A friend told me that a couple of my old classmates were interested
in online watercolor classes by Rick Surowicz. I wasn't really
interested in online classes, but I checked out the many free
instructional videos that he has on his website. I like his style a lot
and he does a good job of showing how he does it. He often does a lot of
masking and rather than painting masking fluid with a brush, he uses
some other tools such as a fine line applicator, a color shaper, and
packaging tape. After trying some of these methods a bit, I found some
videos by several other watercolorists, all of them British, who created
some similar scenes without using any masking. As has happened many
times before, I watched lots of demonstration videos and was inspired to
try some new approaches, but in the end, my paintings came out much the
same as they they always do.
One of the advantages of the barn where our horses are boarded is that there is access to some nice trails. Several times a week we have been going out on them with Maureen riding Zim and me walking. Our favorite, the Goldenrod Trail, winds along near the top of a ridge, in and out of several small ravines. The area is mostly woods of oaks, bay-laurels and pines, with thickets of brush, poison oak and ferns. At one spot there are a bunch of big sandstone boulders, and every time I passed, I thought of painting the scene, and I finally got around to it. To me, it looked quite wild, maybe slightly scary, and that's how I wanted to show it.
Then I tried a scene from several weeks ago when we trailered out to a ranch in Briones where Maureen and Zim participated in a clinic. I walked around a bit and noticed horses grazing high on a hillside and cattle below, and took a photo. I ran into trouble right away when I started to paint it. I found that the fine line masking fluid applicator that I bought was not easy to use, and I dripped several big blobs of fluid right in the middle of the painting. Luckily, it rubbed off easily and I was able to start again.
Here is another scene from one of our trail rides/hikes. All of the horses love the fresh green grass growing everywhere this time of year. Sometimes Maureen has a hard time keeping Zim on the trail, but he is mostly well-behaved about it, so we reward him by stopping at some point and letting him graze for a few minutes.
