If, as I said in my last post, an artist trying out a new medium is like a dog trainer being asked to train a raccoon, then this post is the part where the dog trainer has become familiar enough with training raccoons that she decides to start a raccoon farm to breed them as pets. This is the second half of my watercolor class, and while I would still consider myself a huge watercolor n00b, I do think I came up with some pretty cool stuff here. Also, that metaphor is terrible but I actually really want to start a raccoon farm to breed them as pets in real life, so I had to throw it in somehow. Please, no comments about why that's a terrible idea--I've had enough people try to crush my dreams already.
One of our assignments was to do a cityscape. I didn't want to just go off my imagination, so I did the Professional Artist thing and did a Google search for "cityscape." As I expected, I mostly just found touristy stock photos that you'd find in a gift shop, but then I fortuitously changed my search to "city painting" and found this. That was the inspiration for what I did here--and as it turns out, "inspiration" is the right word because this isn't nearly as much of a "copy" as I remembered it being. Still, the resemblance is pretty obvious, so I have to give credit to the original artist, Tatiana Iliina, for kicking off what I'll call my "Renaissance period" of the watercolor class.
I started by laying down a wash with some pretty thick paint to develop an atmosphere, and then I just added the buildings on in various colors and paint thicknesses. The boldest colors were generally added last, wherever I felt the cityscape needed an accent.
I liked experimenting with different perspectives and color schemes. This one's lack of either a horizon or a ground plane makes it feel crowded and busy, like a classic NYC feel. For me, crowded and busy are good things--I love wandering around downtown areas. I wish there were bigger ones near where I live now.
This was also one of the first paintings where I actually used white, because my teacher mentioned at the beginning of the class that white is technically a gouache and not a "pure" watercolor, so some watercolor contests will disqualify you for using white. You're supposed to use the white of the paper wherever you need white. I finally realized that a.) I didn't care about entering any contests and b.) I had accidentally bought mostly gouache paints instead of true watercolors anyway. Oops. (Gouache is opaque watercolor.)
This one is kind of weird but I mostly like it. It has sort of a "digital" feel to me. Most of the people in my class couldn't tell it was supposed to be a city by looking at it, though I can't really remember what they said it looked like instead. What does it look like to you? Tangentially, which of these do you like the most?
I liked the cityscapes a lot, and I wanted to try and transfer that technique to an interior, so I tried a cathedral. This one here is actually my second cathedral painting; the header image for this post was my first--and also probably a lot better. In fact I think it's my best watercolor so far. These aren't based on any particular cathedral; I looked at several images of cathedrals to get ideas for shapes and light patterns to abstract from.
In between the two finished cathedral paintings I made an attempt that completely failed. You might think that it's impossible to fail with abstract art, but I drew on the paper with a dried chunk of paint just to see what would happen, and it scratched the paper and became impossible to remove or paint over. Which wouldn't be so bad, except that a few of the lines were weirdly diagonal and... it just looked bad, okay? No matter what your first grade art docent told you, there is such a thing as a mistake in art. At least when you're 25 and wanting to start taking art seriously.
Anyway, I peeled the paper off the board I was painting on and found a really interesting pinking pattern on the back where the wash had spilled over onto the other side of the paper. I decided to expand on that, exaggerating some of the more interesting shapes and de-emphasizing others, and then I added a few layers of additional colors. Some of the shapes reminded me of moss hanging off of gnarly trees, so I decided to add some green and give it an organic feel. The orange shapes are just to complete a nice color scheme and add some variety--but I was thinking of birds, bugs, tufts of pollen and other floating forest miscellany. I find that pure abstraction, like Jackson Pollock-type stuff, frustrates me to no end, but if I think of something concrete and let aspects of that guide my painting without representing it exactly, I can come up with some pretty cool abstract stuff. In fact with my watercolors, I feel like my semi-representational abstract works, like the ones I've shared so far in this post, seem more like "finished" works than my more representational stuff, which I'll discuss below. Maybe that bodes badly for illustration as a career path for me and I should reconsider studio art. We'll have to see where my self-teaching goes from here...
Okay, this one is probably a bad example to lead with because it's pretty obviously silly. Sometimes I just get bored or exhausted of trying to take things seriously and I just want to goof off. Of course that's how, say, Bill Watterson became super rich and famous, so if it worked for him it could work for me. This painting took me like 2 minutes, but time spent on a painting doesn't necessarily equate to a better finished product. This is the kind of stuff I learned how to draw with, and though I have no idea what to do with this style, I still feel pretty partial to it. This is that India ink-watercolor combination I was coming upon with my self-portrait in the last post.
Here's the same technique, applied to a slightly more serious subject. The Impressionists painted a lot of ships, and in some ways, some of them were basically cartoonists, depending on how you look at it. (Wow, that was a lot of qualifiers in one sentence. I'm no art history scholar and I'm not going to pretend I am.) I like the effect; it's simple but still looks complete. I eventually want to try a similar technique in oil, building up several layers of multicolored paint to create a texture, then outlining the subject with bold, dark outlines. You'll have to stay tuned to see how that turns out.
One final note: Yes, the boat on the right, according to the reflection, is technically floating above the water. I don't know why I made such a silly mistake. Leave me alone.
Here I started getting experimental with my techniques again. I painted out the whole bird with water and then dabbled color into the water. Basically a wash, but a unique kind of wash. I don't know what to say about this beyond that... It's pretty?
This one isn't quite as good as the bird, but I just really love squirrels. They used to be my favorite animal (maybe they still are... I don't know, I don't really think about having a "favorite animal" anymore), and I would feed the squirrels in my backyard when I was a little kid. It got to the point where whenever we would open the sliding door leading to our porch, all the squirrels in the yard would freeze, look toward the house, and start booking toward the open door, trying to get inside. That was when I stopped feeding the squirrels.
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If you want to take a look at some of my watercolor teacher's stuff, check him out here. It's actually mostly acrylic, not watercolor. He also has some pretty awesome sketches and pictures of his dog Thor (the namesake of my last post) on his Instagram.