Monotype: First Day of Spring

First Day of Spring 8.3 x 7 Monotype, Watercolor & Colored Pencil
Luckily for me, my maternal grandparents liked to take photos in the late 1920's. The family snapshots I get to use as painting references are treasures.

Plexiglass plate with Daniel Smith oil based black etching ink, rolled out with a brayer. The reference was a Brownie camera photo of Al & Margie, and the image was pulled out of the ink with my fingers, q-tips and paper towels.

After a trip through the press, the print is pulled from the plate.

The print next to the plate on the press bed.

After the ink was dry, I added some light washes of watercolor, and started to scribble texture and color with prismacolors.

Nick Nack - Watercolor

Nick Nack 6 x 7 watercolor
In true executive fashion, Uncle Nick was very specific on the colors & brushwork in this portrait. I sketched in the studio and laid the first washes of his face from a photo taken a few years earlier, and then took it with my field palette to the nursing home. For an afternoon, his will trumped his MS once again, and with labored speech tracing a bent finger, he directed the color of the washes for his sweatshirt, chair and back ground. He was delighted to see his handsome face come to life in pigments.
'Nick Nack' hangs in my studio as a collaboration between subject and artist. He died this week - just shy of 85. Free from his handsome anchor, doing cartwheels in heaven. With a heavy heart, I'm feeling so fortunate to have art, as a retrospective visual documentation of life, and a creative flush of bereavement in the coming weeks.

Monotype: Central California Vineyard

Central California Vineyard 9 x 3 Monotype with Watercolor & Colored Pencil
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(Process shots start at the bottom)

The monotype pulled from the copper plate after a trip through the press. Under all the pressure from the press, the ink releases neatly from the plate and transfers to the soaked & blotted paper, keeping most of the textures I scraped into the pigment. There was enough ink left on the plate to pull a very light ghost print, which I'll save for another version of this scene later.

I'm using an india ink sketch as a reference in the sketch pad at the top left corner. I used a brayer to roll an even layer of Daniel Smith oil based etching ink on a thin 9 x 3 inch copper plate. In this image, I've begun scraping & removing levels of ink in a subtractive process with paper towels, q-tips and a rubber-tipped blender. My focus here is values, and variation in textures & mark-making.

Watercolor: Reflections on Flight

Reflections on Flight 19 x 26 Watercolor on Strathmore Bristol
(Process shots start at the bottom)
This will be exhibited - along with 30 other paintings - at Descanso Gardens in the Boddy Carriage House Gallery from March 7 to April 3rd. If you're in the neighborhood (La Canada, CA), stop by and say hello.

Consulting on next steps with studio-helper Lucy. I took a break for a few days at this point to ponder details; what to render or leave out in the shadows and sky reflections. I was aiming for the boundary between abstraction and representation in the splash of shapes across the tiles.

Laying in the first glazes of detail on the objects on the window sill, and their shadows and reflections.

Slathering pigments across the paper with a wide brush: warmer colors on top and cooler colors on the bottom half of the composition.