#ArtWorkLivingChallenge 2021 - Day Four!

Well, today's painting went beyond the time guidelines, but I was enjoying it.

This is the backyard, where my sad sailboat has been languishing for 3 years.  I've leased my dock space, but here it sits.  I THINK we'll be able to get it out this year - FINALLY.

I don't think I've said anything about the SIZE of these little challenge paintings; they're supposed to be SMALL so you can finish them quickly and not get too wound up in the details (I have a problem with that - I tend to keep painting when I should quit!), so I've been working in space just barely larger than a 3x5 index card.  

Anway, here are the stats:

Watercolor
Canson XL 140-lb watercolor paper
3/4" flat brush, 1/2" flat brush, #10 round brush, #6 round brush, #2 round brush, #4 fan brush
40 minutes
3.5" x 5.5"

More Watercolor Fun!

When I was a kid, about 11 years old, my aunt Thelma gave me a coloring book of pictures of national parks and a big tin of watercolors.  I remember it had a picture of Mesa Verde on the cover, and the tin must have had thirty or forty little pans of paint and a brush.  I LOVED that gift!

I got to thinking about those paints and that coloring book, and decided to order some national parks coloring books (yes, that's plural!) and the first one arrived last weekend. I sat down with my cheapo Crayola paints and played with the first picture. I used too much water and the paints bled through to the other side of the thin paper - rats.  But there's no picture there so that's okay.

The Crayola paints didn't do too badly, did they?

I used watercolor pencils on the second picture, then "activated" them today with water and a brush. The colors became way more vibrant after the water! I didn't use as much water for that picture, so there wasn't any bleed-through.  Anyway, it was fun!  I'll be experimenting some more.

Here are the watercolor pencil pictures before and after adding water.

more teeny tiny watercolor fun!

I'm working on my watercolors again!  Back to the artist's paints.  

A lot of the painting I'm doing right now is mainly just exercises.  I section my block of watercolor paper with artist's masking tape and do the exercises/practice in smaller rectangles.  I practice brushstrokes and different techniques and materials.

I always start out with washes - flat and graduated, wet in wet, wet on dry, single and multiple colors.  Some are better than others - it's just practice, after all (and I need a LOT of it!) - but it's fun.

My skies always need work, so I was practicing that the other day, and when I was done, a couple of them begged to be turned into little scenes.  Again, nothing exciting, but FUN.  

Not my best rendering of a sailboat.
Just playin' around with the exercise.

I kind of like this one.
Again, just playin' around with paints.

I'm having FUN and experimenting with the paint for now.  There ARE some things I'm planning to make into "real" pictures.  Just need some guts to get started!

teeny tiny watercolor fun

A couple of weeks ago I posted about how I had put away my "good" paints and paper and was learning to PLAY with a set of Crayola kid's watercolor paints (here).

I'm still PLAYING with my kid's paints, and here are my latest efforts - teeny tiny watercolors.  All but one are right around 1 inch by 2 inches, except one, which is a whopping 1 inch by 3 inches!

As you can see, I've been having BIG fun making TINY paintings!  It doesn't take much, does it?

I was playing with laying down a wash,
and then "lifting" some of the color.
Not exciting, but a pretty shade of blue!
(1" x 2")

Just seeing what happened when I dabbed
some colors onto wet paper.
(1" x 2")

Again, just dabbing some
random colors onto wet paper.
Psychadelic, man!
Groovy!
(1" x 2")

An "accidental" landscape.  Just messing around
and a sunset (sunrise?) over water appeared!
(2" x 1")

Again, just messing around with dabbing and streaking, and an
area of bare dirt appeared in the grass!  But what are those
strange magenta blotches?  LOL!
(3" x 1")

Playing with Paints

My home health care duties are changing - The Knee That Went Bad went to the hospital yesterday and came back with a NEW knee replacement.  No more concrete spacers!  YAY!  I posted about the spacer here.  It's still creepy to think about a hunk of concrete being deliberately put inside your body.

Because That Knee will be more and more mobile over the course of the next two or three months, my time should be a little freed up, and I intend to get back to some of the things I've kind of put on hold.  One of those things is my attempt to learn to paint watercolors.

Some of my attempts have been not terrible and I've even framed them and hung them in the living room.  Then there are the others - hideous, flat things with bad perspective and weird proportions.  Oh, well.

My new Crayola paints!

Here's the synthetic flat and
Crayola squirrel's hair brushes.

I was getting kind of disgusted and then I read an article that flipped a switch - if I wanted to have fun doing something, I needed to PLAY at doing it!

So I put away my artist's watercolors, brushes, and paper, went to Walmart and bought a box of Crayola watercolors, a synthetic flat brush, and some lower-end watercolor paper.  Then I went home and followed along with a YouTube video JUST FOR FUN.  No expectation of a picture good enough for the wall.  And here's the end result...

Even though the colors are kind of too bright for my taste, they're not terrible, and I like how some of the details came out - the weedy field looks weedy, the bushes look bushy, and the trees actually look like trees!  And the rock isn't terrible, either.  I'm not excited about the sky, though, and the one tree is smack in the middle of the picture where it really shouldn't be.  But it was FUN to try painting something with kids' paints.  From now on, I'll try to remember to PLAY more.

I'm Not Very Good at...LOTS of Things!!!

If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly. - G. K. Chesterton

Oh, bless you, George!

There are so many things I LOVE to do, but I do them so BADLY.

I run.  Slowly.  Painfully slowly.  I mean, people WALK faster than I run.  And my right leg is knock-kneed (one source of the problems I've been experiencing with that leg - geesh!).  But you know, this morning I got out and chugged up the street, and I passed a small river birch with a mockingbird in it, singing his heart out.  Last week I interrupted an opossum going about his opossum business.  And there are bullfrogs in a retention pond nearer to our house, and when I hear them "harrumphing," I always laugh.  And I may not be fast, but I can go forever.  At least that's how it feels, some days.

I paint watercolors.  From a book.  Nothing original (YET).  But playing with the paint and trying out different techniques is FUN.  And one of my favorite pictures came about because of a mistake!  I was trying to get a misty rain effect using a technique described in a book.  It just would NOT work, and I kept taking a paper towel and wiping down the picture and trying again.  But one time after taking a disgusted swipe at the mess, I looked and said, "Hey!"  I had made misty rain!  Not as instructed, but who am I to look a gift misty rain effect in the mouth?  I left it, and I've gotten a lot of compliments on it!  

I sail.  Lazily.  I almost never use the jib.  It's in GREAT shape!  Oh, I hank it on to the forestay every spring and keep it in its sail cover on the deck, but I almost never let it come out and play.  Fall comes and I unhank it and throw it and the cover into the cabin until spring, when I hank it on again.

I ski.  Again, lazily.  I don't want to be bothered with the effort of skiing a black diamond slope.  I'll do greens and blues, and try to find the longest way down the mountain.  I want to get as much time on my skis as possible for my ride up to the top, and I want to be able to look at the scenery, not just at where I'm going to have to plant my pole or make my next christy.  My favorite is a about a four-mile glide at Winter Park in Colorado.  It takes me about 40 minutes to get from the summit to the base.  Now THAT'S skiing!

I play the piano.  Well enough.  No audience, please.  Oh, how I HATED recitals!  I play for myself.  Everyone can thank God for that.  At least I know enough not to inflict my playing on others, if I can avoid it.  I used to be better, but ever since getting bifocals...!  Oh my.  I have a terrible time reading the music with my head thrown back so I can look through the bottom of my glasses.  And I lose my place in the music.  And I can't find the keys.  Without my glasses, it's even worse!  I keep threatening to get a pair of CHEAP single vision glasses just for the piano.  But I enjoy the noises I make.  I can hear the RIGHT notes in my head, no matter what is coming out of the instrument!

The point is, who are you doing these things for?  Do you have to be the best?  Do you have to meet someone else's standard?  Are you in a competition?

Obviously, I'm NOT at a competitive level in any of the things I like to do, so I'd better just do them because I like to do them!  What are some things that you like to do that you avoid doing because you think you're not good enough?  I need to make a list of my own, and start DOING them.