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?
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| "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.
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 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.
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.
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.
