River Walk

Watercolor

Oh my God, he uses black!

Yes, yes I do, even in watercolor.  Works good.  It's a perfectly good color if you know how to use it.  I could get along without it, but it's so nice for lowering chroma, and for this black dress it's kind of a good place to start.  As far as I know, no black on the market is a complete neutral.  Ivory black tends to be a bit on the blue side, carbon black is a little on the warm side, but with either I find color shifts to be less of a problem than with using compliments to dull a color.  If you really don't like black and find Paynes's Gray to be much more useful, you might want to check what it made with.  Most manufacturers make it with ivory black.

Doesn't really matter.  Color is an interesting thing and a pretty personal choice.  You can usually get to a given HVC with a variety of different mixtures.  One mix isn't really any better than any other as long as you come up with the color your looking for.  So have a big palette or a limited palette.  As long as it works for you and you know how to get the most out of it, you're good to go.  Personally I've got a big drawer full of paint -- three drawers actually, one for yellows, one for reds and one for blues, greens and blacks.  Most of that paint stays right there in the drawer.  I find myself regularly using about a dozen go to pigments.  Gets me where I want to go usually.

I didn't put a size on this.  I don't have it handy to measure, but it's not very big, about 12 inches high if I remember right.  It was a piece of leftover not pressed paper.

Curled in a Ball

14 x 12 1/2

Silverpoint on off white prepared paper

This is what I consider a perfect subject for silverpoint.  Light on light with no large areas of dark.  Yet I still think the lights and darks balance out fairly well.   It has the light, airy, etherial quality that plays right into the strengths of silverpoint.  Pretty happy with this one.

Child of Water

Silverpoint heightened with white gouache on light blue gray prepared paper

15 x 11ish

A lot of my favorite things here, white dress, reflections in water, hazy background, curly hair.  Well, maybe not so much on the curly hair.  Not that I don't like curly hair, drawing it can just be a bit of a challenge.  

detail about actual size 

This is a second version.  The first was doomed from the very beginning.  After I'd started and gotten well into it I just felt the paper was too dark to convey the mood I wanted.  After that it just got away from me probably because I'd already lost confidence in what the final piece would look like.  Lesson to be learned -- get it right from the beginning.  If a mistake is made, fix it right away or if it can't be fixed, cut your losses and start over.

A Little Drop of Rain

Watercolor on Hot Pressed Paper

22 x 30

They've changed a few things here on me.  I guess that's to be expected if you don't post in, what, two, three years?  Well, maybe that will change.

This seemed like a good image to start with considering all the rain we've had the past week or two.  Really squishy walking out there right now.

Normally you do the painting first then get it framed.  In this case I've had a frame for quite a while, and I've been looking for something that will look good in it.  This should do quite nicely due to the dress color.  Besides it kind of a nice image, at least I think so.  I think it's a nice blend of tight rendering on the figure along with a more splashy approach on the background foliage.  A lot of lifting off was done there.  That's one reason I chose to use a hot pressed paper.  That along with an addition of some extra gum arabic makes lifting out quite easy.  Much easier that painting around lighter areas.

One last unrelated thing for anyone that has commented lately.  Sorry I didn't get back to you, but I had to change me email and the link never got updated here.  So I didn't know there were any comment to get back to.  Hopefully that has been fixed.  All for now.