First Watercolor

First watercolor, done using a lot of water and little color and letting the color bleed into the water.  I began with a pencil outline and then drew over that with a dry paint. This seemed to contain the colors within the leaf so that they didn't bleed out into the background and vice versa.  I then laid a heavy layer of water as I went along in the immediate area I wanted to fill with color.  Then I would take a touch of color and just dip it onto the watered paper and it moved as far as the water would allow, thus accounting for the varity of color intensity.  Lastly, after the color was all finished, I took a narrow brush and put dryer color on it and drew in the stem and a few lines on the leaf.  More and more I am learning to do more with paint brushes than I ever have before.

Intuitive Painting

First of its kind I've done.  I put down a backcground covering the paper with random colors applied any which way.  After it dried I looked at the background from all angles to see if I could find a picture buried in the random lines.  The dory leapt out at me, and after a moment, I saw the one large wave.  I then painted the boat and the wave over the background. 

The purpose of this exercise is to provide a new way of looking at things, a new perspective, new colors, new strokes.  To open the mind to the possible.  It worked, because I've never painted a boat before and I don't usually use green or pink .Had I planned to do this picture, the wave and water, at least, would look considerably different..

Fire

This began as an "intuitive painting" project, but soon took on a shape of its own and I left it as is.  These are my favorite colors when painting, and I come back to them again and again.

Snowy Woods in Moonlight

This is a print made at the print design studio of the architectural school of the University of Waterloo in Cambridge, Ontario, Canada.  The picture was first drawn on paper, then a piece of Plexiglas laid over the drawing, and the drawing etched onto the Plexiglas with a pointed metal stylus.  The Plexiglas was then spread with printer's ink to the right consistency and laid over dampened paper on a manual press.  It was run through the press, removed, and hung to dry. I loved every minute of this process, which was new for me, and spent about five hours doing various copies of the print. 
 

Simple childhood craft of making paper flowers and then putting them on paper.  But I like it more than any other craft or artwork I've done in the past year, other than my jewelry.

Learning Cartooning

Went to a class on cartooning a couple of weeks ago.  I was never interested in drawing cartoons or comics and certainly didn't think I could do it.  But the instructor made it easy.  Back to basics--circles, squares, triangles.  The results are below.

My first cartoon character.  The notes on the side are the progression showing how our instructor had us create the drawings.   First we did a light pencil outline of a circle with a square/rectangle on the bottom of it and a triangle where the nose finally went in.  We then drew in vertical and horizontal lines to guide where eyes, nose, and ears would be drawn in.  Once the outline drawing was done, we went over the features with a heavy marker and erased the pencil lines.  He then had us put in a bubble for a comment from the character and a frame around the face which would represent one segment of a comic strip.  It was easy and painless.  Like I said--just back to basics.

Next he had us draw a real comic strip character from the past.  The Yellow Kid was the first real comic character and was created in 1895.

He then wanted us to do an actual comic strip with a character we created.  I passed on this since I don't plan on doing further cartooning and the comic strip idea didn't interest me at all.  Finally,  he wanted us to create a cartoon of him, the instructor from his guidelines.  I just couldn't do this and he was much better looking than the cartoon that he created for an example.  So mine turned out to be a blend of cartoon and life drawing features as shown below.

The caption I gave it reads, "I'm Alfonso, cartoonist extraordinaire."

  

Tissue flowers