Field Daisies

Field daisies painted as direct watercolor for a painting challenge. Direct watercolor means no pencil marks, tracing or any guide marks. Reference photos are of course permitted. I didn't really have a reference photo for this ... and it shows. Rather messy.  So there are 2 versions for this:

(1) Direct watercolor using a bit of salt for texturing

(2) Incorporating mixed media: outlining the petals with 0.8 Faber Castell Ecco Pigment

I think I prefer the first one without the outlining of petals.

cold pressed Canson Montval 140lbs - 18.2cm x 25.7cm

Day 3/30 for the direct watercolor painting for the month of June painting challenge. So it's no longer June, I still plan to finish as much as I can, especially as July is watercolor month. See #30x30DirectWatercolor2018 on Facebook for my entries and so many other peoples. It's a great learning and development site.

Dead Leaf Butterfly

Orange oakleaf, Indian oakleaf, or Dead Leaf butterfly (Kallima inachus) has delicate beauty disguised in folded-wing camouflage. The idea was taken from a video with a single oakleaf butterfly occasionally flicking its wings open and closed.

Dead leaf butterfly .... watercolor in progress

Dead leaf butterfly - 10" x 14" watercolor on 140lb Arches hot pressed

It's the last day of June and I'm just now submitting my second entry for the June painting challenge on Facebook. The instructions are to paint every day and submit it, and the painting should be watercolor that is directly applied to the paper, which means no penciling or sketching in. Just painting on the white paper. Quite challenging. I lightly penciled in the outlines of the butterflies, and I still got the perspective wrong, but at least they are of uniform size.

Watercolor Swans

Swans on Arches watercolor 300g / 140lb hot pressed - 26cm x 36cm / 10" x 14". Daniel Smith watercolors mostly.

WHIMSICAL SWANS

Whimsical Swans

SWANS AT NIGHT

predominantly Indanthrone Blue (DS)

Swans at Night

The Swans at Night was my first entry for the Facebook daily painting challenge for the month of June at #30x30DirectWatercolor2018. It's mid-June and I just found out about the painting challenge. No worries. I don't have to finish. I just need to participate, because by participating, I'm learning.

Osprey Watercolor

Reference photo from Pinterest. Osprey painted with Daniel Smith watercolors and accents with Micron 005 - Arches 10" x 14" hot press 300g/m 140 lb. But hmm, looks rather like an owl - hoot hoot.

 fishing osprey

Sonja's Dog: Korean Folk Painting

Since I still haven't delivered Sonja's Minhwa (Korean traditional folk painting) dog painting to her, and because she said she wished she could paint her dog "smoking a pipe" and in other traditional Korean folk story motifs, I was intrigued to try a Korean folk-tale kind of painting. So I mixed up a bunch of Korean folk ideas and put them together for my friend who absolutely loves the traditional in Korea.

Folk ideas blended in this painting:

• the rabbit in the moon -- the Korean folk view of the moon unlike the western concept of the 'man in the moon'
• the beginning of a traditional Korean fairy tale is "A long time ago when tigers smoked pipes ..." and usually a pair of rabbits is serving the tiger -- animals are common features of Korean fairy tales, but the reason for coupling rabbits and a tiger in a fairy tale I don't know
• tigers are often paired with magpies in folk paintings, I'm not sure why again, but do know that magpies by themselves are harbingers of good luck -- so magpies or rather crows get featured with the tiger substitute, the dog, and like the tiger that is painted comically with magpies or pairs of rabbits and wearing a hat, the dog is also comically painted with a hat
• pine trees are symbols of the scholar and "uprightness" (correctness and Confucianism because of their typically straight appearance

Korean Folk Story Motifs

Choosing Transparent and Opaque Watercolors

As a beginner watercolorist one year ago, I greatly appreciated watercolor artist Steve Mitchell on his YouTube channel, The Mind of Watercolor, explaining that watercolors are not as transparent as most people assume. That piece of info really intrigued me, and I took many of Steve's tutorials on choosing watercolors, papers, brushes, soaking up theory on what I had assumed was just splashing pigment on paper to create a picture. What a great teacher!

I have to say that probably his YouTube clip I most appreciated was his "My Favorite 8 Colors for Watercolor". In it he explained his logic for his favorite eight color preferences. Basically, he avoided opaque colors, which tend to bog down and muddy colors when mixed with other colors, and his preferential eight were colors chosen because of their transparency and luminosity. He stressed that the popular yellow ochre is commonly an opaque "watercolor" (oh really?!), and then Steve proceeded to offer a list of his color palette alternatives in his "How to Avoid Muddy Colors in Watercolor" clip: 

OPAQUE WATERCOLORS (a few of many)

cadmium reds (muddy complements and dull less vibrant colors)

Venetian red (a gorgeous color but weighs down color mixes)

yellow ochre (particularly known for its opacity)

Naples yellow (absolutely opaque in a lot of brands)

cerulean blue (muddies complements and browns)

raw umber (most browns have some opacity, but raw umber particularly so)

black (very opaque in most brands, but why use it when color mixes can achieve the same effect?)  

TRANSPARENT WATERCOLORS, Steve Mitchell's M. Graham preferences 

Payne's gray (for cooling colors) (my research shows most Payne's gray is opaque)
sepia (for warming colors)
azo green
Indian yellow
red iron oxide
quinacridon red (pyrrol reds are also very transparent)
ultramarine blue
Prussian blue

So my first watercolors were M. Graham and nearly the same as the ones Steve had chosen for himself. He's a landscape artist while I like painting animals within landscapes, so different colors are therefore appealing to me. 

However, while I loved the luminosity and the great flow of the M. Graham, they don't travel well because of their high gooey honey base. Now I've branched out into mostly Daniel Smith, yeah, expensive, but I like their wide selection of transparent colors, and I'm experimenting a bit with a few of their Primatek earth colors. Fun indeed!

I've also chosen a few Winsor and Newton, as sometimes a W&N is more transparent than a semi-transparent DS. But, Steve, thanks for giving me a really good foundation in theory and the first steps in application knowledge. I can say that your passion has become my passion!  

Dog Minhwa Painting

A friend who is a minwha painter (traditional Korean folk painter) and who does tea ceremonies here in Korea commissioned me to immortalize her precious dog that passed several years ago but is still treasured in her and her parents' memories. What she wanted was a minhwa-style painting with her Chow-mix dog, a tea table, plum blossoms, and a bug (preferably two as paired animals, birds, bugs express harmony)...... so her ideas transposed to art form on 26cm x 36cm / 10" x 14" Arches pad hot press watercolor paper with Daniel Smith watercolors:

This is mixed media, not just watercolor, as I used Micro pens (0.005, 0.02, and 0.5) for some lines, and a white jel pen for white highlights.