Back to watercolors

Its been a while since I've done any real painting with watercolors. I've been busy being a colored pencil artist for a while now, with some detours into digital, but have been wanting to go back to watercolors, so here I am.

This piece is my Christmas card, a little behind schedule, but on its way now. I'm working on illustration board (Strathmore 500 series) which is my all time favorite surface to work on. I get cranky with watercolor paper because I can't stand when it warps when wet (even if its stretched and taped down), and illustration board doesn't do that. The only drawback is that you can't transfer art onto it with a light box (its too thick to be 'see-through'), so its back to old-school transferring methods - tracing the drawing down over a graphite transfer sheet.

Here is my glamorous set-up. That's a fancy ceramic yogurt cup for the paint water, held steady by a roll of packing tape. Hey, it works. My drawing table is at a slant, so I have to keep stuff from rolling down. The parallel ruler on the bottom keeps most things from rolling off altogether.

I use a combination of Winsor Newton, Holbein, Daniel Smith, and Turner watercolors. I'm not really a purist - whichever brand has the color I need is what I use. I tend to stay away from the really grainy ones if I can help it, unless I'm doing something with special effects. I like a more even kind of pigment. Sometimes I use gouache (opaque watercolor) too if I need to. Here I've squeezed out some Winsor Newton Hooker's Green, Permanent Sap Green, and Green Gold. So far all I've use on this piece is the Permanent Sap, in various strengths.

And here we have some Christmas tree needles. There will be a lot more of them by the time I'm finished. A LOT.

We're due for an apocalyptic storm tomorrow and the next day. 60-70 mph wind gusts, and 3-4" of rain. This, after years of drought. I think last December it rained one day for about 10 minutes, and the rest of the time we had sun sun sun. The year before, too. Now, we're getting the opposite, and its too much! They're warning the power will go out, trees will fall over and all sorts of awful things will happen, so I thought I'd better blog something in case I'm offline for a while. Let's hope its not as bad as they say!