Sunday, November 22, 2009

Multi-pronged Attack





Since last weekend's attempt to meld detailed drawings and quick watercolors I've concentrated on quick watercolors. I like them. They're fun to do and because they are quick my standards aren't as high. But I often want to take what I've learned from them and use it on a more developed watercolor.

Today I decided to first do a fairly quick watercolor of a Lesser Yellowlegs and Solitary Sandpiper seen at Crane Creek in Ohio. I intended to then do a more developed watercolor like last week.

Something went wrong. I ended up spending an hour or more doing a watercolor on paper that could never handle that much working. I'm not sure how it went so wrong but I decided it might be best to do a detailed drawing before proceeding to a more developed watercolor.

But this time I decided to use my watercolor pencils. Now they've always been very frustrating to me. I thought that wouldn't be the case today because I didn't intend to use water with them. But they were still frustrating. There's something about the physical quality of the pigment that makes it very recalcitrant about accepting additional layers of color, with or without water. So the results are at top. Basically the first color down is what you see, regardless of my intent for it to be otherwise.

So a beautiful day for sitting in the sun working on new drawings and paintings has gone awry. But progress in art is rarely straightforward.

Time to go do some garden work while we're still enjoying this abnormally warm November weather. Maybe these will look better when I come back. Ummmmmmmmmm then again maybe not.

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