Willow

I was in Maryland's Zoo last week and I met newborn baby giraffe. Her name is Willow. She was born 7 weeks ago and she is the first baby giraffe at the facility in more than 20 years. I guess she will have a lot of visitors this spring and summer.
Willow, I wish you happy and healthy life :)

Improving Daffodil Watercolor Painting

This is a picture that we created at AC Moore's watercolor class during 2 hour period. It is good and you can leave it like this but also you can go farther and add some more details. Below I'll show what I've done with it later at home. I hope it will help you to improve your paintings. 

I decided to darken the background and make it richer. You can see that I sketched leaves and a flower bud at the top left corner. With such helpful pencil marks I was ready to start to paint around. I used in turns Phalo blue, yellow ochre and sap green colors.

When the paint dried off I added some more leaves with positive painting this time. I used deep green and darkened it with Phalo blue. 

Next step - shadows.

Here is a finished version. Darker shadows made this picture more three dimensional. To create my gray for the shadow I used a mixture of Ultramarine blue and Burnt Umber. You can also use Paynes gray.

Warming up a ski run

I've just came back from a ski trip. I was skiing in a beautiful state of Vermont. The mountains were ready, perfectly covered with the white powder. It was a nice change from all that gray Maryland's scenery. Surprisingly there was not too many people there.

The views were spectacular and inspiring, especially from the mountain's summit. Although my sketchbook was in my bag all the time, I wasn't able to sketch. The wind was too cold to remove the gloves from my hands. Nevertheless I wouldn't be myself if I didn't take some photographs. 

Here you can see one of my pictures. I took this one on the trail down the Ramshead Mountain. I knew right away that I would like the scene. Layers of mountains and small figures of skiers are great subjects for a watercolor painting.

Later at home I studied this picture in more detail. I noticed some drawbacks though. Heavy, gray clouds made this picture dull and almost monochromatic. Also the skiers were hardly visible on the dark background full of trees. I knew that I had to rearrange the composition of this picture a little.  

I began with making the sky more dramatic. I painted it with wet-in-wet technique. On the wet paper I threw yellow pale color just to add a little sunshine. Then I painted small part of the clear sky with cerulean blue. I carefully painted around white clouds. At the end I added darker tones to make heavier clouds. I used mixture of french ultramarine and crimson red.
Then I waited until everything dried out. After that, I painted the mountains starting with the farthest one. I used mixture of french ultramarine and crimson red.
The conifer trees were done with a combination of phthalo blue and yellow ocher. To create darker trees in the front I mixed french ultramarine and burnt umber. On my photograph, the trees are in all shades of gray. To change this and warm up the scene, I painted some bushes with yellow ocher and burnt sienna.
To emphasize skiers I painted them on a white background. I also narrowed the ski trail to eliminate the overwhelming whiteness of the snow in the foreground. Thanks to that, the skiers automatically became more pronounced. One of the skier's jacket had neon blue color. I found this tone too destructing so I changed it to the dark gray.
Now my dear readers it is your turn. You can take my photo and paint from it. Modify it to your taste and most of all enjoy the process. Start with quick pencil value sketch, it help to determine what you like. Let me know how it went :)

This Chritmas

This Christmas I wish you all my friends and followers around the world
Peace and Happiness 
and maybe Santa has left you a requested gift in your stocking.
Merry Christmas, Feliz Navidad, Wesołych Świąt
And a Happy New Year 
:)

Colored Glass

I love colored glass. You can find all range of tones on one single vase. This is why this kind of glass is a favorite subject for many artists.

Here is a display of several vases. I chose only three of them to draw. You can use this photograph as reference to make your own drawing and let me know how it went. Click on it to enlarge. 

The most difficult part was my contour drawing. I used top part of the tallest vase as my measuring unit. I measured it with my pencil and a thumb and then set down the right proportions between height and width of all my vases. Lines of symmetry were helpful too. From these lines I drew the vertical lines. On those lines I checked if my outer lines are equally away from the center.

To control the curved lines I kept turning my sketchbook upside down quite often. At the end I glanced at the drawing in the mirror to make a few additional corrections and then proceeded to the pleasant part – shading.

For shading I used regular 2B mechanical pencil. Highlights were done with an eraser.

I completed the drawing within about an hour.

To sum up:

A good drawing comes from a good subject. 

So hunt for it!

Watercolor Pocket Set Review

Watercolor pocket sets are great for quick outdoor sketches. There is a big variety of sets like this in the stores. Usually I have a big dilemma, should I buy something expensive from the brand name company or should I buy something cheap made in China.  This time I had a really good coupons to AC Moore and I was able to buy 2 sets to do the comparison: Winsor&Newton and Reeves.

	Windsor&Newton	Reeves
Price	$23	$10
Box quality	excellent	good
Brush quality	excellent	poor
Pigment intensity	good	good

Windsor&Newon is a really cute set, the box is super small and handy. The brush has excellent bristles with point. The Reeves’ box is larger but still fits in my purse. I don’t like Reeves’ brush at all, it is too soft and it is not pointy enough.
The biggest surprise are pigments. Both companies have comparable color strength and tone. You can see it on my sample color test.
To conclude Windsor&Newton’s watercolor set is a great choice when it comes to overall quality. On the other hand Reeves is great when you want to save some money. You can create great watercolor paintings no meter which set you choose. Although you definitely need a better brush for the Reeves set.

Beef up the Composition

In late December I visited Canaan Valley in West Virginia. It’s a very beautiful and peaceful place and if you are an outdoor person you’ll love it too. Walking through the woods and meadows was a real treat for me. Because it was too cold to stay in one spot and draw I took a lot of pictures while hiking.

Here is a scene that made me freeze for a moment. This sight had a lot of attractive features but also had a few distracting elements. In my rough sketch below you can see how I handled the components to create a more exciting composition. The drawing was done with a graphite aquarelle and washed over with water. This helped me see the tones and the lighting better.

The creek was my focal point so I decided to cheat a little and make it a bit wider and brighter. The trees along the stream had trunks covered with lichens light in color. To emphasize that brightness I positioned them in front of the darker conifers. The unbalanced tree trunk and the footbridge were grabbing attention away from the stream so I didn’t put them in my drawing at all. Also, I decided not to paint the tall trees in the background to simplify the setting.

At first I covered the tree trunks with masking fluid. I wet the entire paper and applied the diluted mixture of ultramarine blue and burnt umber for the background. I added yellow ochre to the mixture to achieve a nice green color for trees in the distance. To create the soft look I started painting while the paper was still wet. For the foreground I used burnt sienna and a touch of purple. After these first two washes I waited for my paper to completely dry. Then I painted the closer fir trees and pines with the same mixture yet more condensed. Next I removed the masking fluid that covered the trunks. I painted their edges gray and green to create a feeling of roundness. The grass was done by a lot of negative painting. I completed the painting by adding shadows behind the trees.

I really enjoy painting details and I have to remind myself constantly not to over do it. 

Go to my YouTube Chanel to see the video of painting process

https://youtu.be/-1O7356g0ME