ZenTangle #1

I was just introduced to the idea of ZenTangle a couple days of ago and I'm already hooked! Here is my first doodle.

Colorful Converse

My painting pal, Pattie, offered us a selection of photos she took of her kid's shoes to help kick us (read "me") into gear to start painting again! Well, it worked, here is my finished painting......thanks Pattie!

Watercolor Fun with Converse!

My good friend, Pattie, has gotten me painting again. Here is a simple cold-pressed paper with mask and a single variegated wash of color. I plan to do more but I kind of like it like this also. I took a little liberty playing with my new iPhoto app and added the vignette effect.

Linear Visions Show - I'm finally ready!

It's 10:30pm and I finally have everything ready to take to the show tomorrow! I actually painted two different versions of these Tahoe Kayaks. The first one you've seen previously in this blog - I've tweaked it a bit and put on a tightly cropped mat which helps with the graphic "feel". The second version, seen framed here, is the one that my family voted on for entering into the exhibit. I tried two different techniques, both of which were unlike my usual style.

P.S. Thanks to my wonderful hubby who taught me how to cut my own mat!

Kayaks (for Linear Vision show)

I thought I'd try something different for the upcoming Linear Vision show by painting these colorful kayaks strong and bold. I used Photoshop to crop and posterize my original photo (taken in Tahoe), and I simplified the background, removing the large boulders and replacing them with just sand. I'm not sure if the posterizing look came through in the final painting or not. Time to move on to a new project!

Tom Lynch Watercolor Workshop

Three days of intense workshop with Tom Lynch. The first two days we did lightning fast exercises, one after another. Today, the third day, we watched Tom demo a complete painting (on watercolor canvas) and then tried our hand at it, hopefully incorporating some design tidbits that he had mentioned previously.

These are some of the exercises we did. The first one is just showing the sunset colors reflecting and intensified on the hills. For the next one he gave us a magazine picture and a paper towel with a 1-inch hole out of the center. We had to paint - no drawing first - what we saw in the little hole. Then we had to tear the hole a little bigger and continue the painting, and repeat a few more times. Mine was pretty simple since it was just some tree trunks and foliage and water. The third example was also from a magazine photo but we had to write a couple of words on the back of the paper and then try to paint that "description". Mine was POWER and COOL (for the waterfall). Not sure that I got that one right, but it was fun.

All these were done pretty darn fast and I think most of us were totally exhausted at the end of each day.

Depth of Field Exercise

This week we had to experiment with depth of field, both great and shallow. Here are the four images I submitted.