A watercolor for today. I love peacocks, white peacocks especially.
I am trying out new techniques for water color painting. I used frisket for the first time, masking fluid, you paint that stuff temporarily, paint over it and then you rub it off. Your watercolor paper comes out white. Very interesting and fun.
So here it is: ”The lonely moonlight walk”, aquarelle on paper, 4” x 8”
The vet has been and Tarq’s tongue, what’s left of it, looks very good! Everything is healthy, no infection, and at least the skin is growing over the torn end. Which means he can have all his normal food and hay again!
Which is very good because the stuff we were giving him was not at all good for him. Way too much sugars and proteins!
Tarq is very happy too.
Two great Danes on an 8” x 8” panel!
Oil on painter’s board, 8” x8”
This was fun to paint! And this proves my theory: As soon as something is fun it is also good. I went all daring with large brushes, and I love the shapes of Great Danes. The spotted one has such a sweet expression on her face.
I used M. Graham oil paints, a new discovery for me. I love them, beautiful top quality paints.
I used a very minimal palette, set up with white, yellow, red, umber and blue, With these you can mix all the colors you need
Sketching in my journal at fly ball practice. We have lots of new talent.
Merlin, Puppy Power!
Graceful Gracie.
I think I need to color this one, what do you think?
This was commissioned from the Netherlands, but I was in Dallas so had to make do with photo’s. If at all possible I prefer to makes sketches from life. But I will take commissions using photographs.
And the internet makes it easy to send photos, make sketches and share them, and discuss the final painting.
The style was to be somewhat 18th century, a real state portrait! I used oils on marouflé, painting board, covered with Belgian portrait linen, this makes for a very stable panel, of very fine quality.
The final pencil sketch:
The painting in progress
The finished painting!
At The Dallas Aquarium
or why you should stop playing with your smartphone and pay attention
So this is the real thing, I brought a HUGE canvas, it’s 2 meter by 1,5 meter. That’s 80” by 60” in inches.
I usually start of with a grisaille base painting.
At the Dallas Aquarium sketch
For lack of an easel, (my stuff had not arrived yet) I hung the painting on the wall. Not ideal, but it worked. I had different sizes of steps to reach different parts of the canvas. Luckily I didn’t fall off any of them, although there have been some close calls! Unlike the water color sketch I now started out with working on the Water world. This is because oil paint is a different medium, so requires a different approach. I really wanted the colors to stand out, and of course the foreground had to stand out…
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A long title for a brilliant book!
So: the super excellent life-changing magic of tidying up… Here’s the gist, the writer, Marie Kondo, is a professional organizer, who goes around Japan to help people get rid of clutter and organize what’s left of it. If you think all Japanese are all minimal and zen, think again! They are just as messy as the rest of us. And they have even less space. That is, until Marie has visited. She doesn’t sell storage solutions, she wants you to have so little you don’t need storage solutions.
Marie is Shinto and so thanks all her stuff when using it, after using it and when throwing it out. I thought it was brilliant. I am not a Shinto animist, but I am ”barking mad”, and one reason I cannot get rid of stuff is that I feel sorry for the stuff that gets…
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Look at this fun development of the color sketch!
The thing was to find out if I could get this juxtaposition of light right.
(See the black and white sketch here)
There are two worlds overlapping here. There is the world of water, where color is subdued into a greenish bluish palette, and everything is diffuse. And then there is the world of air with sharp contrast, also in the lighting, warm lamps and stark shadows.
Só fascinating!
A white piece of water color paper and the figures of the world of air.
The fish and rocks are sketched in,
The water world is colored in. I thought it worked.
Next installment will be the preparation and the base painting on the gigantic canvas!
So, over at Basenotes, the perfume forum I am a member of, today’s synch is about ”Your first ”investment perfume”…”
Hum, I don’t ”invest” in perfumes, I use them! But I did ”invest” in a few extra bottle of Balmain de Balmain (by… guess who? Pierre Balmain) when I learned that this gorgeous perfume is going to be discontinued. I found a seller on Ebay with a very good deal too.
It’s sad though. All good perfumes are discontinued by now, and that’s because the ingredient which makes all my favorite scents, ”Oakmoss” has been banned ostensibly because somewhere, somebody, sometime, had a slight tiny bot of irritation when exposed to a dollop of the stuff. I think in reality it is because it’s an expensive ingredient and they want to move on to more synthetics. I base this opinion on the fact that alcohol, is far…
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This really has to be posted on this site as well.
And, I now have a diary. I am making one drawing of Mohammed every day.
A pencil is:
Stronger than the sword
Stronger than the guns
Stronger than the gods
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