I joined a wonderful online Facebook group related to the book One Watercolor a Day by Veronica Lawlor. You share the exercises you do from the book in a closed group. At the right is the first exercise, sometimes known as Day 1. You were supposed to experiment with different colors and marks on a page, keeping a set palette with each watercolor. I did a lot of what is called wet on wet – you apply water, then a color, then another color – it’s not easy to control, but one sometimes gets lovely results.
So I was wondering when am I going to fit in doing a watercolor a day? Or even one watercolor a week? This past Sunday I learned if you have sunlight but no power, you can paint and paint and paint. At about noon on Saturday we (and thousands of other Edison and Highland Park residents) lost power (there was a damaging fire at a substation in Edison, New Jersey). We did not get out power back until 4 pm on Sunday (others got power back at varying times). It was a totally unexpected blackout. Those who had bought generators after miserable Hurricane Sandy were happy(satisfied?) to use them.
I learned (again) how much we depend on technology and power. Indeed, I had a pile of work I needed to do, but it all had to wait. Happy to have a little space and time to paint with watercolors.
There is also a Facebook group for the book One Drawing a Day (see my review called One Drawing Per Week). I’ll try that one later – one can only do so much.
Umbrellas, watercolor and gouache on paper by Leora Wenger, 2013
In continuation of a series of watercolors related to Raritan Avenue in Highland Park, here is my latest that I am calling: Umbrellas. I took at least ten photos of this watercolor painting in different light until I picked one that was closest to the image. It still had a little too much blue, so in Photoshop I slightly decreased the balance of blue. The idea of the painting was to emphasize the color of the umbrellas and the wetness of the day. The people are just busy.
The brighter less opaque colors in the watercolor on this page are done in gouache. I posted a detail of this painting last week on Google+. Go ahead and Plus One my watercolor Google+ posting, if you like.
This female cardinal in my backyard was the first photograph I took in 2014. Note she is duller than her brightly colored male mate – she has one streak of red feathers to display. What was your first 2014 photograph?
I can’t even begin to imagine the pain of losing a child. Phyllis continues to write after her son Sam has died; in this post, she talks about “the terrible vacuum of grief.“
I am continuing my work on house illustrations. Last week I showed you a sketch I had done of a Highland Park house. Above is my Illustrator version of an illustration of this home. I originally made all the windows black, and then I decided to switch the windows above to a blue gradient, so it looks like a sky reflection. The illustration is made of a collection of shapes placed in many layers in Illustrator.
One of the features of a good flat design illustration is eliminating details and only depicting what is most important to view. This process of what to include and what to leave out is not an easy one.
My long term plan is to depict at least three homes in this manner. Here is another house illustration – I sketched the above drawing by hand using pencil and then a ink pen (then I scanned it into the computer). If you know Highland Park, I welcome you to walk around and look at the homes to see if you can find these. But I won’t identify them directly.
I also plan to do some flat design bushes and trees as elements in between the homes. The lamppost in the top illustration makes a fine detail for this purpose as well. I’ve been collecting various illustrations in Pinterest so I can refer to those illustrations for ideas.
This morning I was playing around with the Live Trace tool in Illustrator, and I created the above line art drawing from the original sketch.
This process of creating a suburban street scene with houses and trees is taking longer than I anticipated.
The last time I started working on houses, roofs, and illustrated street scenes I got as far as this roof with second floor and then that was it for quite a while. I’m now tackling the projects of depicting a few houses in a row in a flat design illustration. So far, I photographed a few houses, searched for old photographs I had taken and decided it was easier to take new ones, did one or two pen illustrations from my house photographs, and started an illustration of one house in Adobe Illustrator.
I also pinned a fair number of house illustrations to Pinterest. I noticed the successful illustrations follow less is more … a few accents in color can go a long way.
After I do a few houses, I plan to work on illustrated trees, bushes and other elements you might find in an old-fashioned borough like Highland Park. I’m hoping I can find a way to do clouds that don’t look like everyone else’s clouds. Stay tuned for more houses, roofs, illustrations and my artistic endeavors in those areas.
