" in the distance and the feeling of perspective.