Climbing Mountains and New YouTube Demonstration

Day 9 of World Watercolor Month
The prompt for today is climbing mountains. I think this phrase fits both metaphorically and realistically because it seems like you’re climbing a mountain sometimes while trying to develop your watercolor skills doesn’t it?

After our sketching session we looked over the results.

A whole group of us climbed to the outlook past Buster Brown field during my recent Watercolor Nature Journal Workshop at the North Cascades Environmental Learning Center. Along with the demonstration and my sketch of Rita already on the page, I added another little vignette showing the view below. I managed to indicate the bridge across the distant edge of the lake.

New Watercolor Demo on YouTube

I’m also using this sketch to fit the prompt of “shapes and colors” for day 9 of the FireflyWatercolor Challenge. The idea of the challenges sparked my creative  muse. I had just visited the North Cascades National Park and wanted to do something about that rather than a beach scene. (saving that for later, though). I concentrated on interlocking the mountains, lake and surrounding forest shapes in the composition and distinguishing them in atmospheric perspective through color.

If you would like to see a video demonstration of my process please visit my YouTube channel here. Give me a thumbs up if you like it!

After recording and uploading the video, I looked at the sketch with critical eyes and decided to develop the lower left c orner a bit more. See tomorrow's post.

Day Nine and Ten of 30x30 Direct Watercolor

I just got these finished for Day 9 and 10 of the #30x30DirectWatercolor2018 challenge and stepped quickly inside as it started to rain. I should have waited, because a beautiful sun break happened after the rain. On the other hand, you just have to know how to paint in diffused light if you're going to make watercolors in the PNW.

Working on Timing and expressive Brushstrokes

I feel fortunate that I have so many choices from my garden right now. I love Delphiniums for their unusual blue colors and interesting shapes all along the stem. You get to see every stage of the flower as it blooms from bottom to top.

Definitely wet on wet. Still wet while snapping a photo.

I tend to take a photo almost the instant I finish signing the painting. I sign the painting while the last brushstrokes are still wet.  There's a reflection from the sky in a bubble of wet paint, which you can probably see if you look closely at the center of the right hand stem.

Some watercolor effects after completely dry

Some watercolor effects take place while the painting is drying and aren't recorded in the snapshots that I take for social media. The Kilimanjaro paper takes much longer to dry than some other papers I use and causes a variety of surprise effects in the process. You can see this above, where I took another photo before posting this article.

Inktober Day 9-Broken

A tree fell across the rocks and was carried down the waterfall, broken

Couldn't find Schnitzel

Ahhh. The last day of my "Julie Andrews" curse. (Let's just hope Dick Van Dyke doesn't start up with Chim-Chim-Cher-ee!)

I present to you: Brown Paper Packages Tied Up With String!

These are the kind of packages my grandmothers would send with gifts, cards, clothes, puzzles, coloring books, dolls, and homemade cookies in them. To keep things steady, they would pop up a pan of popcorn and use that to fill in the voids. When you opened the package, you saved the string, carefully folded the paper for later use and inhaled a big whiff of popcorn! (I wonder if anyone ever used real peanuts?)

Thank you, everyone from Instagram and who commented through email and here on my blog with great ideas from "My Favorite Things".  At the risk of going insane with that tune in my head 24-7, there actually are quite a few of those that I just may end up coming back to before the end of Inktober!