Felicia, watercolor on paper, Fall, 2021Old Man, watercolor on paper, Fall 2021Charlotte, gouache on watercolor-board, Fall 2021
A few notes:
For the watercolor paintings, I planned two different approaches, a softer and muted one, vs a more vibrant and contrasted one. The results were somewhere in the middle. Especially for the first painting, I wish I had softened some edges and let go certain definitions instead of spelling out everything I saw.
The gouache one is a homework from Watts. It is a practice of the Zorn palette and the tiling technique. I found both the medium and the technique challenging. Tiling is to juxtapose thick layers of close-value paints and blend them (if necessary) later. It’s a good preparation and practice for oil painting, but it requires a lot of patience in value control and shape design. Hehe, patience! 😉
Young Woman, oil on canvas board, 11 x 14 in, July 2021Young woman, oil on canvas board, 11 x 14 in, July 2021
Watercolor:
Jeff, watercolor on paper, 9 x 12, July 2021
The more I learned about anatomy and head drawing, the more I am afraid of making mistakes, and the tighter my paintings become. Especially in watercolors, things were all under control (to the extend of my ability of course). They rarely just happened. The recent Draftsmen podcast mentioned how as a student, one learns and memorizes everything, and later forgets everything to become an artist. Hehe, we’ll see.
Girl, watercolor on paper, 9 x 12, June 2021Amanda, watercolor on paper, 9 x 12, June 2021
Quasi Zorn is 1) when I realized that I didn’t have ivory black and cadmium red in watercolor and replaced them with neutral tint and pyrrole red; and 2) when I couldn’t decide if the white of the paper counts or I should use the titanium white. The paper white doesn’t help in mixing colors, but the titanium white turns everything too opaque. I will keep digging and meanwhile order some new colors!
California watercolor artist Mike Bailey once said in his workshop that artists should keep going back to their old works and find inspiration there. In the past, that’s something I rarely did. My own works used to make me sad. If they are good, I feel like I haven’t made any progress, and if they are bad, I am bad. Last year when I started my social media presence: this blog and my Instagram, I managed to go through some of what I had done with Mike’s words in mind. It took some getting used to, but after many self-pitying moments, I saw sparks. There are things that generate ideas, things that remind me of techniques I learned and forgot, and things I simply want to re-do.
One of the sparks is an old abstract acrylic painting “Waterfall”, a design still excited me:
Landscape, acrylic on canvas, 24 x 30
I kept the design, but drifted away from the primary colors and brought in the fluidity of the watercolor medium. Here’s the new version:
Waterfall 2, watercolor on paper, 22 x 28 in, 2020
Earlier this month I also submitted a self-portrait to Art Room Gallery’s Portrait Show, and received an “Honorable Mention.” Here’s the artwork:
Decision, watercolor on paper, 9 x 13 in, 2021
As I mentioned before I have been focusing on portrait this year. Though techniques are still my major concern, and I understand it takes far more than the a few months to grasp it, I do often think about if I could go deeper than just the face. “Decision” is an attempt to bring out a bit of the inner world of the subject.
The rich colors of the season remind me of a series I did years ago. It consists of four still life paintings, done in watercolor and ink pen. It was the first series I ever did and was done before I had any appreciation of doing things in some sort of consistency. My natural inclination is always jumping around among different things.
As I have better understanding of the creative process, I start to see the benefit of staying for a while with a particular technique, a color theme, a subject matter, a design concept, etc. It reenforces your strength, challenges your thought, and often leads to new discoveries.
Anyways, here they are:
Autumn Colors 1, watercolor and ink pen on paper, 16 x 12 in, 2015Autumn Colors 2, watercolor and ink pen on paper, 12 x 16, 2015Autumn Colors 3, watercolor and ink pen on paper, 16 x 12 in, 2015Autumn Colors 4, watercolor and ink pen on paper, 12 x 16 in, 2015
The things that connect this series are techniques and subject matters. I set up some “fall” related objects and chose four settings. They are parallel to each other in terms of relationship. Another way to develop a series is to derive new pieces from the old one. I am in the process of an experiment of that and hope I will be able to show it soon.
Nikki, watercolor on paper, 9 x 12, September, 2020Astrid in Design, gouache on paper, 9 x 10, September 2020
Here’s what I find out so far:
It behaves like a good quality 140lb watercolor paper. So in theory, you can use water.
However, as one can imagine, transparent color doesn’t fire well on black paper. You need a lot of pigment for a color to show, and the colors still dry lighter. So you can’t really use a lot of water.
Like any type of black paper, how you deal with value on it is quite counterintuitive.
In the first painting I used mostly watercolor and mixed in some gouache white in the highlight area. The second painting is gouache. I personally like the the gouache one better.
I feel like I am very lack of imagination with this paper. For the second painting, I believe I could achieve similar effect with ink resist method. While using black paper makes it easier in certain ways, ink resist could have some unexpected result. In other words, it is not particularly empowering.
It could be just I don’t know how to make the most out of it.
If you are on the west coast you know what I am talking about. The sky is literally orange the whole day, from Oregon to California! I painted this scenery a while ago, as a sunset scene. I mounted to a cradled wood panel, and varnished it (see my previous post about hanging with frame). I believe the varnish darkened the painting a bit, and the result is a perfect depiction of today:
Orange Day, watercolor on paper,11 x 14 in, 2020
As much as I enjoy being a prophet, I miss my neighborhood’s normal color:
Neighborhood walk 1, watercolor on paper, 9 x 12 in, 2020
I recently submitted a couple of artworks to an online exhibition “Patterns” at Light Space & Time Online Art Gallery. One of the submissions received an honorable mention and was selected into Top 15 Artists in the “Painting & Other Media category.”
This is the painting that received the recognition:
Marching, watercolor on paper, 22 x 30 in, 2019
I also submitted one to a different category, “Photography and Digital.” I don’t really have any experience with digital art. I took a watercolor doodle and manipulated it in Photoshop Express and Procreate. It failed to enter the show, understandably, but I had a lot of fun making it:
Bubbly Dance, digital, 2020
Maybe I’ll make a carpet out of it some day!
I am taking a 2D design class this fall and learning some basics about Photoshop. Hopefully I will have some better stuffs to submit next time! 🙂
Light, Space & Time has online exhibitions of various themes and it is cheap to enter. Highly recommend for emerging artists.
Sometimes when I run out of ideas, I stare at the trees outside my window. Occasionally, I draw or sketch them:
Since I am a bit running out of topic recently, I turned my window scene into a couple of paintings:
Window Scene 1, watercolor on paper, August, 2020Window Scene 2, watercolor on paper, August 2020
There are usually squirrels dancing on the branches and crows meeting on those roofs, and once in a while, I am waken up by wood peckers attacking the trunks. Some day, I will manage to catch them in my “window paintings.” 🙂
ZHI SU 