December 2018

It seems that I have been neglecting this blog for a while. I've neglected my painting too. I let the summer go by without doing any artwork and didn't get started again until my class resumed in October.

At the end of the spring session of my class in June, we painted a cluster of grapes. I thought I had made a mess of the background painting, but it finally turned our all right. The grapes were going pretty good until I added the dark shadows and then they looked a bit flat. But rather than try to fix it, which might have made it worse, I called it done.

When the fall session of my class began, I started with a scene from our recent trip to Mammoth Lakes. We usually start off our first day there by walking around the Sherwin Creek Campground. For many years it was our favorite place to camp, but now we stay in a cabin at Tamarack Lodge. We love that area where desert sagebrush meets alpine forests, a place that feels very alive. I think I captured some of that feeling here even though it was done quickly and kind of sloppily. It's kind of bittersweet because I included our dog, Darby, and this was his last trip with us before he died of cancer.

Then our next class project was to paint something to use on a holiday card. I chose to try working from a photo of two of my grandkids, Makaila and Zack with the snowman that they built. I usually avoid trying to paint people, but went ahead with this anyway. It's not bad, but it doesn't look much like Makaila and Zack, and I decided not to use it for a card.

The class was still working on this project the following week, so I tried another snow scene. What I liked best about the photo that I used was the shadow of the tree on the snow. I was hoping to get that done with one quick wet on wet pass, but the blue spread too much and I went back and tried to fix it later. I still like it pretty well, but it is not what I had hoped for. I'd still like to learn how to paint wet soft edges, but so far it is way out of reach for me.

In the fall session of my class, we always do at least one scene with colorful trees. Some of the ones that we have done in the past have not interested me much, but I liked this one because the water made it more interesting. This one was fun to paint, but a bit scary at the end because after spending quite a lot of time on the trees, the success of the painting depended on the reflections which had to be done very quickly. I was lucky this time and mine came out all right. The white streaks were masked, and they may have come out better if I had lifted them out with a thirsty brush like Ron did.

Our last class project of the year was a tiger. It involved masking the tiger to paint the background, then painting the shape of the tiger and adding the stripes last. I think mine came out surprisingly good.

May 2018

This painting of a vase of roses was a class project. Ron demonstrated it painting fast and loose, but although it started out looking rough, he turned it into a very nice painting. Mine didn't work out so well. But maybe I learned something from the experience. I hope so. I wasn't going to include it on this blog, but then I changed my mind. I don't need to prove how good I am as an artist. There is a lot of luck involved in watercolor painting, and some days you have it and some days you don't.

Here is another questionable painting. At the beginning of one class Ron provided prints of a Golden Gate Bridge photo. I went ahead and started painting it before he began his demonstration. I just sketched it freehand and painted it fairly quickly and simply. I soon realized that the proportions of the bridge were off, but I finished it anyway.

The following week, I started over again, this time tracing the photo to get the bridge looking better. This one turned out better than the first, but still not so great.

Then we worked on a vineyard scene with rows of young grapes. This felt more like my kind of thing and I had a good time doing it. I think it turned out pretty good.

My last class project of the season was a wave crashing on rocks. Most of the work of the painting was using masking fluid to make the wave. This one was also fun to do and I like it.

March 2018

This was another class project. Most of the class felt uneasy at the prospect of painting a face, but everyone did suprisingly well. I think mine came out pretty good. The original photo had a very dark background like my painting, but in his demonstration, Ron started painting a lighter colored background in blues and reds, intending to add the darker background later, but changed his mind and left the background as it was. I thought it needed the darkness, so I made mine dark.

The next class project was a view of Lower Yosemite Falls from a photo recently taken by Ron. It was a nice photo and felt like just the kind of scene that I like to paint. I was able to keep it pretty loose, and I think it one of my better paintings.

Then we did a scene from a calendar of the lone cypress on the 17 mile drive near Monterey. I remember seeing it on a family vacation when I was a kid, but not since then. We have spent a lot of time in the area over the years, but never did the drive again.

For the first class of the spring session, I chose to work from a photo that I took with my phone one day when the sky was filled with dramatic clouds. It is looking south from Diamond Hills, north of Livermore, the ranch where our horses are boarded. I mostly wanted to see what I could do with the clouds. I found it a bit challenging, but overall, not too bad.

January 2018

Last fall, for one of my painting classes, I decided to work from a photo that I had taken on a walk in the nearby woods, a close-up of leaves under bigleaf maple trees. After spending a couple of hours on the painting in class, I thought it was a total mess and put it aside. I ignored it for a couple of months and then recently looked at it again, and thought it had some potential, so I worked on it some more, and now I like it.

This class project was based on a photo of some colored glass vases of flowers. The photo didn't really do much for me, but painting the glass would be an interesting challenge, so I went ahead and tried it.

December 2017

One of the projects for my watercolor class was to paint something for a holiday card. Usually I look for images of snow scenes, but this time I didn't find any that inspired me so I used a photo from our September trip to Mammoth of some aspen leaves. I just got up close to the leaves fluttering in the wind and luckily it came out pretty good. I also used the photo for the cover of a calendar that Maureen and I put together every year. I like my painting, but I think I like the photo better. I didn't end up using the painting for a card. Maureen found lots of unused cards from past years and used those rather than having another one printed.

Ron, my painting class teacher, likes to do lots of scenes with colorful trees this time of year. This class project was based on a photo of a river. Ron's demonstration painting emphasized the trees over the water, but I liked the river and tried to show more of the reflections in it. I didn't quite get what I wanted, but it was a good try.

Our fall color paintings nearly always include one with lots of white trunks of aspens or birches. For this one I again deviated from Ron's demo by emphasizing the bright yellow leaves instead of filling the space with reds and oranges. I didn't think much of this painting as I was working on it, but now that it is done, I think it is pretty good.

more October 2017

For the second week of class, Ron was still going over basic stuff for the new students, so I needed to come up with my own idea of what to paint. With memories of our recent trip to Mammoth Lakes in mind, I chose another of my mountain photos from years ago. In the nineties, when our sons were in their teens, we took them on a couple of weekend backpacking trips into 20 Lakes Basin, near Tioga Pass. It's a very beautiful place that's only a couple of miles of hiking after riding the shuttle boat across Saddle Bag Lake. I was a bit unsure that I could do a good job of painting it, but I dove right in and finished most of it in a couple of hours. I am quite pleased with the result.

In the third week of class, we started an autumn scene inspired by a photo supplied by Ron. I thought the photo was quite interesting, at least more than some of the other fall scenes that we have done. Ron said he chose it because Greg, one of the students, wanted to see a demonstration of painting rocks by scraping with the edge of a credit card. Unfortunately, Greg didn't make it to class to see it. I wasn't interested in any of Ron's techniques like credit card rocks or painting with a sponge. I did some masking for the leaves on the rocks and a few tree trunks, but otherwise just used brush and paint. I think it came out pretty good.

October 2017

I did one more painting last June, but didn't get around to showing it on this blog until now. One afternoon, I went out for a little hike in Garin Park here in Hayward, and I followed Dry Creek for a couple of miles. There was one spot where the shadows and reflections caught my eye, and I took a photo with my iphone. It was a complicated scene for a watercolor, but why not give it a try? I added the fish, but it wasn't exactly cheating because I did see some little fish in another part of the creek. I was afraid that it was too mixed up for anyone to get what it was supposed to be. Today was the start of the fall session of my watercolor class, and I showed it to my fellow students, and a lot of them liked it, so maybe it's not so bad.

As I said, today was the start of a new season of my watercolor class, and I needed an idea of something to paint. I chose a photo I took a few weeks ago when we were spending a few days at Mammoth Lakes. When we are there, we always go out to Hot Creek for a walk because it is such a special place. This time we chose to take a trail into the canyon a bit upstream from the hot springs, and as we started down, I shot a photo of this juniper. I think it was the clouds that really caught my eye, and I think I did them pretty well. A few minutes later as we were walking along the creek, the clouds grew more threatening, and we decided that we needed to get out of there. We found a rough trail out of the canyon, and made it back to our car with dark clouds and thunder. A minute or two later, on our way back to highway 395 when it sounded like rocks hitting our windshield. The hail was so heavy that the traffic on the freeway was either pulled over or going about 10 mph. After about 10 minutes, we drove out of it, and made it back to our cabin.