Watercolor Pumpkins

I love pumpkins and with fall on the way, I decided to give watercoloring a few a try. I quickly made these three on my lunch break. I'm not exactly sure about where the proper shading is supposed to go, but I love the curly stems and little dots.

On a side note - I usually take my photos at night and I'm having difficulty take a good quality photo without harsh shadows from the overhead lights on my paintings. I need to figure out a better solution.

Wet into Dry Watercolor Squares

The second project in Heather Smith Jones' Water Paper Paint was working watercolors with the wet into dry technique. (You can check out project 1 in an earlier blog post.) In this project, we created color squares of all shapes, while learning how to mix the paints with each other.

It was amazing to see how many colors you can actually make with just the basic set. I was using Winsor & Newton's Travel Watercolor set. My squares are not perfectly shaped, but I'm slowly getting the feel of the different brushes. While this isn't a large painting, it took me forever to make. I'm finding that watercolor painting is relaxing and easy to get absorbed in. I'm already terrible at keeping track of time and it whizzes by when I'm painting.

Wet into Wet Watercolors

Tonight I started my watercolor explorations with Heather Smith Jones' Water Paper Paint book, which I mentioned in an earlier blog post. The first project is Wet into Wet, where you paint rather wet circles and then paint additional circles with other colors inside - all while the paints are still wet.

I was definitely surprised at how some of the colors reacted with each other and how the paints in the pan can look so different on the paper. I really loved Intense Blue, Viridian Hue and Cadmium Yellow Hue...those three colors, coincidentally, go great together as well!

I originally didn't think the wet on wet process would be a style I was interested in, but it was actually pretty cool to watch the colors spread through one another - they looked like crystals growing! This would be a great technique for wrapping paper or simple cards.

Colored Pencil Shaving Relaxation

Not only are colored pencil shaving so pretty, but twisting the pencils through the sharpener is somewhat relaxing.

Drawing Jill Bliss Style

First drawing of a leaf.

Original Leaf

First drawing of a flower - the yellow pen is a little hard to see.

Original Flower

First contour drawing of a flower.

I love the drawing style of Jill Bliss - she focuses on drawing flowers and other nature elements with lots of little lines, dots and other patterns. A while back I purchased her Drawing Nature: A Journal and have decided to finally start using it.

The first drawing is intended to get you to just draw a simple leaf and/or flower to get your baseline to look back at later. I drew a leaf and yellow flower from the park by my work.

Next, you move onto the first exercise: flower contour drawing. Considering I wasn't allowed to look at the page or lift my pen, it turned out not too bad. Jill recommends you spend an hour on your contour drawing - I only spent about ten minutes. I did this on my lunch break, so I didn't quite have the luxury of time. I definitely plan to spend more time on my next contour drawing to really practice looking at my subject.

Macro Monday: Los Gatos Creek Trail

During an evening walk in the Los Gatos Creek Trail, I stumbled across this pretty little Statice plant along the edge of the trail. I love the papery texture of the flowers.