squwetchy If this looks familiar it’s either because you live in Canada on this -18C day, or because it’s the same painting I thought I finished yesterday and posted on Instagram… but with some #snow added into the scene. #watercolour

squwetchy dabbling in a simple #monochromatic #watercolour this morning inspired by the cold temperatures outside!

squwetchy I sat atop a waterfall and painted this plein air #watercolour with water from the creek.

squwetchy A plein air #watercolour painted atop a mountain. #waterfall

Now that I’m back home and actually have decent paints… a proper brush … few mosquitoes buzzing in my face.. and less rush, I want to try this screen again.

squwetchy For our penultimate #watercolour #flower class we did this little red rose. Given that a) this week is our last class and b) I usually only do my homework to show off in the next class, this might have been my last at home assignment painting for a while. That said, I’ve been snapping pics of flowers for a couple weeks now and I bought a pass to the local botanic garden so hopefully it will be a summer of painting plein aire in the park.

squwetchy #watercolour #flower at the the #botanicgarden

squwetchy A practice rose by any other name? #watercolour class number 7 means that I really only have one more homework assignment, huh? [read more...]

squwetchy About six hours later I decided this #dandelion #watercolour was a little lacking in depth, so I spent another hour or so adding lots of shading, some subtle some not, and now I think it has a lot more oomph. What say you? [read more...]

squwetchy #dandelion #flower in #watercolour

squwetchy Week four of my #watercolour class and we dug into some interesting new techniques for this elaborate people flower. Some lifting and some layered/blending washes had some interesting optical effects related to what goes the illusion of transparency on the petals. I have been pushing in the boundaries of my backgrounds for all the pieces I’ve completed for this class …which was above and beyond to the assignment, and just something I’d seen done online. The instructor really likes it tho and has been ribbing me and calling it The Brad Technique and some of my fellow students have started to imitate it.

squwetchy Oh sure, you say, after all those pretty flower pictures now you go and post some depressing #dystopian #watercolour scene from a Fallout game or something, but see the thing is this was inspired, colours and all, by a photograph I took this morning of the creek valley filtered through the haze of all that forest #firesmoke, so… put that in your pipe and… well.

squwetchy Apart from the small paint splatter accident mid way thru, my #watercolour #flower painting homework for week two turned out better than I’d expected. to be honest, I didn’t really like this picture when he showed it to us last night and the results that he got were a little flat and uninspired for my own personal tastes, which has less to do with the artistic quality and more to do with the lesson that was being forwarded in our second class. I tried to duplicate the results as best as I could, and then soften the background a little bit more than he had in his original piece, which was a fairly abrupt matte black. Watercolour flowers week 2 homework used about fifty bucks* worth of yellow paint but the results seem worth it. *tho not really

squwetchy Take two: This is the second attempt, my “homework” attempt at the same #flower image as my last post from my #watercolour course night one.

squwetchy It has been almost a year since I took a #watercolour class at the local recreation centre. Last spring I took a course from a local teacher on painting Canadian landscapes in watercolours which taught me a whole bunch of new techniques and ideas for improving my personal sketching and painting. This spring, I signed up for a second course by the same teacher, but this time our focus is #flower painting in watercolour. we are encouraged to document the process each class by taking photos of the various stages of the artwork as we paint it as a group, but our instructor insisted obviously that none of those pictures that would hint or give away course materials be posted anywhere so while you will see a number of finished Paintings as a progress through the course over the next few weeks the closest I can give you to show some of the background is a picture like this of me documenting the colour I used to mix for one particular stage, which I don’t think gives much away.

squwetchy Starting next week I’m back in the classroom with my favourite watercolour instructor Frank. I signed up for another round of #watercolour painting classes at the local rec center. This time will be focussing on flowers so be prepared for lots of pictures of little pretty things and the high chance of me complaining about almost certainly being the only guy under 60 in my class. I was trying to get back into it as I haven’t done as much painting as I should have over the last month or two and I painted a couple spring scenes including these two.

squwetchy Another #autumn #watercolour landscape

squwetchy An #autumn #watercolour expedition into some local nature and I improvised a mask for the tree trunks using some bits of grass.

squwetchy A little sketchy sketch in the park and then some additional #watercolour touch ups back at the hotel and my first day of #travel painting is done

squwetchy As much as I like sketching with ink and lines, the rawness of pure #watercolour (when I can take my brush) is starting to grow on me.

More adventures in creating stuff outside ended with a quick #watercolour #sketch in the trails and a new #video to profile the whole thing. With a million big ideas in my empty days it’s also nice to grasp onto little projects that I can share in a moment of effort.

squwetchy I was reading about this thing called the Zorn Palette (great for portraits and people scenes) which is a three colour restricted #palette consisting of yellow ochre, vermillion & black, and all the #colours you can mix on variations of those three. i don’t have those colours, at least not in tubes, but it got me thinking about a restricted palette i could make that might be good for nature scenes with just three tubes: this #watercolour and ink #sketch was done with just cerulean blue, lemon yellow and payne’s grey. if no one has named that palette yet i’m calling dibs and we’ll try some more pics with it… but i’m going to the art store someday to get me some #zorn colours too!

squwetchy Monochrome dreams, part 1, is a study in #watercolour with a single colour of paint, a #palette of one if you will.

squwetchy another #watercolour #steampunk #robot