A Watercolor Retrospective: Part II

 8/10/19: Doing the Watercolor Part I had me thinking a lot about how perhaps to progress.  So i will continue (and finish) my Part II.  However, first I wanted to include a new Facebook post with my first watercolor in a long time:


I pulled out my watercolors and attempted a favorite scene.  Some lessons learned:

  1. Don’t forget the focal point with its dark and light contest
  2. Try again with a limited palette of familiar colors (these colors happened to be available from a old palette which happened to have many colors laid out)
  3. Try to get darks without having to go back over them.
  4. Testing adding a 4th bullet by copy and pasting the third one: I will look for the painting with the notes and add the notes here.

I found it useful to put the notes at the bottom of the painting.  They can easily be torn off.  The image is approximately in a golden mean ratio. If I like the painting I will use a frame 8x13.  Oh yes, I am going to have to deal with glass again!!

Aug 2020: We have a new interface in blogspot. It's a good thing I've been familiarizing myself with HTML. This will be a opportunity to learn more. I need to practice.
First I will try adding a couple of images of recent (2019) watercolors now using the image icon from the format bar:
I entered this last one (Storm Coming, 12x9) into the 2019 National Show by the Plein Air Painters of New Mexico. I took it to a frame shop to add glass and frame it. Using glass for paintings is an issue for me - or it was. It was one of the reasons i switched to oil. I know there's a way to varnish watercolors but I feel it takes away from the beauty of watercolor. I used my usual dark frame for this watercolor (matted). I will have to take a photo of it framed.

New Interface HTML Update: it was easy to insert images and to add text. Basically, the interface 'does the html work' when inserting an image. I can just add notes. It might look daunting but it's okay. Note that it might be of some interest to see the underlying code that is necessary to produce a web pages or a blog. The one piece of HTML code I am adding is a line break to break up the paragraphs; look for a < followed by a br and a / and a >. Then copy and paste the combination and insert between two lines. I needed to add two to create a space between tow paragraphs. I'll insert three line breaks here:


August 2020: Recently I bought some gouache paints (opaque watercolor) and hope to begin using the soon. Stay tuned.

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