A little of this- and a little of that...

A few weeks ago, before the holiday, Torsten (that is my art teacher if you have forgotten) ushered me into the painting room in his 3 room studio, to where a large easel sat, already prepped with a large piece of white paper. He gestured to some brushes and a palette of water color paints. Then he rummaged around in a resource folder and produced some things for me to work from. Then he handed me the brush, and said...PAINT.

*You mean with no pencil sketches first?...gulp*
*With all these other people around to see my flub up*
*Perspire...what if it's a mess...or loos silly...perspire*

I was not prepared to work on the fly, with my usual calculated and planned style being the crutch...plus the entire idea of making something less than perfect...
Well ugh...*Oh goodness get over yourself girl....*. But Torsten continued to further gesticulate and encourage, while of course this all goes on in German just to further complicate matters...

SO this is what I ended up with at the very beginning ...(Can you tell I was looking at Picasso's fawn ink drawings earlier in the day??) and I must say that while all of this intimidated the living H*ll out of me it was actually felt quite nice to be working only with paint...though I am finding that one of my biggest handicpas is loosing the "Illustrator" style to get things to be a bit more real... I'm workin' on it...This is the version of anothe rimage free hand again in paint only, and the same image again below, but with a pencil sketch first and then several paint washes over top.

The secret it seems to me is to make all of your main lines very lightly in a wash and then to build the colour up refining the shapes as you go. At the end the guiding lines are virtually invisible, so if they were a bit off it is no problem. The beauty of water color if you are using good paper it is easy to lift ant excess color off after the fact, even if it has already dried, with a little light pressure (cutips or TAMPONS work well go figure) and some water.
The next is a rendition of one of Torsten's pieces.
This next peice is something have been fooling around with for a while, wanting to experiment with my pen and ink a bit more, using the pen to do some really super fine detail, and then water color and some ink washes for shadow and depth...It was fun to fool around with the different things...it is called "Chronic Pain", and relates directly to my Prolotherapy experience, those having had prolo for chronic pain are the ones taking little ballons up up UP from the mountain and those for whatever reason didn't/couldn't/or wouldn't are decending to I know where not...sort of dark I know, but being free of pain is what enables me to do all of this!!! YAhhoooo!!!

Got some more watercolor portraits to show you tomorrow!! Check back in!!