Week 2 - Tony Grove Lake (from photo)

As soon as I saw this wonderful photo my brother took I wanted to paint it in yellows and blues. Instead I discovered I'm not sure how to paint mountains, skies, or water. The only thing I remotely liked were some of the spiky leaves.

Which is why they took over the painting.








Edit: I took this painting in to my class and my teacher did some additional work on it to fix it up. Here are the results:

Exercises (Bad)

Here are some practices I did this week. You don't have to tell me how really bad they are, I already know. Nightmare-inducing. :)

These first two are from Charles Reid's Watercolor Solutions:




And this third is from Zoltan Szabo's Watercolor Techniques (it was supposed to be a shack in the mist with some interesting rocks and plants in the foreground, but I got so discouraged with the mist I abandoned the foreground):

Week 1 - Pink Cyclamen (from life) Fall/2009

I want to be artistic, but whenever I try I'm not satisfied with the results or how long it will take to improve to a point that I find acceptable.

I guess what I really want is to be a savant.

Since that is clearly not the case I signed up for a 10 week watercolor class. I'm going to repurpose this blog to post my artistic attempts. In 8 more weeks if there isn't noticeable progress I'm going to have to re-think watercolor as a hobby.

These pretty flowers were sitting on my table when I got home from class. Although much of the painting was a wet mess, I think the end result is kind of pretty. I liked working with the bright colors.