It Started With an Exploding Watermelon.............

"Dawning" watercolor

Painting Challenge

Today's painting began as another of those challenges that I often give to a class or workshop. This one came from my watercolor class at The Eye Studio. We were working wet-on-wet color gradations (so in other words just letting our paint run from one end of the paper to the other---in this case bottom to top).As the paint made its way down the paper we added a light yellow, letting the colors bleed together. Then when the paper was still slightly wet we dropped bits of light green onto the paper. I also dropped bits of red paint.

So when mine was done it looked like the painting below. Since it looked like an exploding watermelon I had jokingly named it "Front Row Seats at the Gallagher Concert".

And what is the challenge? 

To find an image in the abstraction. To me the green and red "spots" seemed to float through the air rather like specks of dust, pollen, or bits of plant and insect life catching the early morning sunlight. I was imagining the dawning of a day as seen from the ground and looking up.

Negative space painting was used in the bottom half of the painting giving a somewhat dreamy quality to the part of the earth still waking up.

Dragonflies!

"Dragonfly Summer"

Dragonflies!

I have heard that our lake is the home to over 100 different types of dragonflies. I'm not sure who counted, or how they counted, but the dragonflies are abundant every summer. Except last summer.

I asked one of the year-round residents of the lake about the drop in the dragonfly population and he attributed the cold, rainy weather which came in after an extremely cold Winter and a late Spring. 

I'm not sure if he was right but dragonflies were on my mind enough to want to integrate them in to a few of my paintings. The Dragonfly Series was started last Fall, and then set aside as I needed to get a few Winter themed paintings ready for shows.

So now as Spring is upon us (at least it is on the calendar) it's time to paint the dragonflies again.

"Dragonfly Summer" and "Dragonfly Moon" were both painted with water media.

What's Water Media?

Water Media refers to paints that rely on water to dilute the paint. In this case I started with watercolors and added some luminescent acrylic paint on the dragonflies to give them an extra glow.

Both paintings have the feel of fantasy illustrations which is exactly what I wanted to achieve. To me there is something magical about these delicate creatures and their luminous wings changing colors in the sunlight with every movement as they flit across the lake.

In fact to me the whole lake is magical.