Color Journal Update

I have been working long hours lately, and find myself hungering for time to play with my art supplies.  One Friday evening recently, I tucked myself away in my studio with colorful markers and my watercolors.

I began with my Winsor & Newton watercolors in lemon yellow, Winsor blue and Hooker's green.  After those washes dried, I followed my intuition in exploring the positive and negative spaces of the page with Posca pens, Faber Castell black India ink pens, a white gel pen, & a set of inexpensive permanent markers. 

I have a voice within that says "Buy new art supplies, then you'll create masterpieces!"  

But I find that my old familiar pens and watercolors are friendly and inviting. And I can create endlessly with what I have.  

Why not dig out your favorite supplies and simply explore what they can do?  I hope you have a little play time soon!

Still Life Watercolor with a Ball Jar

The best subject to draw or paint is one you find fascinating and beautiful.  I use this Ball jar in my studio to hold water for my brushes, and I use it because I find it beautiful.

I wanted to practice painting its transparent, glassy, colorful form.  I began with a light pencil sketch, and laid in wet-in-wet washes of a variety of blues:  Prussian, Pthalo, and Cerulean. 

 I added in the cast shadow, and after the watercolor had dried, I added linework details with Faber Castell permanent black pens, and a Uniball white pen.

The final result was that I got to spend some time exploring watercolors and the way light passed through this gorgeous old jar.  I was pleased with the painting, but mostly, I was grateful for the time I got to spend creating with no other purpose in mind.

I find this sort of project to be healing and restorative after a busy day at work.  Peace resides in my art studio, and it feels grounding and like prayer to sit still and play with my art supplies.

I hope you spend some time playing with your art supplies soon!

Nature Journal Update: More Pencil Drawings!

The beauty of fall is a balm to the artist.  Here's a walk through my nature journal.

 

Sycamore leaves along a wandering creek.

Wild Blue Lobelia growing along the creekside.

A tiny Spiny Softshell Turtle I noticed as I sat alongside Raccoon Lake.

A colored pencil sketch of flowers blooming across the lake from where I sat.

Thanks for coming along on the tour.  I hope you get a bit of time in nature today.

Pencil Drawing in the Campground

 

I've been teaching a pencil drawing class at the Community College of Beaver County, and am delighting in playing with drawing pencils in my nature journal.  I took a little time to sit in an empty campsite at Raccoon Creek State Park and sketch a friendly-looking RV under the spreading boughs of a couple of pines.

Changing art mediums brings new inspiration and insights.  Being able to follow along each curving, gnarled branch with my HB mechanical pencil, and explore the textures of bark, pine needles and twiggy branches thrilled me. 

And sitting quietly and sketching feels relaxing, connecting, like a meditation.

Wishing you time today to sit and sketch something that draws your eye, simply for the joy of exploration.

Zoom Doodles & Zinnias

The rainy summer has produced an abundance of flowers in my backyard garden.  Lately, I've enjoyed snipping a bundle of zinnias, marigolds, calendulas, & Queen Anne's lace with a Purple Coneflower to top the bouquet.  Basil and spearmint add a lovely green backdrop to show off the bright colors.

A pint jar of fresh flowers on my desk brightens the energy and gives me something beautiful and natural to focus on while in a Zoom meeting.  Recently, at the end of one such meeting, when my note-taking was done, I added a sketch to my meeting notes.

Self-Care: Create a Personal Mandala

A new favorite art book of mine, The Zen of Creative Painting, has inspired me to be more experimental in my artwork.  According to author Jeanne Carbonetti, "All art mirrors its creator."

Jeanne steps you through three exercises --creating a mandala, a still life or landscape, and a figurative artwork -- and helps you to understand how your art expresses what's within you.  I find the process meditative, expressive and encouraging.  

By looking over my artwork with that mindset, I feel celebrated, and can see core parts of myself that I overlook yet should feel proud of.  Why not embrace what makes you unique?

Jeanne describes a mandala as an abstract artwork that can take any form.  I created my own mandala, drawing what came intuitively with a Micron pen and colored pencils.  

What does my mandala unveil to me? A large heart full of symbols of life (spirals), light (star), and love (hearts) represents my love of life and people & my desire to live with loving kindness towards others.  

The vibrant colors represent my strong will & expressiveness (blue), passion (pink & red) & creativity (orange). The predominance of yellow represents "shine time" to me -- the energy I receive from being with other people.  Unfortunately, I haven't been able to be among people much due to voluntary quarantining, but seeing what a core part of me that is feels like a celebration of myself.

The light and dark moons represent my yin-yang love of spending time actively with people as a teacher followed by time in the quiet solitude of nature or my studio.  The whole composition is full of living creatures, the earth (multi-colored triangle), & water droplets (blue dots) representing my love of nature and earthiness.

I recommend Jeanne's book and the process of exploring & celebrating your unique self through her creative discovery activities!  Make your own mandala and discover your own inner beauty.

A Simple Winter Watercolor Landscape

I'm currently reading Cathy Johnson's book First Steps: Watercolor Painting (North Light Books, 1995).  She shares her step-by-step approach for beginners to simplifying a landscape.  I tend to get lost in details, wanting to include every knobby tree trunk and bowing weed stalk in a scene.  I am happiest when I can fall into the tiniest features of some bit of nature -- an acorn or autumn leaf, for instance.  

But with an entire landscape, I am learning to see & paint the larger forms first.  What a relief not to expect myself to trace every bramble and bough in the landscape, but just to capture the spirit of the moment.

Saturday morning, I sat down with my paints at the kitchen counter and looked out the sliding glass door to the image above.  The morning mists made the distant trees look hazy, and I focused mainly on Grandmother Sugar Maple -- the bushy looking tree on the left.  

In years past, Grandmother Sugar Maple has provided us with gallons of sap to boil down into delicious, golden maple syrup. I have a special reverence for her, which deepened my painting experience.

Each painting is a learning opportunity. A chance to connect with nature.  A chance to slow down. A chance to express ourselves.  

I hope you will keep painting -- it leads to delightful discoveries!

Nature Hike & Sketch

 

On an afternoon hike today, I was about to cross a little stream, and looked up and saw this tangle of tree roots and moss-covered rocks.  I pulled out an ink brush pen and a fistful of colored pencils to make a quick sketch in my nature journal.  I started with the India ink brush pen, and sketched the scene, then tinted it with a few colored pencils. The day was cold, so I had to work quickly, and then get back to hiking to warm myself up.  But, I captured a few photos before leaving so I can continue painting in the warmth indoors.

Art for Self-Care: Nature Sketching

A constant in my life over the last few years has been hiking with David. Our routine hike takes us down 5 miles of trails through woods, past meadows and over streams to a backpackers' camping area in our local state park.  At first, we hiked for fitness, and to be together.  

When the lockdown began, I started tucking my nature journal under my arm on our walks, and sketching when we stopped for water breaks.  While I immersed myself in drawing a May Apple or a wobbly cherry tree, David would read the news on his phone, finding it less stressful to digest the news out in nature.

I filled one nature journal, and started another by in mid-summer.  Having hiked 730 miles since April, I continue to add sketches on each hike.  It helps to have this routine in my life, & to create and connect with nature.

Art Journaling as a Stress-Break

Taking the cats for their veterinary check-up is both important to me and stressful.  Three furry friends in their cat carriers buckled into my little Elantra created a symphony of mewling misery as we headed 10 minutes down the road to our vet the other day.  I'm grateful for our team of wonderful, caring & kind vets, but because I have empathy for my kitties, I can feel their distress in the process as they are examined, wormed and vaccinated. 

Thankfully, our cat friends got a good health report.  When I pulled up our driveway, safely home and done, all I could think was I need to make some art.  Once I had the cats out of their carriers and settled back into their familiar space, I grabbed my nature journal and colored pencils, and wandered down the hill from my home to plop on the grass and connect.

Sitting with a stand of nodding grasses and weeds and sketching them felt like magic.  I relaxed.  One of my cats sat at my feet, and we simply took in the beautiful afternoon sunshine playing over the grass fronds.  Deep evergreens in the background created a shadowed contrast to the November weeds.  I began to feel calmer, more grounded, peaceful.  The simple act of sitting with scrabbly weeds and scratching sketches in a journal felt deeply healing.

Grandmother Hickory Tree in the Mist

The recent warm weather allowed me the ability to sit outside in comfort and draw a favorite hickory tree on a rainy morning.  I'm fascinated by the twisting branches of Grandmother Hickory tree, and the negative spaces created between each curvy limb.  As I finished up my drawing, a crow sailed in to land on the top of Grandmother Hickory tree and cleaved the misty morning with his loud caws. 

Nature puts on a show for me every time I sit still and pay attention.   

 

The Benefit of Living with an Art Model Update

 

In a recent Zoom class, I worked the camera while David modeled. Professor Sue Powers demonstrated using different colors to represent values. Doing this keeps the brain from focusing on outer lines around the body, and builds the mass of the body from within, finishing with a few contour lines on top.  It's easier to see the real construction of the body when you focus on shadow shapes.  Here, I used hot pink as the base body tone, white for highlights, aqua for medium shadows and black for dark shadows.  

This technique helped me to construct a realistic and live-looking hand.  Sue recommended working quickly, and keeping your drawing implement in contact with the paper, even if you only make thready little lines.  Thanks, Sue!

A Rainy Sunday Sketch

What do you do with a sleepy, cold, rainy, quiet Sunday morning in Autumn?  Sip a pot of hot black tea, and sketch the essence of fall -- a colorful leaf.  This bristle-tipped oak leaf caught my eye on a recent hike, so I scooped it up and set it on the table where I have my morning tea.  Finally a moment to sketch it, I fell into that timeless time, the meditative state we drop into when we draw.  Art connects us to nature and heals us.

Pen & Ink Nature Sketches

I've been playing with Micron pens and an ink brush in my nature journal, following the contours of the lush late summer vegetation. Beauty in abundance waits to be captured outside. 

Whenever you draw, you connect with the energy of your subject.  Right now, we could all use more of the peace that nature offers.

Celebrating Color in Summer

The joy of new paints is trying out the colors and exploring what you can do with them.

The page "Things Leaves Do" was inspired by nature journaler Hannah Hinchman, author of A Trail Through Leaves: The Journal as a Path to Place.  She fills illustrated journal pages with topics like "Things Snow Does."

Finished 3 Fabulous Feathers!

I couldn't be more delighted with my new Schmincke watercolors.  Here's the finished study of a Crow feather, an Owl (?) feather and a Downy Woodpecker feather.  Of course, the real feathers that I found out on hikes and around my farm weren't purple and blue, but I decided to take a colorist's approach to the black, earth-toned and black-and-white, feathers, respectively.

New Paints!

I allowed myself a luxury over the 4th of July weekend:  A new set of Schmincke Horadam Aquarell watercolors.  They arrived Tuesday evening from Jackson's Art supplies in London, and I have been amazed and delighted by the intensity of the colors and the ease of painting with them.  A wet brush picks up the gorgeous colors easily.  Here are some samples of my early color tests.

Nature Journal Update: A Stormy Afternoon

A stormy afternoon made me reach for my watercolors and gouache. I love how white gouache sits on top of the watercolor painting, allowing me to lift out highlights in the turbulent sky.

Figure Drawing Update: Kathryn's & David's Duo Poses

I have wanted a chance to really sink myself into drawing duo poses for a long time.  When I teach in the studio, I focus on helping my students, and don't have much time to draw the models myself.  A silver lining to teaching art via Zoom is that I get to draw just as much as my students.  I'm grateful to Kathryn and David for their creative poses to challenge and inspire us!  It was an amazing session.

Nature Journal Update: Summer Thunderclouds

A summery afternoon built cumulonimbus clouds that didn't travel very far very fast, but rumbled and dropped curtains of indigo.  Tired at the end of a busy day, I sat on the front porch and sketched, blissfully.