Watercolor Painting - Autumn Path

This painting is from my class work for the watercolor studio that I'm in this semester. I'm working hard at trying to improve my watercolor skills, and so far I feel like I've been doing pretty well with trying to apply what I'm learning in the class.

Inspirations: Vintage Books no.1

This weekend, while I was in Woodstock, Vermont, I went to a store that was selling old and used books. If you're ever in Woodstock, I definitely recommend stopping in Pleasant Street Books.

I spent a good amount of time looking through the old childrens' books, mainly because I love a lot of the old illustrations that you can find tucked away in those books. I also love vintage cover art. The owner of the bookstore gave me permission to take pictures if I wanted, so I snapped a few pictures of some things that caught my interest.






I also took some photos of decorative bindings on a few of the older books that were in the shop as reference for an upcoming art project of mine.


And this is what I wound up bringing home with me! I bought this hardcover, clothbound edition of Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales. It's 373 pages long and has numerous full color plates inside, illustrated by A. Duncan Carse. There's no publisher's date inside, but the bookstore owner said that it's from the early 20th century. I just thought it was a really beautiful book.

I also brought this old, torn book cover home with me. The store owner had a bunch of detached covers propped up around the store as decorations. I liked this one and asked him if I could buy it, but he wound up just giving it to me. Two thumbs up for the cool bookstore owner!

More figure painting stuff

Here is some work from in class yesterday. The first is pencil on paper, about 9"x12". The second was a color study done with acrylic on an 11"x14" canvas panel. The plan is to eventually make a larger, more finished painting using these two studies as resources.

Dürer Watercolor Study

For my figure painting class, we were given an assignment to do a color study painting of a photocopy of either a Michelangelo drawing or an Albrecht Dürer drawing. I decided to use the Dürer image that our teacher assigned, and I worked in watercolors to force myself to practice. My watercolor skills are kind of weak, but I want to get better, so I figured that this homework assignment would be beneficial. We were also supposed to focus on using warm and cool lighting in the color scheme. I was pretty happy with the way this came out, considering this is the first time I've attempted color portraiture with watercolors. The painting measures approximately 11" x 14".

More figure painting stuff

Here are two pictures from last week's figure painting class. The newsprint study was done first (18" x 24"), and then I painted the watercolor version (11" x 14").

Child Story Project - New and Old Self-portraits

For my child development class we were asked to find a piece of artwork from our childhood, study it, and write a reflection on it. We were also asked to find a photo that corresponded with how old we were when we made the art. After that, we were asked to create a new piece of artwork, inspired by our older piece, that showed where we are now as an artist. The two pieces needed to be tied together somehow, whether in an obvious way or not.

I decided to use this picture that I found in a folder of old drawings of mine that my mom had saved. I was probably around three or four years old when I made this little pen doodle, which is a self-portrait. The actual drawing is really just a scrap of paper, measuring 3 1/2" x 3", and I was amazed that my mom saved this little scribble of a drawing. I've also posted the photo of my four year old self that I decided to use for this project.


Looking at this childhood self-portrait started me thinking about my current artistic tendencies. I have always loved drawing people, especially their faces. I'm guilty of investing the majority of my time on the subject’s face and often don’t spend nearly enough time on the background. That's not too far removed from this picture I drew when I was younger, which has no background whatsoever. People have always been my favorite subject to draw though, starting with cartoon inspired characters when I was younger and moving on to more realistic subjects as I've grown in age and experience. Studying this old drawing also made me realize that even now, many of my drawings start out with scribbled pencil lines, only to be refined later. But those initial sketchy lines definitely still have their roots in the same sketchy scribble lines that are in my old self-portrait.

My current artist style tends to be illustrative, leaning towards realism but inspired by fairy tales and other stories. For the past few years, my preferred method of working has been to start out on paper and to finish the picture digitally, so that was how I approached this project. The piece of artwork from my childhood that I was using was a self-portrait, so I felt it was only appropriate to do a current self-portrait. After taking some reference photos to use, I drew the initial picture on watercolor paper with brown colored pencil and then went back and painted over it with ink washes to establish a base to work from. Then I scanned everything into the computer and started the digital painting in Photoshop.

I knew that besides this image being a self-portrait, I also wanted it to reflect my current artistic interests. Art nouveau, especially the line work and compositions of that style, have been a big influence on my artwork for many years now. After studying the self-portrait I made when I was younger, I started picking out some loops and swirls that I had drawn in my hair that I felt would work perfectly for an art nouveau styled frame around my new self-portrait. So the frame is in fact directly based on the lines my younger self had scribbled for hair and eyes in my old self-portrait. The same scribbles from my old drawing were also used, repeated and rotated over and over, to create part of the texture that I used in the frame.

I also wanted this new self-portrait to be outdoors and to have trees in the background, since the photo of myself from when I was younger was also outdoors and with trees. The only difference is that now I am walking down a path instead of sitting up in a tree. I felt that picturing myself walking would be a good way to indicate that I am now on a new path in life, both with school, career possibilities, and my artwork. It's a new and exciting time in my life. Sometimes things can leave me feeling a bit nervous or stressed, but for the most part I feel like I am on a very good path right now. The decision to enter grad school was not a decision I made lightly. It's been four years since I finished my undergraduate degree, and I waited a while before applying to grad school because I wanted to make sure that I was really certain about the path I was choosing. The whole process was a cautious but confident decision.

Upon completing this project, I was quite amused to see the comparison between my two self-portraits when they are displayed side by side. A complete stranger might not be able to see any relation between the two, but the differences make me smile. I look at my old self-portrait and I can remember the countless hours I would spend as a little girl, drawing pictures over and over on whatever scraps of paper were handy. I can remember all the different stages of artistic development I went through, what my interest in subject matter was at various times, and my first experiences with new types of art and processes. I can remember all of those steps that have led me to my current artistic process. I am very much aware of where I am coming from, and where I have been, and I can’t wait to see what is yet to come.

Watercolor Sketches

Here are some small sketches from watercolor class this week. We were practicing gradated washes, hence the backgrounds.

More figure painting

Here's a painting from the figure painting class that I'm taking (acrylic on 9" x 12" canvas board). I'm really enjoying this class. I've done a decent amount of figure drawing before, but not much within the past few years, and I've never done any figure painting with a live model. This class is going to be a really good experience, and hopefully it will help my painting skills become a bit faster as well. Like the value studies in the previous post, we were supposed to stick with a limited color palette and were to try to focus on values, not details.