'Braving the Storm'

I intend to follow the 'Braving the Storm' painting through on the blog. I'm working on a 22" x 15"sheet of watercolor paper which I've coated with gesso. For the first wash I splashed some blues and browns on the get rid of most of the white.


Here the major shapes are blocked in and I decided to add a couple of doves.


I'll have to work fast to polish this up because, although it's raining now, the storms may be over by next week, the cherry blossoms are beginning to swell and I'll soon want to be working with brighter hues.

Wilder Weather

I'm not happy with the way my flicker was posed in the previous image and thought I might work out a more interesting flicker/branch relationship.

And maybe I could get more of a feeling of a storm. So here's another small study.

Lesson 1: Working with Blues and Browns

Effective paintings can be made with just two tubes of paint. Here we'll use ultramarine blue and burnt sienna - two complementary colors. First make a gradient swatch and notice all the variations of tones you can create.


Try a small study using mainly cool, blue tones with warm, brown contrasts and then try the reverse. Use pure hues for accents.


These grayed tones make me think of a rainy day and it has been raining non-stop here lately. During the worst of the storm we kept an eye on a flicker hunkered down in our walnut tree. He looked so miserable and I'd like to capture the feeling of 'braving a storm' in a painting. Here's a first attempt using the using the blue/brown complementary color scheme.

New Blog Site

I'm setting up this blog with two ideas in mind. I want to discuss topics I'm covering in my classes/workshops and, secondly, I think it might be fun to report on paintings I'm working on as they progress. It will be interesting to see which way the blog evolves.