Playing With My Watercolors

Working On A New Watercolor

Perhaps I should give a little background on this painting. Also, I will try to get a better photo of it. The background was started about 8 years ago when I first began to put paint brush to paper. For about a year before that, I spent every minute I could spare: reading books, researching supplies, searching the internet for artists teaching on the web and/or teaching through DVD's, and purchasing supplies. After about a year of research and watching DVD's, I finally began this piece of 22" x 30" Arches 300 lb cold press paper by dividing it equally into 4 equal pieces (without cutting it). I was doing an exercise on laying in color to get something that resembled sky and water. The point was to try 4 different methods of putting down the original wash to see what differences it might make. A few days ago, I finally took out my Bruynzeel Design aquarelle pencils and added the silhouettes of two children to 1 of the 4 blocks. I then worked on the water some more. It has been a nice experiment because there was no pressure to "get it right," but rather only to explore the possibilities. This photo is cropped to adjust for the strange angle that I captured, and the fact that I used a simple preset crop. The children are actually slightly off to one side.

By the way, to view my latest design on Cafe Press you can click Abstract Flow.