On the Nineth Day of Christmas,

That's really the Nineth day of Christmas! The Rose Bowl Parade!

Roses from my garden 6X6 watercolor

In honour of which is the above little piece. Well, by now I think the game is over, was it Oregon or Wisconsin? I'll have to check to find out, I've been painting. Need all the practice I can get. My apologies, these roses are from a neighbors garden from last summer. Again I was switching inks and pens in the middle of doing this. The Rapidograph still has Toffee Brown ink in it which is for fountain pens and not waterproof. So I tried one of my dip pens with waterproof ink, but today I could not make a fine line if my life depended on it! So, I cheated. After doing the center bloom with the dip pen I pencil sketched the others, painted them and once dry went back with the Rapidograph to get the fine lines I wanted. This becomes apparent in the differences between the the roses. It was too late for that one.
The New Year has begun! Enjoy it.

And High Time Too!

OK, at the top we have an old one I'd almost forgotten about. It's the rose in the bud vase. It was done in class and we were learning more about wet into wet backgrounds and glass. The rose was supposed to be red, but it, well the background would just eat it, so I squinted at it and decided a nice bright golden yellow would show better.




The landscape is after a woman artist from the early part of this century. Abby Williams Hill was a California painter (oils) and this is Laguna Niguel before Hollywood changed southern California. In fact this is quite a ways south of L.A. but it is built up now. I spent a lot of time this spring painting the mustard bloom here in northern California, and I loved her portrayal of it down south. My watercolor version (this is the "can't leave well enough alone" part) didn't have the, well, in acting it would be called "Presence", that her's had. So I just kept fiddling with it until I ended up with a storm coming. I had seen something like this and as I was developing the shadowing in the distance, the storm was just sort of born. So, my thanks to Ms. Hill for the inspiration! It's 11X14 inches too, it felt wonderful to work larger again. Things were starting to get pinched looking. That's what happens when I focus too much on detail for too long and work small.

I had taken a look again at the Lone Cypress picture and, although it shows the crystalline atmosphere there was that day (very rare), I keep wondering if I should have worked bigger and softer. Or am I second guessing my second guesses?

The fish picture is here again because I took a better photo of it, I hope.