Reading in a Tree – 10 1/8″ x 8″ - watercolor on Fabriano Soft Press

I do wish I’d gone deeper on the shadows. This was a tricky one to transfer to a digital format. The colors went all wacky when it got scanned. This is pretty darn accurate though. Just some fun with dappled light.

Getting to the point, I am planning a series of teapot house paintings, one for every season. They’re the kind of paintings old ladies have hung in their sewing nook, I’ll grant you, but I’ve always wanted a playhouse made out of a giant teapot…

Teapot House – Spring - 10in x 10in – Watercolor on Fabriano soft press

Cheshire - 14in x 11in – Watercolor on Fabriano soft press

I think every time I watercolor I learn something new. I’m pretty much an advanced beginner at this point. Slowly figuring it out.

This month will be spent working on new pieces for my portfolio, applying to publishing houses and illustrating the second children’s book in a series. Life is grand isn’t it?

I don’t even know. A newborn lamb could take a steadier picture than this. Oh well. This is the watercolor under painting and the beginning of one of the windows. I say under painting but in truth the back wall was destined to be much darker than that. Just didn’t want to waste the paint. Oh, the paint, by the way, is Cotman watercolor with a bit of Graham gouache near the end stages.

This is about where I got to with my developing watercolor skills. I deemed it not terrible and put it away for the day… Only for it to plague me to the point of distraction, ultimately ending in my taking out all my paint gear at bedtime and breaking out the gouache.

And this was the results of the gouache phase (which I thought was going to end in disaster as things often do when me and gouache get together). Then, at the eleventh hour (actually it was about 10:00pm) I decided to change his shirt color. But that would have certainly led to failure, so I put in the Hunchback of Notre Dame to observe a cartoon stained glass rendering (I don’t have internet at home at the moment and you be surprised at how much it helps not to!). After rolling through half the movie I pulled out the watercolors once more.

Stained Glass Dragon 10in x 10in – watercolor, gouache and graphite on soft press watercolor paper

And we have about the final rendering. It’s at the point where no matter how much paint I add, it looks about the same. If anything else is to be done with this, it’ll be digitally rendered. All-in-all though, I’d consider this my best over all watercolor project since I started using the medium.

One thing I’ve learned for next time: Despite their brilliant light-giving quality, stained glass windows are darker than one would think with extremely rich color. I was afraid to go as dark as I needed to at the beginning, but now I know for future reference.

How long is it you ask? 45,465 words. Not bad. Though now it has to be totally rewritten since it lacks the deep foreshadowing and character/world back story that comes with a preconceived plot.

A novella is typically 17,500-40,000 so I’ve slightly exceeded my goal with this ultra rough draft.

This isn’t for NaNoWriMo though, despite it being completed in November. I tried NaNoWriMo a few years ago. Not only did I not have the time to finish it but also was unsure where to go after two pages. This story fared far better I think!

A new creature waits to be painted and I tried a new process on this picture.

I made loose sketches to get just the view I wanted. This ended up taking two front’s and a back’s worth of paper which is rather surprising for me. I’m not a sketcher.

Then I clearly drew each element on another sheet of paper about how I thought I’d want them to appear in the final. Roughly anyway:

Then in Photoshop (which I only really use for jobs like this and making digital copies of artwork) I pasted all of the elements together and wrestled them around till I had the right size along with some cropping:

As you can see, the man and back window are hardly done and there are just some perspective lines thrown in for kicks and giggles. That was then printed out on computer paper. The image is 10″ by 10″ so it had to be printed in two halves and taped together. Taped on the front with the stain scotch tape so it could be written upon. That done, I refined the image:

I wanted not to have to work the surface of my brilliant Fabriano Soft Press watercolor paper so I decided to use a transfer method from my youth. Remember? you rub pencil all over the back of the paper then stick it on top of the good paper and use it like a carbon paper? Trace over the image? No? Why doesn’t anyone remember doing that…

Okay so I took a pencil… Actually I wanted an excuse to use my fatty chunk of graphite so I used it instead. Look at that beast. That’s a full-sized shopping bag it’s sitting on by the way.

Anyway, I rubbed the back of the drawing with it. Which is why I didn’t tape on the back. Unfortunately it ended up being rather too light:

So I rubbed it over again with my graphite stick for good measure. Didn’t leave as solid a coating as I would have liked but it was okay anyway:

So I’d never done this on watercolor paper before and it didn’t really occur to me until afterward that the texture of the watercolor paper might result in a somewhat broken line. So after putting the drawing graphite covered side down and tracing over the image (with a stylus or pencil, anything with a sharp point really) I ended up with this:

I really could have lived with this since I was watercoloring over it anyway, but I wanted the lines I did preserve to be crisp so I gently traced over some of these lines resulting in a final image ready for watercoloring:

And for some reason totally unknown to me, I could NOT take a straight picture that day. Don’t worry, the final image will be nice and straight and hopefully pretty as I’ve never tried to depict a glass creature coming out of a pane of stained glass to grab a bagel before. Any pointers out there?

I really wasn’t sure what I was going to do for the actual creature. The original idea was a creature in their study… Not specific on what creature. I just decided to make a Cheshire. Plain and simple. Here’s a very, very rough color test thrown together in photoshop using the almost finished pencil version:

Yes, shadows are off and the light doesn’t fall perfect. Just wanted a rough idea of whether the pencils were working right without having to draw in shadows and  erase them later (like I always, always do, rather stupidly). Will definitely be increasing contrast in the final. And bringing the dark all the way around the frame more…

Waiting on new watercolors. Meanwhile, on to the next creature lines!

I don’t like the texture of the unpainted watercolor paper but I’m sure I can figure something out. And there’s something very wrong about the overall picture perspective so it might get a do-over.

That’s all for now. Waiting for a shipment of Fabriano Extra-White Soft Press paper to come in. Who knows, I might redo both pages on that paper!

I’m thinking of making some instruments soon, as the flute I made as a model form my book has a few holes that are out of tune and the flute I’ve played for years needs a pad replaced inexplicably. Some of these instruments have strings and one had a tiny 1″ sound hole. I had some downtime and decided to fiddle with a parchment rose for this tiny opening.

So I drew up a design on paper… which ended up being way too complicated for such a small hole. So I made another less complicated one. Redrew the design on parchment. Because I’m crazy and have parchment just lying around… in two colors. Yes. I’m a very odd person.

Cut out with my awesome knife skills. The inner circle is 1″ and the outer is 1-1/8″. <– Note this is the only time I’d put a quote mark inside another punctuation. I don’t care if that’s the American way to do it. It’s ugly.

These are the two middle slices. Yeah the circles aren’t as prettily cut out. I’d be far more precise if this was for  someone. Just messin’ around for experimental purposes

I glued then cut, hence the rough edges. It made gluing easier though. I’ll just have to take the time to line it up in the future. The spacer between each is just a circle of 1/8″ thick paper backing. Nothin’ fancy. Wood would be preferable of course.

All three layers together. I’d put a wood ring around the top as well likely with some means of making it removable (so not permanently installed). Not bad for a 20min trial.

Rough, but it gives me a good idea of what’s required from a non-master

Ever seen a black and white sunrise? Neither had I till I started this project.

What’s there to making a picture anyway? Ya throw down some lines…

…and some more lines. Yes. That is the tracing paper with pencil scribbled on the back method of copying lines from our youth. There was no way I was gonna redraw the exact same thing three times when copying was an option

Then you fill in the lines. Badda boom you’ve got a picture.

Here’s a rough picture of the final. Not yet dry so still a little wiggly looking. Needs to be cut down a bit and have a better contrast picture taken. This one’s a little bright. There’s also the issue of the last panel: the sky got horribly messed up. Had to use a lot of white to clean it up.

Unfortunately little to no white was used in the others. And the white is cool while the paper is slightly warm. An undetectable difference till they’re side-by-side. It’ll work out though