A Portrait A Day 31 - Benedicte

Watercolor on Arches CP 140lb, 9x12". Reference photo: Bénédicte Delachanal of Julia Kay's Portrait Party.

A Portrait A Day 30 - Abrianna the Conqueress of Glaciers

Watercolor on Arches CP 140lb, 9x12". Abrianna is my neighbor who likes to take pictures and climb glaciers.

This painting is pretty much the opposite of the last one. I went against my intuition and kept working after I should have stopped. It has more depth and color than it would if I did stop when I wanted to (at about 15-20 minutes of painting) but it looks tired. On the other hand, tired is what people must be when they get to the top of a mountain ;)

A Portrait A Day 29

This is very unlike most of my portraits - but I really felt that one wash was enough and that I would kill it if I went any further. I don't know this guy (which really helps as I don't have to stress about making the painting look exactly like him) - he is from a CD with pictures that my friend sent me some time ago.  Must be some friend of hers.

Watercolor on Arches CP 140lb, 9x12". Can you tell what's going on? That's all I wanted to say :)

Stig-Ove Sivertsen, Norwegian watercolor artist

I keep "finding" Scandinavian watercolor gems. Here is the newest addition to the Artist Website section of my recommended links: S.O.Sivertsen

Another jewel from Sivertsen's website is this beautiful video that gives you a peek into why the process of working with watercolor is so exciting and addicting:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVBTfew3e3M

It almost doesn't matter what the end result is. You can just watch it move, bleed and blend for hours...

Nice soundtrack, too. Some Norwegian Radiohead :) Correction: Icelandic Radiohead (Wikipedia told me so). Sigur Ros.

Oh, and the other video on his website "is not available in my country."  Thanks so much, Sony.

A Portrait A Day 28 - 1900s Man

Watercolor on Arches CP 140lb, 9x12". Reference image: Portrait of a young man from the Powerhouse Museum Collection. A wonderful photograph, do take a look.

A Portrait A Day 27 - Molly and a watercolor book review

Watercolor on Arches CP 140lb, 9x12." Reference photo is Molly Peck of Julia Kay's Portrait Party. As you can see, 95% of this painting were done wet-into-wet. I was (and still am) very inspired by a fantastic book:

Wet-on-Wet Watercolour Painting: A Complete Guide to Techniques and Materials [Paperback]

New Holland

Buy on Amazon

Ewa Karpinska takes the mystery out of the "difficult" medium and explains how to achieve the effects you want to see in your watercolor painting. She offers a systematic approach to wet-into-wet watercolor painting that makes sense. She breaks the "water cycle" (when water is applied to paper) down into seven stages: lens, mirror, shiny, semi-matt, cool matt, dry matt, and dry (only the five stages in between "lens" and "dry" are relevant to wet-into-wet painting). Using three different consistencies of paint (dilute, creamy, and pasty) and five color application methods (dropping in, tilting support, "skating", drawing, and "keeping a drop on a leash") she gives the reader 5 x 3 x 5 minus the incompatible combinations (like dry matt and tilting) = around 45 recipes for wet-into-wet effects.

Of course, the success of these recipes depend on variables like timing, amount of water, amount of pigment, and humidity. You still have to figure out the right moments for the right actions, and master the elusive medium by practice - but if you need to understand how it all works first, this book is great.

I was actually a little turned off by the cover when I was buying the book online, but as it was recommended to me by an artist I admire (Jean Haines), I went ahead and got it. And I am so glad I did! There are wonderful, dreamy paintings by Karpinska inside and several step-by-step tutorials as well.

Here is a brief demystification of wet-into-wet watercolor techniques at Handprint.com.

A Portrait A Day 26 - Lorna

Reference photo is my friend Lorna.  She is originally from Costa Rica and we met during both of our first years in the U.S., at an ESL class. Unfortunately, the painting doesn't look like her, even after numerous reworkings (if you look close, you can see areas of diluted gesso here and there). I guess I'll have to paint another one some time and aim for more resemblance!

Speaking of years in the U.S., yesterday was my 7-year move-i-versary (thanks Genevieve for another made-up word I can add to my vocabulary ;)) It feels so strange.

San Miguel de Allende - October Virtual Paintout

Here I used one of the four brushes that my dear husband brought me from Japan. I'm sure there's a name for this kind of brush but I don't know it :) It has stiffer, longer hair in the center and softer, short light hair (goat?) on the outside. The variety in the hair length and stiffness adds variety to the brushstrokes. A rather interesting tool :)

Don't forget to take a look at all the wonderful entries for this beautiful, colorful city at the Virtual Paintout blog!

Blacksmith watercolor - finished!

12x16", watercolor with touches of gesso on Arches CP 140lb. I'm done and I'm glad I haven't overworked it. But I keep thinking that the background on the right should be darker. What do you think?

For comparison, here is what it looked like before gesso touch-ups . That post also has a link to the reference photos that I uploaded to WetCanvas reference library. Please feel free to use them for your projects :)

In case anyone was wondering what happened to me, I am quite well and keeping up with the Portrait A Day project. I am also a mom of a 14-month old boy, who takes a little too much time per pound of weight :) I have about 6-7 posts worth of material (including some watercolor book reviews) that I will try to post soon. Stay tuned!

A Portrait A Day 25 - Dad

My Daddy! :) Watercolor on Arches CP 140lb, 9x12."

I painted Julia (whose hands were portrait #24) twice while in Sacramento, but somehow both of the times turned out to be "unblogably bad." So, here's my dad instead :)

I'm back and I have some figures :)

I am officially back! Had an okay visit in Sacramento, two highlights of which were a figure drawing session (thanks to Sandra!!)  and the Second Saturday Art Walk. It was my first live figure drawing (or painting, in my case) session ever. I am completely hooked now and intensely suffering at the lack of anything like that here in the high desert. Here are some of the results:

brooke 2

brooke 3

brooke 4

brooke 5

12x16 watercolor on paper.

There were some seriously talented and skilled people there. I only hope that I'll get to their level when I get to their age! :)

Second Saturday wasn't that great but it was something. Saw some new works by Bernie Weston and they were nice. He is still very affordable, so all you collectors out there should hurry up and collect :) I was hoping that the gallery still had some of his smaller 8x8" paintings that I saw last time (something I could afford) but they weren't there anymore.

As usual, I had grand plans for all my "free" time, and as usual, the free time didn't show up. In Russian, there is an expression, "to divide the skin of an unkilled bear" - for which I don't know a similar English expression. It means to make plans for resources that are not yet in your hands...Anyway, I'm back, and the portrait-a-day project is restarting tomorrow!

Figures by Kristina Laurendi Havens

People sometimes ask me how to get "flesh color." My answer varies based on whether I want to enlighten them, get into a discussion, or move on to something else. So...unless you are talking about pantyhose, I think that there is no such thing as flesh color. If you don't believe me, check out figure paintings by Kristina Laurendi Havens.

I don't remember how I came across Kristina's work - I think she was featured on Etsy.com blog. Speaking of Etsy, Kristina is having a 30% sale at her Etsy shop, check it out: http://www.etsy.com/shop/krystyna81

She also keeps a very interesting blog: http://krystyna81.blogspot.com/, has a website:  http://www.studio81.biz/, facebook page, and twitter account. Oh, and her flickr stream is full of beautiful art! Enjoy!

A Portrait A Day 24 - Julia

Watercolor and watercolor stick on Arches CP 140lb, 9x12". Julia is a friend's friend...a photographer, a jeweler, and she also just opened a gallery in the heart of L'viv, the creative capital of Ukraine. She is one of the best friends of my best friend, and lives infinitely closer to my best friend than I do. In a way, she is what I could have been had I not left for the U.S. seven years ago. Only I wouldn't smoke.

I painted this instead of her face for two reasons: because this picture tells something about her that her face would not and because her face is my portrait-a-day 25. Enjoy, and don't smoke!

P.S. I will be traveling on Thursday or Friday and then visiting family and friends up in Sacramento, so may not be very diligent about the blog in the next two weeks.

Oh, and did I mention that I LOVE painting from black-and-white photos? About a third of the portraits-a-day were painted like that. And I just found out about a blog that does a bi-weekly challenge for painters who want to do just that, add color to black-and-white pictures: http://colormechallenge.blogspot.com/

A Portrait A Day 23 - blacksmith (WIP)

Watercolor on Arches CP 140lb, 12x16". This blacksmith was working at the fair I did this weekend (the fair was an incomplete waste of time and money - would have been complete had I not been painting. At least I had more time to paint than I would have had at home).  I still want to do a couple of things in this painting but I'm too dead and tired tonight to finish.

I will also be uploading a couple of photos of him to the WetCanvas reference library, if anyone is interested. Probably tomorrow.

A Portrait A Day 22 - Greg

Watercolor on Arches CP 140lb, 9x12". Photo reference: Greg Durrett of Julia Kay's Portrait Party.

Manhattan - Virtual Paintout

A very quick wax crayon and watercolor on yupo, 10x10". I definitely could have used fewer lines!

And a very dead day at a very local arts&crafts fair. It was their first day of the first year running the fair, and it was a Friday. And we got a thunderstorm by the end of the day - something that almost never happens here in the desert. Everybody at the fair is hoping for a better tomorrow, and me...I'm just enjoying a break from being a stay-at-home mom.

A Portrait A Day 21 - Goat Transforming into a Cathedral

Watercolor over acrylic gel medium, Arches CP 140lb, 9x12". Reference photo is Goat Transforming into a Cathedral who is also in Julia Kay's Portrait Party, who makes fantastic art and whose Flickr name, when abbreviated, looks remarkably close to "Gotic" (this is the grand revelation I had when naming the image file). Enjoy!

P.S. I can kinda see a cathedral in that abstract background on the right...I mean, of course I planned it all to look like that ;)

A Portrait A Day 20 - Oliver and rainbow

Watercolor with touches of gesso on Arches CP 140lb, 9x12". Reference photo is Sandra's grandson, Oliver. The photo she sent me said "Oliver with rainbow," hence the background :)

A Portrait A Day 19 - Lara's Mom

Watercolor on Arches CP 140lb, 9x12. Painted from a picture of my friend's mom. I feel like I should have left it be around 25 minutes before I actually stopped - but I always want more darks, more depth, more definition. With all that, I lose some of the initial freshness and mood. I guess it's a very fine balance I need to learn to keep!

On a different note, this blog's views reached 10,000 yesterday and I'm happy as a true dork :) Thank you to everyone who came and looked at what I am doing here, and especially to those of you who keep coming back for more. You keep me going!

A Portrait A Day 18 - Angel Zhang

Watercolor on Arches CP 140lb, 9x12". Photo reference: Angel Zhang of Julia Kay's Portrait Party. Yeah...not very happy with this one. Overkill.

I worked on it while at my booth during a local event yesterday. People really like watching somebody paint (I do, too) and I'm getting used to the pressure of somebody looking over my shoulder. It's not that bad when you space out and ignore the world outside of your painting (which I do anyway, regardless of spectators).

Wordpress was down last night (second night in a row actually...all the more reason in favor of migrating this blog to my own hosting, which I am in the process of doing), so posting today.