Art Note Cards

Grape Leaves Note Card

I've been selling individual note cards printed with my paintings at art fairs and shows, and they've been quite popular. 

Boxes of assorted cards, as well as individual note cards, are now available at www.topazsun.com.

Boxed Assorted Note Cards, Set 1

I will be posting some new art and ideas about watercolor shortly.

"From The Pier"

My painting "From The Pier" is currently on exhibit at the "Pop-up” Gallery CA 101 juried art exhibition in Redondo Beach, California. 

The show runs July 27 and 28 and August 4 and 5, 2012 at 1700 Pacific Coast Highway. If you get a chance, stop by and see the wonderful art by 110 artists from 41 cities.

"From The Pier" is a view from the Manhattan Beach, California pier looking over the water and back toward the houses in town. I loved the movement and the variations in the water and tried to capture the feeling of the breezy summer day on the pier.

"The Zone" in Art

Sometimes when I paint, I somehow instinctively "know" what the painting needs, and what I should do next. Almost always when this happens, the result is both good and unexpected.  

In the painting "Bamboo and Rose", the colors and brushstrokes on the tree trunk were the product of one of those instances. Without really thinking, I knew what colors to use and how to apply them to convey the texture and form of the bamboo.

This kind of consciousness is called "being in the zone", a term used in sports, in work productivity, and in all sorts of creative endeavors. It's a highly desirable state. Sometimes, when I'm laboring mightily and not liking the results, I wonder why I'm not getting to "the zone".

In an excellent article from Lifehacker, "What is the Zone, Anyway?", Martin Rue, a software developer, suggests that focusing on what you're doing, and having sufficient energy and alertness to do your work, are essential, and that distractions should be minimized to the extent possible.  Beyond that, though, you need to have sufficient technical knowledge to bring to the task, and you need to care about what you're doing. 

I find shutting out distractions essential (and difficult).  Music can either be a distraction, or a help, to me, depending on what the music is.

What's your experience with being "in the zone"? What do you do to promote it?

5 Great Watercolor Instruction Books

There are a lot of watercolor instruction books out there.  I own way too many! I prefer books which don't try to dictate one "right way" to do things. Here are 5 books which have really helped me, and which I find myself pulling out again and again: 

1. Watercolor Essentials, by Birgit O'Connor. North Light Books, 2009.  This book, which comes with a DVD, clearly explains the basic watercolor techniques. It's great for a beginner, but is also very valuable to the more experienced artist as a refresher and a helpful reference book.  



2.  Creating Textures in Watercolor, by Cathy Johnson. North Light Books, 1992. Shows you how to depict many textures, ranging from hair to fabric to metal to glass to wood to water. I use this book frequently.



3.  Watercolor Bold and Free, by Lawrence Goldsmith. Watson Guptill, 1980. This book of experimental watercolor techniques inspires you to go beyond the same cliched subjects and paintings.




4.  The Watercolorist's Answer Book, by Gina Rath. North Light Books, 2005. Subtitled "425 Tips, Techniques and Solutions", this book is chock full of practical techniques, information on value, color, composition and design.



5. Step by Step Watercolor Painting, by the Alexander Brothers. Sterling Publishing, 1994. While I generally avoid "step by step" books, these beautiful paintings by two brothers with very different styles can't help but inspire, and the book contains lots of interesting ideas.

 
In the future I'll post about more books, that cover painting in general and aren't specific to watercolor.

Do you own any of these books? What's your opinion? Do you have other favorites?

Painting with One Color

Even for those of us who love color, every once in a while it's fun to experiment by painting with one color only.  Using just one color really helps you see your painting in terms of lights and darks. I find doing this helps me establish values when I carry what I've learned over to my usual, multicolor work.

Sepia is a great color to use for this exercise. Not only does it evoke old-time photography, it also can be used in a range from very dark, almost black, to subtle, minky shades.

Here are two small paintings I've done using only sepia.  Both are from old family photos; the one at the top is a quick sketch done without any pencil drawing.  The bottom one may not be quite finished.

Have you tried this? What do you think of using just one color?

Is It Finished??

Sometimes the hardest thing for an artist is to tell when a painting is "finished".

I dashed off this watercolor sketch the other day. I painted it quickly on a quarter sheet of watercolor paper, without doing any pencil drawing beforehand. It looks fresh, and it conveys the scene and the feeling I was going for. But it looks somehow incomplete.

Yet I'm hard pressed to figure out what to do to finish it. I'm concerned that if I fiddle with it a lot more, I will ruin the freshness and spontaneity of this little sketch. There have been way too many times where I've kind of liked a piece but couldn't resist making one more change or adding one more thing, and then regretted it.

Right now I'm inclined to leave this painting alone. Maybe I'll do a second version of this idea, with more pre-planning, careful drawing, and more detail.

How about you? How do you know when something is finished? Have you ever been sorry you added "one more thing" to a completed painting?

Knowing Your Paint Colors- The ASTM Numbering System

Why does Anthraquinone Blue look so much like Indanthrone Blue? And what's in Undersea Green? 

Paint manufacturers offer a bewildering selection of colors, all with different names. This makes it difficult to compare colors between manufacturers, or to identify what colors are contained in a mixture. 

 If you look closely on your tubes of artist quality paints, you'll see an alpha-numeric designation, usually two letters (and usually beginning with "P"), and two or three numbers. This refers to a system developed by the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) for identifying the basic colors. Knowing a little about this system helps solve some of the mysteries surrounding paint colors. 

Each color family is designated by a 2 or 3 letter abbreviation. For example, blues all carry the designation "PB" (Pigment Blue); yellows, "PY" (Pigment Yellow), and so on. 

That Indanthrone Blue, for example, is PB60. If you look on a tube of Maimeri Blu's Faience Blue, you will see it described as "Anthraquinone Blue", with the designation PB60. So Indanthrone Blue, Anthraquinone Blue, and Faience Blue are essentially all the same color. Of course, some variation between manufacturers is always to be expected. 

Undersea Green, a popular mixed dark green from Daniel Smith, turns out to be a mixture of Ultramarine Blue (PB29) and Quinacridone Deep Gold (PO49). So if you were so inclined you could mix this color up yourself. 

 Checking the ASTM designation on your paints will help you understand what's really in that paint tube with the exciting name. 

A complete listing of the color designations is contained in The Artist's Handbook of Materials and Techniques: Fifth Edition, Revised and Updated (Reference), an indispensable volume for all artists.

How I Organize My Paint Tubes

I have lots of tubes of watercolor paint. I love color and I love to try out new ones. I'll take a workshop and the instructor will recommend- or even mention- a color, and I need to try it. Or I read about a color in a magazine article and want to see how it works for me. 

I was keeping all my paints in a large box. That meant rooting around in it, sometimes for quite a while, to find what I was looking for. I needed a better way to organize my colors. 

 
I found this plastic stacking, and locking, box system at Target. I think this one was for Christmas decorations (hence the green and red color scheme) but Target, and stores like it, carry things like this year round. I bought two sets with four boxes each. 

In set number one I have a box for each primary color, plus greens. In set number two are my earth colors, like sepia, burnt sienna and the like; purples; and "miscellaneous" (student grade paints, watercolor sticks and so on). I have one box at the bottom available for overflow. 

This system has been working very well for me. If I need a particular color, I know which box I need to open, and I can see at a glance what colors I have. The handles at the top allows me to carry the whole business around if I need to. The plastic insides wipe clean if any stray paint gets on them. 

Have you found any good organizing systems for your paints or other supplies?

Art and Baseball

"Generating Power"

Baseball is a great subject for art. The atmosphere, the movement, and the interactions between players, umpires and fans provide lots of opportunities for interesting paintings and drawings.

I take a small sketchbook with me to games. I sketch quickly and try to capture the positions of the players, impressions of the crowd, batting and pitching stances, and the like. Those little sketches are good reference for later paintings. I also take photos at the game, and sometimes make sketches from photos that appear in the newspaper, like the one below from a photo by Associated Press photographer Eric Risberg.

If I can capture even a small portion of the excitement of the game, and the feeling of being there in person, I consider my work a success.

A New Way to Rescue Failed Paintings

Like most artists, I have a stack of paintings that didn't quite work the way I wanted. I can't bring myself to throw them out but I certainly don't want to display them. 

I've been able to rescue some of those old paintings using a fairly new product, Daniel Smith Watercolor Ground, available from Daniel Smith Art Supplies. I use the ground to cover unwanted areas and to create texture. When it dries (which takes several days), I can then go back and paint, draw and/or collage over those areas. 

Here's an example. I really liked the bright trees in this painting, but the background was a very uniform, and boring, dark brown, so the overall effect was disappointing. I covered the unwanted areas with the watercolor ground, using a 2 inch coarse brush. I worked around the trees but wasn't overly fussy about it. 

When the watercolor ground dried, I decided to collage the bottom left area with some Japanese paper in a floral design that complemented the tree colors. Then I created a blue sky area and a soft purple foreground in watercolor, and finished with branches done in watercolor pencil. 

I was pleased with the result, and feel that the watercolor ground gives the painting, which I named "Dream Scene", a foggy, dreamy quality. 

I'd love to hear about other artists' experiences with reworking their "failures".

The iPhone Camera as Art Tool

The iPhone has a really good camera, and I always have my iPhone with me. So I use it freely whenever I see anything that might make a good subject for a painting, an unusual texture or pattern, or anything else I might be able to use in a painting. 

During a walk in my neighborhood last year, I spotted these large, colorful palm leaves.  I loved the colors, the textures and the position of the leaves, and I was able to get in close and compose the photo the way I wanted it: 

It turned into two paintings, one emphasizing the bolder colors and with a dark background, the other with more pastel colors:

This has turned into a wonderful tool for capturing fleeting moments, even scenes out of my car (when the car is stopped, of course)! I have quite a few of these photos that will eventually make their way into my painting.

Two of my recent textured cityscape paintings.

 

Remembering

Street

Creative Block? Go Look at Art

I seem to have two creative states. The first is the wonderful one where the ideas are coming to me so fast and from so many different directions that I can hardly write them down fast enough. The second is when I think I will never have another creative idea in my life.

When the second state hits, as it does to all of us from time to time, I’ve found that the best thing to do is to go look at art. I go to a gallery or a museum. Or I just look online. There are plenty of great sites like Art Knowledge News (www.artknowledgenews.com) that bring you great art every day.

Great art will inspire me. Not to copy it, because that’s unethical and not creative at all. But maybe it will remind me of a medium or a technique or a color palette I’ve liked in the past, or wanted to try. This Paul Klee painting, for example, reminds me how much I like abstracted urban scenes, line and inventive color. 

Even looking at “bad” art does the trick for me. Looking at art I don’t care for, or that I think isn’t very well done, gets the “I can do better than that” juices flowing.

Digital Art from the iPad

I've been enjoying creating art on my iPad.  I've been inspired by one of my favorite artists, David Hockney, who is now creating many wonderful and detailed artworks on his iPad.

A brush created especially for the iPad, which I received as a birthday present from my daughter, makes it much easier to manipulate the "paint" on the iPad screen. It's the "Compose" Nomad Brush, from www.nomadbrush.com, with interchangeable tips. In addition to the actual brush there is a "glide bevel tip", which is a stylus that glides like a brush.

There are numerous art apps available.  I’ve been using Art Studio for iPad, by Lucky Clan, and and Brushes- iPad Edition, by Steve Sprang, and like them both. Art Studio has lots of Photoshop-like functions, such as drawing straight lines, circles and the like, and "fill" for any closed shape.  Brushes has fewer features but comes closer to the actual process of painting.  Both apps allow you to mix colors, vary line thickness, use different effects such as stippling, and work in layers. Brushes even lets you import a photo and paint over it. That's a great way to try different approaches to finishing a painting before altering the original. 

It feels freeing to try things, knowing that if they don't work, there's always the "undo" function, or, worst comes to worst, the "delete" function! So far, I have not achieved great precision, but I do think that's part of the charm of the medium. 

Here's an example of my digital art, called "Bar". I like the bold graphic shapes and the values. 

Are you using art apps on the iPad? If so, I'd like to hear your thoughts about them and see your artwork.