New watercolor in progress

I've been working on a new watercolor painting today, a portrait of Zooey Deschanel. I'm taking a break for the rest of the night while I decide on what I'm going to do for the background. While I mull it over, I thought it might be fun to post some progress photos here on my blog. The photo above is what the painting looks like at the moment on the art desk, and below you can some photos that I snapped quick while I was working on it.

Florence - a watercolor portrait

Yesterday, I decided that I wanted to try doing a watercolor painting based solely on warm and cool colors, which is how this whole thing got started. I chose to do a portrait of Florence Welch from the band Florence + The Machine because I thought her bright hair would lend itself quite well to the color scheme restraints. This turned out to be a lot of fun and I want to try doing more watercolor portraits in this manner. It's a good exercise, if anything.

The final painting measures 12" x 12 and was completed on April 17, 2011.

Prints are now available through my print shop!

Along The River - Paris watercolor

Another Paris watercolor for my sketchbook, measuring 8" x 5 1/4". The Seine was extremely high while we were there, so many of the walking paths under the bridges along the river were flooded over. This was the view along the Seine facing towards Notre Dame.

Ceramic Box inspired by Hokusai's Great Wave

This is a demo piece that I made for one of my 8th grade classes. For their assignment, they had to make a clay box using slab construction. The lid and any other designs that they put on their box had to be based on a famous piece of artwork. For my demonstration piece, I made a box that was inspired by Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai's "The Great Wave off Kanagawa".

The finished box measures 5 inches x 4 inches and is a little over 4 inches tall. The lid is layered with different levels of clay to add some dimension to the image. All of the students were encouraged to think about how they could add texture or depth to the painting that they were basing their box on, and how they could use the different glazes to try and re-create that painting.

Walking In Paris

Tonight I made a little color painting in my sketchbook, based on photos that we took while walking in Paris during our first day in the city. I want to go back, especially now that it's springtime.