While rooting through the garage this week, I found this frame.
I decided that I could make a decor item for my patio, which also could hold various gardening implements on a row of hooks. But what I really wanted was to fill the opening with an abstract painting of geraniums. Something like this:
I picked up a remnant of solid white cotton twill. It seemed to be sturdy enough to stand up to outside conditions. After I washed and dried the fabric, I cut a piece approximately 3 inches wider and longer than the frame opening. Now the fun starts.
My fabric paint choices included green, emerald, red, and yellow. I mixed some violet into the yellow to make a gold color. After about twenty minutes of messing around I had a nice background painted.
To give a little variety to the patches of color, I scrunched up the fabric.
And here is my panel, fully dry and ready for further paint layers.
I’m excited by this result, and keen to work on this fiber object some more.
When I returned from Wisconsin last month, I made a vague suggestion about painting a watercolor of sand hill cranes. They are very impressive birds. In Madison the cranes are so acclimated to humans that they are not bothered with our presence. We even saw a couple with a dog on the leash approach resting cranes, and the birds never budged.
Because I think this will be a difficult painting, I decided to start with a simple close-up of a sandhill. This photograph was snapped by Bill. I zoomed in when did my edits.
This is a nice profile shot.It seems the bird is showing up its “good” side!
After making a quick pencil sketch, I used the printing technique learned on Wednesday. This time I stamped the background with bubble wrap and some rug grips using three earthy colors: yellow ochre, burnt sienna and ultramarine blue.
Once that was sorted, I painted the subject. It was a simple matter to follow the lines and colors of the photograph. I was careful to leave a little white. Masking fluid allowed me to represent the wispiness of the feathers.
After a few relaxing hours I was finished.
Time for a Crane
I wish all my watercolor attempts would go this smoothly.
In addition to the ochre, sienna and blue, I used alizarin crimson, carbazole violet and a little quinacridone gold and white gouache to bring out the eye. Painted on Arches hot press paper.
5/08 2022: Happy Mother’s Day all. I’ve been mulling about this painting for the past two days, not satisfied. It seems to me a little flat and unfinished.
So today I addressed the bits that bothered me. In the photograph, the light is strong, making crisp dark shadows and bright highlights. The light in the painting was too subtle. To fix this, I brightened areas around the face and beak with lifting and then applying white gouache. Once the highlights were as light as I could get them, I moved to increase the depth and complexity of the shadows. In particular, the gradation of the shadow along the bird’s body was inadequate. I added another layer, feathering the shadowed area over a larger section of the torso.
Finally, I looked over the background, deciding that the bright white section on top of the head just drew the viewer’s eye up and out of the picture plane. I painted it out with a wash of light tan paint that blended into the existing background color.
These adjustments may seem like not-so-much. Perhaps a big to-do about nothing.
I feel that the changes made the difference between a bland copy of a photograph and an interesting portrait with shadow, light, texture and all the compositional elements working together. To me, my crane is now more vibrant, existing in three dimensions instead of two.
Yesterday at art association weekly open studio, we had a lesson incorporating printing into a watercolor painting. We gathered various leaves from our yards. I chose some fern leaves and the soft fuzzy leaves of lamb’s ear.
There are just a few steps. First, lightly pencil in your subject. I chose to draw a vase of flowers based on my memories. The paper is wet over the background and allowed to dry to the “low gloss” stage. Next, choose a leaf and paint a few colors on it. I started with yellow, then added stripes of blue. Then the leaf is pressed onto the paper, held in place briefly and removed. In addition to pressing the two shapes of leaves wherever I wanted leaves, I used a paper doily as a stencil, painting through the holes to make a pattern in the foreground. Next, I painted on some small tulips
Here is my painting after the paint had dried, showing these steps completed.
Today I finished the painting. This involved building up color and adding some details to the leaves, the vase and the flowers.
While it is a very simple style, I will call this experiment a success.
Painted on Arches cold press paper with yellow ocher, Winsor yellow, ultramarine blue, alizarin crimson, carbazole violet, transparent orange, and viridian. A little white gouache played up the highlights.
We’ve been enjoying lots of birds in our backyard. Because it has been such a dry and cold spring, the birds seem to be spending lots of time perched on the birdbath.
Male cardinal, photo taken last year
All the interest in the little blue birdbath reminded me that I had started a series of watercolor paintings of various creatures that stop here to drink or bath. In particular, I want to make a large-scale painting of an imaginary scene.
In my imagination, a bird and a squirrel are having an argument over which of them gets to drink first. I had done some small sketches and paintings of squirrels. Today I am sketching a blue jay perched here, right about where the cardinal is sitting.
To get started, I turned to David Sibley’s book, What it’s like to be a bird.
One of the things I love about this guide is the watercolor paintings, done to scale, of each bird featured. I knew Sibley was a great naturalist and now I know him as a fine illustrator. Turning to his image of blue jays, I traced the life-size head of the blue jay.
Eventually, I ended up scaling it down to about 90% of life size. I then transferred the tracing to my sketchbook. Then I looked at several photographs of the blue jay, some from the internet and some from Bill’s archives. Since I couldn’t find exactly the posture I want to represent, I just took bits and pieces of different images. This could have turned into a disastrous Frankenstein of a drawing, but it didn’t.
Love this guy’s attitude!
This took about an hour and a half, the but the time was well worth it. I learned a lot by studying each part of the bird as I worked on it.
In the future, I will do a few watercolor studies of the jay and also draw a squirrel to this same scale, before combining all the pieces together in one painting.
The process of making up a quilt from scratch has many challenges. One I face today is building my Stay At Home Round Robin quilt around another maker’s pieces. None of the swatches are the same size or shape. How can I fit them together?
Here’s how I went about finding an answer.
The first step I took was to get them as flat as possible. Each swatch was hemmed by hand on the warp edges to keep it from fraying. As I began carefully picking out the stitches, I marveled at the how small each was. That got me to thinking about the maker, Margaret Howard. And I began to imagine her at her cottage on the lake, where she lived three months of the year. (Since this cottage is still in the family, and I had been there several times, my imagination has lots to work with.)
I imagine that, despite the passage of years, the grounds surrounding the cottage are very little changed. There are towering trees, both deciduous and coniferous, providing lots of shade. The path through the trees to the cottage are lined with wood ferns, all the way up to the door itself.
Margaret is sitting in the main area of the cottage, sewing this hem. She has a view of the lake through a large picture window. While the trees now are quite tall and obscure this view, back then she likely could see the lake easily.
There were other families, her relatives, staying in cabins nearby. Each evening as the sun sank low, they gathered on the shore to toast the passing of the day. I feel certain that Margaret would join them. That bit of the beach is on the east side of the lake. The sun sets directly across the lake from this beach.
Having been there during one of these sunsets, it’s hard to describe exactly how beautiful it is. When the waves on the lake are gentle, one feels that the lake is bringing the colors of the sunset directly to one’s feet, like a precious gift.
A contemporary view of Shell Lake, with a new metal dock.
Back then, the silence must have been profound.
Of course, on special occasions, or when the air is too cold, a campfire is a must.
At this point in my musings, I brought these ideas together, and came up with a plan for the quilt. If you have been following this project in my earlier post, you saw that I sewed together three swatches to form the center block.
What if I divided the rest of the quilt into four sections, making a large block to anchor each section. And each section would show one of the elements enjoyed by the maker at her cottage on the lake – woods, fire, water, sky. Thinking more deeply about these elements, I realized that they corresponded to the basic elements described by ancient civilizations of the world: Earth, Fire, Water, Air.
To tie everything together, I did some research on the colors that the ancients associated with these elements:
Earth: Green and brown. Fire: Red and orange.
Water: Blue and pastels. Air: White and yellow.
And here is my (somewhat crude) plan for the quilt, sketched in watercolor.
This is my first go at the layout. I’m not sure about the dark sashing. But there will be plenty of time to audition some other fabrics as I work along.
Daily Fiber 