Watercolor Recovery Mode

Having realized that it’s been a long time since I worked in watercolor, I decided that I had better open that palette and try to paint from a few photos to see how much ground I had lost. Working from some very local Northshore of Long Island photos, I banged out a 5″ x 7″ and a 6″ x 8″ attempt over the course of the last two afternoons. The first was of a sunset kayak scene on the local river, and the second was a Long Island Sound beach scene of windswept dunes. The best I can say is they are not terrible, just average. My saturation needs help, and the colors on the dunes are really ugly, but dune vegetation is not that inspiring colorwise. My people and birds both look a bit like they need medical assistance. The boulders in the midground turned out ok, but they were a much needed cover up of when I attempted a man and a dog. The dog looked like a more like Dalek silhouette from Dr. Who.

The 6 x 8 was done on a new block of Fluid 100 100% cotton paper which performed well and held up to my need to blot a few things out along the way. The kayakers were done on the last page of that Baohong (I just became an amazon affiliate, but I know you won’t buy this product) paper that I tried out a few months ago. I am happy to see that gone.

I am working on blocks or loose sheets nowadays instead of doing much in a sketchbook. I am intimidated by other people’s sketchbook tours. I have three bound sketchbooks that have some really good pages and other really awful pages. I like working small when I don’t have the energy or time for working on a multi-day larger painting. Perhaps I will just make a bunch of paper signatures to bind into sketchbooks after the fact.

I remain undaunted. On any given day, it is better to have painted poorly than to have not painted at all.

Now back to TurboTax.