Waterways

"Waterways"

Image size 16" x 8.5"

Acrylic

This looks like an underwater infrastructure to me.  Painting watery looking paintings seems to ease the heat we are having.  I painted this on TerraSkin, which I haven't used for quite a while.  If you regularly follow this blog, you might remember that TerraSkin is a surface made from stone dust and non-toxic resin.  It is mostly non-porous, but the surface has a little bit of tooth which holds the paint a bit better than Yupo, another non-porous 'paper'.

I love using fluid acrylics on this surface.  I've also experimented with watercolor, oil and pastel, but I think acrylics are so perfect to used in transparent layers.

New Zealand Sky

"New Zealand Sky"

Image Size 11" x 15"

Watercolor

I've been busy working on my house this past week so I didn't have much time for painting.  Here is a watercolor skyscape.  I really enjoy painting skies in watercolor and you'll probably be seeing a lot more in the future.

Oceans Apart

"Oceans Apart"

Image Size 21" Diameter

Watercolor

This is a circular painting on a handmade piece of watercolor paper.  I bought a few of these papers several years ago.  I love the shape of the paper and the fact that it has a deckle edge.  These look wonderful when framed with the paper floated so that the edges show.  This paper doesn't have any sizing in it but I painted on it while it was saturated which seemed to work well.  I used some heavy sedimenting paints - Daniel Smith's Lunar Earth, Lunar Black and Lunar Blue and was hoping for some heavy textures but the effects are pretty subtle.  That could be because of the lack of sizing but I'm not sure.

I kept layering colors and created the design in the lower two thirds with a combination of cobalt turquoise, Titanium White, Lunar Earth and Ultramarine Blue while the paper was in varying degrees of wetness.

If you're not familiar with the "Lunar" colors from Daniel Smith, they have very heavy particles in the paints that settle into the texture of watercolor paper.  Any other colors you mix them with take on those characteristics and sometimes separate from the heavier particles which gives a beautiful effect.  Lunar Earth is my favorite of the Lunar colors.

Breaking Wave

"Breaking Wave"

Image Size 15" x 22"

Watercolor

I'm embracing one of the symbols of summer this week.  I really enjoy painting crashing waves and trying to capture the feeling of power in the water.  It's fun to paint in any medium but painting it in watercolor is always a challenge because the whites have to be saved when working with only transparent watercolor.  I used resist to save many of the whites and then worked wet into wet to get the softness of the spray and color blending in the wave.  I like the graphic quality that the hard edges of the resist add to the painting.