Apples and Oranges (13 x 18 inch watercolor) $250.00
I had to watch my youngest daughter like a hawk to get this one painted. She loves the sweet miniature Clementine oranges and kept threatening to eat my still life before I had it painted. I don’t blame her much. Clemetines are so very sweet and so small you can eat three or four of them and have had less than a full sized orange.
The palette is raw sienna, burnt sienna, cobalt blue, french blue, phthalo blue, quinacridone magenta and hansa yellow. The magenta and the new hansa make a perfect orange colored orange.
Cherry Blossoms in a Blue Pitcher (watercolor 12 x 19) $250
We planted a two ornamental cherry trees the year we moved into this house. Five years later the trees put on quite a show each Spring. The branches I take inside don’t make a dent in the abundance of blooms.
I made two fundamental design decisions in painting this image. Both help make the blossoms pop. First, rather than paint the blue gray evergreens in the actual background, I added an abstract green background to compliment the pink blossoms. Second I painted my white window blue. I also moved the branches around to improve the composition.
I began by masking the blossoms. Then I painted the background and window casing. The blossoms and branches came last.
The palette was raw sienna, new gamgee (yellow), phthalo blue, quinacridone magenta, opera pink, dioxazine purple, and burnt sienna. The background is raw sienna and phthato blue painted wet into wet. The casing is phthalo blue and burnt siena. The blossoms are magenta and opera pink grayed with phthalo blue or diaxazine purple. The leaves are a wash of new gamgee and magenta washed over with dioxazine purple.
This is much the same composition and color scheme as Jade and Tulips I. I lowered the tulips which causes them to stand out more than in the original version, but makes the upper line of the composition less interesting. Including more of the jewelry box increased it’s three dimensionality as did opening thing lower drawer.
The palette and work methods are the same as Jade and Tulips I.
Tulips, Jade, and Books (watercolor 8 x 11) $100.00
Our house is covered in floor to ceiling book shelves. So it was really only a matter of time before the shelves showed up in one of my still lifes. This time they feature only as a reflection.
Years ago I celebrated a new job by purchasing a jewelry box I had coveted for several years. I love oriental furniture with it’s brass hinges and inset jade and soapstone. I find a whole room full of such furniture much too heavy. But the jewelry box was everything I loved about the furniture in miniature. And despite it’s exoticness, it looks perfectly at home on my plain pine dressers. And it has the added advantage of actually looking better half open with the jewelry hanging out than it does closed.
It took me some time to compose a picture with my jewelry box at the center. The problem is that the box’s shape is really just that, a vertical rectangular box. Compositions with the complete box were brought to a complete and boring full stop by the edge of the box. In the end, I subordinated the box to the tulips and cropped it along one edge. The dark open door of the box makes a beautiful foil for the bright tulips.
Once composed, painting the picture was relatively straight forward. I masked the highlights and then began with the tulips painting them in a various combinations of hansa yellow, hansa gold, yellow ochre, cadmium yellow, and cadmium red. The leaves are combinations of the same yellows with cobalt and phthalo blue. I used the same colors for the jade necklace and insets as I did for the foliage.
I went on to painting vase and metal hinges using primarily yellow ochre, raw sienna and burnt sienna dulled with cobalt blue and cerulean blue. I added the box in combinations of burnt sienna, quinacridone magenta, and dioxazine purple.
The dresser top is layered washes of burnt sienna, raw sienna, and burnt umber. The wall yellow ochre and dulled with dioxazine purple. Layed the wall on very heavily to allow the tulips to pop.
Same nautilus, new angle, new colors–after several attempts to paint the nautilus in it’s true colors, I think I understand why I keep changing them. The shell’s shadows are warmer colors than it’s highlights. Most real world objects have cooler shadows and warmer highlights. But the standards of the shell have warm local color while the base of the shell has cooler local color. Painting apricot shadows with cool blue and green highlights simply goes against the grain.
This time I ignored the natural color of the shell entirely and simply painted the colors I felt like painting and ignored natural color altogether, focus entirely on value. I painted the marble to echo the center of the shell.
I reserved the highlights with mask. The palette is phthalo blue, dioxazine purple, new gamgee, a little quinacridone magenta, and burnt sienna to dull the blues and greens. The background is a wash of burnt sienna which I chose to contrast with the cooler shell. I mixed the colors in multiple transparent washes. I dropped some of the softer shadows wet into wet paint.
Nautilus with Glass Stones (10 x 11 watercolor) $150.00
My husband and I spent last weekend on the Oregon Coast. The weather was so fine we hardly even went inside at all. So on our last day having not set foot in a shop all weekend, it occurred to us we had bought nothing for our daughters. So we stopped in a shell shoppe. We did find some lovey sea urchins for the girls. But we also found something for us, a bisected nautilus shell. Stephen wanted it to display it, but I wanted to paint it. I’ve just finished painting it and it now lives on our mantle together with fossil shells and a free form hand made basket. But it will visit the studio again.
I took great liberties with the color of the nautilus which is really is really a dull orange in the outer chambers fading to blue green at the center. The color shift in my painting was driven by the decision to heavily under-paint the shell in phthalo blue to emphasize the depth of the shell. I over-painted with various mixtures of new gamgee yellow, quinacridone madder rose, and phthalo blue.
In Progress
The left most of the glass stones resting in the shell is actually stone marble. But the green and rust of the actual marble would have clashed horribly with the rest of the painting, so I changed it to a blue glass marble.
The background is a wash of burnt sienna grayed down with phthalo blue.
This is one more painting from my Valentine’s Day bouquet. In the clear glass vase the lilies are much softer and less dramatic. I emphasized the soft back-lighting.
The palette is only slightly different than Lily with Carnations. I added dioxazine violet which I substituted for phthalo blue when underpainting the lilies. Dioxazine is a good pigment for underpainting because it is strong, staining and transparent. Violet is warmer than blue, so the lilies are warmer too.
Yes there are red carnations in the painting. You just haven’t looked closely enough.
Both the carnations and the lily come from the Valentine’s Day bouquet my husband gave me this year. The Danish silverware vase was my Mother’s. So the painting is a family affair.
The fact that the lily inevitably points out of the picture presented a compositional problem. I used the window frame to create a boundary to contain the eye within the painting. Theoretically the window frame with lead the eye back around to the vase and into the painting once more.
I began the painting by masking the white edges of the lily, the stamen, and the smallest white highlights. Then I laid the window frame and background in with multiple transparent washes. I began the window frame with a mixture of cobalt blue and burnt sienna. I followed that with phthalo blue, and finally added a very thin wash of burnt sienna to tone it down. The window began with phthalo green and burnt sienna. While the wash was still damp I lifted it with tissue to create a mottled look. I followed that with successive layers of cobalt blue, phthalo blue, and burnt sienna laid wet into wet. I made the background darker around the lily and lighter by the dark vase to add drama.
Next I under painted the lily with phthalo blue. I added the shadowed fuchsia with quinacrione deep red rose sometimes mixed with cobalt blue. The sunlight fuchsia is a combination of quinacridone red and cadmium red. I added the spots last in darker versions of the fuchsia under them. I painted the colored highlights in the vase in tandem with the lily. The carnations are cadmium red.
The leaves and stamen began with new gamgee (yellow). I laid a green made of new gamgee and colbalt blue over the top. The tips of the stamen are burnt sienna and phthalo blue.
Here are another three cone flowers from last Fall’s garden. This time I painted them during my gallery shift.
I altered my painting techniques a little from Afterglow I. I under-painted the petals in phthalo blue before over painting them in opera and dioxazine violet. I under-painted petals in phthalo blue too. I think the under-painting does add to the the three dimensionality of the flowers.
I also added dioxazine purple to the palette, working it in to the cones and the petals.
This is my on-line studio. Here, I post my paintings (and some of my failures) as I paint them. Most of the paintings shown here are for sale through this blog.
I often include notes about painting techniques as well as the subject and the day I painted the particular entry. There are a few demonstrations here and there too.
