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revivingKensArt (1 Viewer)

I was quite amused by this statement. The first thing that struck me when I looked through your thread was how bold and full of life your work is ;)
I have never seen a yellow leg but the nearest one is bouncing off the screen at me. Love it.

Thanks Chrissy,

I'm happy to hear that my work seems bold and full of life. I guess that's an unstated goal of mine. But it's so hard to see your own work and evaluate the results. So if it seems bold and full of live to others I won't complain!;)
 
I know just what you mean, and tho you may tomorrow say, just fine, I'll bet it won't exactly be what you had as your vision of it, from my point of view, and the 100 I did, if you just keep painting paintings that are fine or OK you will get to where your vision is or at least closer now and then. Each one will teach you, staying humble the learning is quicker, I think I got better when I just gave up and let the watercolor have it's way....also less is more with wc.

I've always thought that art, or just about anything else worth learning, is a humbling process. You just have to hope that you get more successes than failures and that the successes give you the impetus to keep going and not give up. I think that you're right that if they're fine or just OK that is enough to keep you going.

The painting does look better today but I still see what's missing, primarily some sense of light in the darker areas of the picture. I wanted the dark but I also wanted some shimmering light within it. That just didn't happen. When I had the brushes in my hand I looked at them like foreign instruments which I'd never ever seen before. I'll be happy when I look at them fondly and say 'yes this is just the brush for doing this!'
 
The painting does look better today but I still see what's missing, primarily some sense of light in the darker areas of the picture. I wanted the dark but I also wanted some shimmering light within it. That just didn't happen.

Jonsson's work has this quality, when I studied it I found he used a rough enough paper that a loaded brush would skip over areas leaving white spots some very small some bigger, and then sometimes glazed over this and achieved something like you describe.
 
I still see many parts of this painting where it just doesn't measure up to what I'd hoped for. However a man's reach should exceed his grasp......... I think the answer to that is not to rattle on about what I might do but instead just do it in the next painting!

Colleen, I'll have to look at that aspect of LJ's painting. Though I've always liked the rougher type of paper I just recently found that it doesn't work too well if I'm trying to start off with fairly detailed drawings as I did here. It's hard to control the pencil on a rough surface. So a new dilemma.;) For now I'll probably just stick with the cold press paper I have rather than going to an even rougher paper and hope to get this sort of shimmering light through more skillful brushwork.
 
cold press is rough enough, so the next step is learning how much water and how to sweep the brush to leave the dry places. I tried it with masking out, and this was not very successful, so brush control was how I went.
 
Big brush - plenty of air bubbles and leave it alone after one swish. Using spatter techniques can also give pleasing variety in texture and glazing layers can produce depth and intensity without killing the colours.
 
It's that 'leave it alone' part that kills me every time! Like that old TV commercial about never being able to stop with just one potato chip.
 
It's that 'leave it alone' part that kills me every time! Like that old TV commercial about never being able to stop with just one potato chip.

quite right - I can easily eat 225% of my RDA of saturated fat in one go, and the same goes for watercolour.
 
Maybe that's why my brushes behave so badly and look so foreign each time I pick them up. The alcohol to water ratio is just too high in the water jar.
 
Back to my 15-30 minute watercolors. Two Savannah Sparrows, though that may be hard to tel because the streaking is really finer than I've made it, and some Snow Geese, all seen at Brigantine NWR about 3 weeks ago.

One thing that is new about these is that I'm not doing a bit of initial pencil sketching and I'm doing them when I have no time to do anything developed. So they don't have the pressure of making art; I'm just having fun for 15-30 minutes.

I hope that eventually that will carry over to the more developed watercolors.;)
 

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Now the geese are especially good. Quick, light touch and descriptive brushstrokes, all you need!

Mike

Thanks Mike, Arthur, Colleen,

If only I could remember to use a 'quick light touch' in all my work! That seems to be the lesson of the week as Tim mentioned something similar.
 
I did a couple of 15-minute watercolors at start of week using photos of a Northern Shoveler I took a few months ago. They were a disaster. So today I decided to do some sketches of the NS and other ducks I had some photos of to see if I couldn't get a better since of duck structure.

After two watercolors and one sketch of the same photo of the NS it finally hit me that I have no idea how he got his foot up in the air like that. I mean I know he got it there by lifting up his leg. But I can't imagine that the leg is attached that high up on the torso. So I'm sure missing something here. I guess this shows the dangers of working from photos. But it was all I had to work with...........
 

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