weekend watercolors

On a leisurely Saturday a few weeks ago I sat down with the remainder of a pad of watercolor paper and got out my watercolors and a couple bottles of acrylic paint and sat down on the floor in front of the paper cutter. I had this idea floating around in my head that I wanted to experiment with mixing some very watered-down acrylic paint with my watercolor pigment and see what happened. You know, there's a first time for everything.

I also finally got around to watching "Shutter" from the OnDemand menu. "Shutter" was one of those movies that when I saw the preview commercials on tv — I was like "oh, I want to see! that" Of course, I never get around to actually going to the movies. So, either I'll see it 5 years later at 2am sometime on cable, or maybe I'll find the dvd bin at Walmart. So, yes, there it was on the OnDemand menu, beckoning me. I like horror movies and well, I watch Joshua Jackson as Peter on"Fringe" (which is an awesome tv series).

So, I sat down in front of the papercutter with my paints and began experimenting. For the most part, I kept the two types of pigment completely separate from one another until I had them on the paper. Most of the acrylic paint I was using was either white or a milky sage green color. So, there was a sort of pastel / spring feel to all the paintings. Plus the other colors I was using were blue / periwinkle / purple / rose colored, so there wasn't like red or orange or anything dark or citrusy. The colors are saturated, and yet the tones are muted... at least — that's what I think of as "muted."

I suppose it's kind of strange to know that I make such colorful springy paintings while watching scary movies...

As usual, I sat down and named them. And generally, this is when I realize there are a couple of them that I can just never part with... and those end up is a special pile.
And sometimes when some time has passed and I'm sitting there listing them I think "really, this didn't end up in the keep pile?"

This is one of the ones that I'd probably rather keep. Of course, purple is my favorite color : )

“midnight plum phantasmagoria”

These are the others:
“mulberry mauve morning”
“violet morning glory”
“violet morning dew”

What I've been doing...

I have been making art since I was 2. And I've used a lot of different media. I think the first thing I drew as a very small child was actually done with a bic pen on paper, because it happened to be the writing utensil that was hanging around the house.

As far as rendering is concerned, prismacolor pencils are my favorite. Sometimes I have to throw a little black ink pen in there for the tough details... because it's very hard to find a black verithin that will actually stay sharp and not lose it's lead — seriously, it's a massive structural flaw with those pencils. And because the black prismacolors are also notorious for losing their lead when you sharpen them. But also because I own a lot of Zig Millennium pens, and I'm very fond of their quality. So, using them isn't something I fret over.

Anyway, in the event that I was somehow unclear: I love drawing with prismacolors. I would pick them over anything else on the planet. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy photography, acrylics, watercolors, pastels, pen & ink, etc., but when it comes to rendering something — get me my prismacolors.

So, when I paint, it tends to be abstract.
Abstract painting is really the kind of painting I enjoy the most. To put it in terms of litotes: it is the least tedious. Yes, I find painting "things" to be tedious. Abstract painting, on the other hand, is one of my favorites.

I'm not single minded, and I don't think there's an exact way that everything must be. That's just not the kind of person I am. So, it's not to say that I don't like or enjoy other people's paintings that render "things," just that it's not my personal preference.

So, anyway, I've been painting a lot recently. And, yes, the paintings are abstract. I think of them as "implicit landscapes" (which, yes, I know, implies that they are not abstract through and through, and yet I don't care). They're the kind of paintings I like making, because there is nothing about them that I find to be even remotely tedious.

These are some outtakes of some of my paintings. My scanner is only 8.5 X 11 inches, so these aren't the whole paintings, just parts of the middle. The actual paintings are 11 X 14 inches. Yes, I know, I could have taken badly lit photos of them that wouldn't really convey the 'details' or the color accurately, those are actually the qualities that I enjoy the most in my own paintings... But anyway, these are some snippets of some of the 20+ paintings I have made in the last week. I hope you enjoy color as much as I do.