Watercolor was the last actual art class I took in college, so the artwork I am sharing here is a lot more recent than the stuff I had shown previously. At this point my work was much more informed by actual knowledge of the art world and art history in particular. At the same time, it's not necessarily outstanding, because at least for me, learning a new medium is a little bit like putting a raccoon in front of a dog trainer and telling her to train it. She's probably going to have an easier time than the average person, but still. It's a raccoon.
Except for the brief oil painting class I described earlier and a bunch of work with colored pencils and other "kid's media" when I was younger, most of the "serious" artwork I've done has been pretty monochrome: charcoal and chalk, pen and pencil, India ink, etc. The color I have used has often been pretty abstract, arbitrary color. (The abstract piece I'm using as the header for this post was made from leftover color samples from some of my first watercolors.) For me, watercolor was more difficult than oil in that so much depends on how much water you've added to the mix, and since a little paint goes a long way, a tiny change in the color mix can change your results dramatically. At the same time, it's a little more natural in that, as with pen or pencil, if you keep going over the same spot with more paint, the color gets darker. (Depending on how much water you have in the paint--watercolor is weird and finicky and unpredictable.) There are pros and cons to how quickly it dries; you can work in layers pretty quickly and easily, unlike oil paint, where you may have to wait several days or more before you can add another layer of paint. On the other hand, if you make a mistake, there's usually pretty much nothing you can do about it, except for try to make it look like you did it on purpose.
Oh and the title of this post? Thor is the service dog that my teacher brought to class every day. The teacher doesn't actually need a service dog; he just likes training them. The title would be a little more appropriate if it were a cat, since everyone knows the cat is the one in charge in that relationship. But whatever.
After some completely mindless experimentation (like I said, trying to train a raccoon), as far as I can remember this was the first actual painting I tried. This is just a house I photographed on my phone a few blocks away from mine. If you live here, sorry/not sorry for creeping on your house. It just had interesting shapes. For the most part this isn't a terrible first try, but it's a little sloppy and I kind of hate the sky. For this painting I didn't sketch the house in first or anything; I just kind of attacked the blank page with paint. That's the main reason why it feels so disorganized--whether or not you actually like the disorganized look. I kind of have mixed feelings about it. The black outlines were added at the end because it definitely looked too disorganized without them.
Here was my second attempt. Personally I think it's much, much better, especially in that it feels much more like a watercolor painting. You can see where the water flowed in a lot of places. I especially like that it feels like a rainy day, even though it actually wasn't rainy when I took the photo. I outlined this one in pencil before going back in and painting in the colors. You can still see the pencil lines, which I also have mixed feelings about.
For this one, I outlined everything in pencil, then went over the pencil lines with a drafting pen, then erased the pencil lines and filled in the spaces with watercolor. It ended up looking more like an architectural drawing than something you would likely see in an art store, but I kind of like it. It also kind of has a Simpsons feel to me, like you could animate cartoon characters into this scene. This style of course does have some drawbacks; it's a little more rigid and less expressive than the one above. I go back and forth on which one I like more... basically I just have mixed feelings about everything.
The assignment for this one was to do the entire painting in washes--basically, getting the paper wet beforehand and then painting into the water instead of onto dry paper. That's also pretty much what I did with the sky and the street in the pencil-outlined painting above, but doing it for the entire painting means there are no solid outlines at all. I added the pen drawing on top of the wash, and I think it has a pretty cool effect.
This is just a landscape I found on a Google search, basically. It's the view across the Puget Sound from... somewhere. I'm from Seattle, so besides the obvious beauty of the Northwest it has an air of nostalgia for me. This painting was also done mostly in washes, except for a few areas where you can obviously see outlines, such as on the mountains, and drybrushing, like the rugged brushmarks in the golden reflection in the water. I like the bold colors in this one but I have--you guessed it--mixed feelings about how childlike the shapes feel to me.
This one is a sobered-down version of the same scene. The colors feel more realistic, although they are not the same colors found in the original photo. There are some weird dry spots in the sky where the paint didn't really take and I have no idea why that's the case. We'll just pretend it's on purpose. I also tried something new on this painting: this gummy stuff that repels water. You paint it onto the paper and let it dry, then paint over it in watercolor. The paint sticks to the paper but doesn't stick to wherever the gummy stuff is. Then you peel it off when the paper is dry. It comes off in clumps, with roughly the consistency of rubber cement. It's a cool idea, but unfortunately in my experience it kept ripping up pieces of the paper with it. That's probably because I didn't let the paper dry completely before I peeled it off. I'm impatient. Or it might just be that I had low-quality paper that comes apart when you rub it with your finger. I do not have mixed feelings about destroying the paper I am trying to paint on. That was no good.
I think that overall I like the first version of the landscape more, just because of the colors. Which do you prefer?
* * *
All these next ones are of the same woman, though you wouldn't be able to tell from looking at most of them. Obviously recognizability wasn't my number one priority... I promise I can usually draw faces! You've seen me do it! But no, for real I just wanted to try out a few different techniques. Some are obviously a lot better than others. None of them is what I'd call a "finished" work, just watercolor sketches. Which ones do you like the most/least?
* * *
This last one is a mix: I painted in the outlines in India ink and then colored it in with watercolor. I started experimenting with this technique by copying East Asian ink and watercolor paintings. I didn't scan my copies of them because reasons. But this is pretty much what I came up with, and it's a style that, as you'll see in my next post, I liked. By the time I painted this I was starting to get into the watercolor groove and develop a style... A few styles, actually. This cartoony ink and watercolor style that feels more like a more advanced version of what I used to do in high school, and a more abstract, painterly style that feels more like the thing you would discuss using four-syllable words in an upscale gallery. You know, if it were like a thousand times better. Or if it were the exact same quality but I was already famous.
Oh by the way that's a self-portrait. I forgot I hadn't shared one of those here yet. At this point most of my readers are my friends and family though so you probably already knew that. (Unless it's a lot worse than I think it is.)