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October 17, 2010 1:25 pm

Mangos and Pears, a Color Exercise

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by Jenny Armitage    in biography,composition,for sale,still lifes,techniques,watercolors
Still Life watercolor of magos and pears by Jenny Armitage

Mangos and Pears (watercolor on clayboard 11 x 14) $150

I started this painting in Karen Vernon’s workshop this October. The photo I worked from is hers.  The photo showed two mangos and a pear.  I broke up the trio by moving one to the mangos to the wall.

We spent one of the five days working on color. The lessons aren’t unique, but certainly useful. Color has several properties, hue, intensity, value, temperature. Hue is the actual color. Intensity is the brightness or dullness of the color. Value is the lightness or darkness of a color. Temperature is the warmth or coldness of a color. Blue is the coldest color and yellow the warmest.

We spent one one morning working on changing color value without changing any of the other properties. This is not as straight forward as it appears as some colors de-intensify or intensify as they are diluted with water. Adding a bright and warmer hue of the same color will re-intensify a color.

Then we de-intesified the colors at each value. As I discussed earlier in a blog about gray, the way to deintensify a color is to add it’s compliment. Red and green deintensify each other as do purple and yellow and blue and orange.

Colors will appear brighter next to their compliment and next to deintensified color.

In the afternoon we discussed the color of shadows. Shadows are generally the deintensified compliment of the color of the object casting them as altered by the color of the surface they fall on.

Light will bounce from surface to surface. Thus one object will affect the color of the object next too it.

This little painting is a lesson in color begun in the workshop.  I rarely work from other people’s photos, but this painting began with one of Karen’s photos.  The photo showed  two mangos and a pear.  I moved the second mango onto the wall.

The bright fruit works well for playing with the color concepts we discussed in class.  The green pear and the red mango are compliments.  Therefore the shadow of each is the color of the other.  The red of the mango reflects onto the green of the pear.  The deintesified floor helps make the  relatively intensified color of the fruit pop.  The background is almost as bright as the fruit, but it’s darker and much cooler in temperature.  Both dark values and cooler colors tend to recede.

This painting is protected with a polymer varnish and may be framed with or without glass.


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September 19, 2010 9:23 am

The Corrugated Plain

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by Jenny Armitage    in biography,for sale,landscapes,prints available,watercolors
The Corrougated Plain, a watercolor of Montana by Jenny Armitage.

The Corrugated Plain (11 x 15 watercolor) $175.00

I spent a few hours at The Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument in Montana. My husband is a sort of pocket expert about Custer’s Last Stand so it was a place we simply had to go if we got within three hundred miles of it.

Stephen did show me over the battlefield. Standing on the actual ground makes many contemporary descriptions clearer. Western plains are deceptive. They often look flat from a distance, but turn out to be steep and hilly. People, houses, factories hide in what looks like an unobstructed view to the horizon in a all directions.

The battlefield is like that. From the ridge you have the illusion that you can see all, but you can’t. And the land leading up to the ridge is steep and hard. But my painting is not of where Custer made his famous last stand. Instead, I painted view from where his Lieutenant Reno was pinned down. Reno retreated up the gulches after meeting the Indians in the valley below. The hills are probably much the same, but the river below snakes through a flat valley and it has moved over time. And of course that fields and ranches now occupying the land came after the battle.

Despite the graves, the markers of where Custer’s men fell and where Indians fell, the land itself remains beautiful.

Painted on Arches cold-pressed 140# paper with phthalo blue, cobalt blue, cerulean blue, quinacridone deep read rose, burnt sienna, quinacridone gold and raw sienna.


Or purchase a print through Fine Art America.com.

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August 22, 2010 6:58 pm

Wet Summer in Big Sky Country

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by Jenny Armitage    in landscapes,prints available,sold,watercolors
Wet Summer in Big Sky Country a Watercolor by Jenny Armitage

Wet Summer in Big Sky Country (watercolor 10 x 14) (SOLD)

I grew up in the mountain-west.   It’s dry country.  On the plains it’s high desert.  In the mountains it’s not exactly a desert, but it sure isn’t lush either.   This summer, it was wet all across the mountain states.  Wyoming was green.   Let me repeat that, sage brush covered Wyoming was green. Yellowstone was positively lush with green grass. The park probably had twice it’s usual allotment of wet land.

This is the east side of Yellowstone National Park above the lake, but below Yellowstone’s Grand Canyon. The colors looked like spring, but the grass was much too long.  The silver stream is really just endless wet ground—a spontaneous marsh, made just for this year.  But between the cloud shadows and the sky reflecting on the water it was beautiful.

I painted it conventionally beginning with the sky and stream, then building up the greens layer by layer.  To get all those shades of green I used three blues (cobalt, phthalo, and cerulean) and two yellows (quinacridone god and yellow ocher). In addition I used burnt sienna and quinacridone deep red rose.

This painting has sold, but you may purchase a print from my gallery at Fine Art America.

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August 12, 2010 11:47 am

The Sunlit Porch

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by Jenny Armitage    in buildings and bridges,for sale,prints available,watercolors
The Sunlit Porch, a Watercolor by Jenny Armitage

The Sunlit Porch (watercolor 13 x 17) $225

I’ve always been intrigued by houses half hidden by trees.  They arouse all of my worst instincts.  The very fact the house is hidden makes me want to spy. I don’t of course, but I want to. The feeling is contradictory in any case because I want a house like that, private and treed. And I certainly wouldn’t want anyone else peering between the leaves.

The house I painted was particularly appealing because of the way the sunlit picked out the front porch. The tree sheltered privacy is an illusion though. And no private person’s privacy was injured by painting it. The house is one of the remaining officers’ houses at Fort Robinson Nebraska. Nor do the trees completely shelter the house, they merely screen it from the parade ground. From the porch one would have an unobstructed view of the northern bluffs. Not a bad thing that.

My painting methods were conventional. I began by tinting the paper with burnt sienna. Then I sketched the house and trees. I painted the house first working from light to dark. Then I added the trees beginning this the trunks. I painted the trees loosely working very wet. Then I scrubbed the edges to soften them and lifted color with a tissue.


Or purchase a print here.

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May 8, 2010 11:22 am

Through the Bamboo Grove

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by Jenny Armitage    in landscapes,prints available,techniques,Uncategorized,watercolors

Through the Bamboo Grove (watercolor 17 x 23) $300

As promised, here is a larger more finished version of the Bamboo Grove.  I left the composition pretty much as it was in my little postcard painting, but I greatly increased the contrast by darkening the shadows and underbrush.

This time I poured the painting.  Pouring watercolor is a process much like batik.

I began by making a value sketch of the painting in graphite.  I transferred my sketch to the watercolor paper with graphite paper.  Then I used liquid mask to save all of the white highlights.  In this case highlights were thin strips of light on the edge of the bamboo, and the ridges where the sections of bamboo meet.

Once the painting was masked, I mixed three colors of paint very thinly in cups: cadmium yellow, new gamgee, and phthalo blue.  I wet the painting and then poured the paint out of the cups across the paper working from left to right and sloping downward.  I poured the yellows first then the blue.

After the painting was dry I masked all of the pastel values, mostly sky and unshadowed path and poured again.  This time I used hansa light and new gamgee for the yellows and both phthalo and cobalt  for the blues.  I added quinacridone deep red rose too.  I mixed all of the colors more thickly than on the previous pour.  I used very little red and tried to isolate it on the bottom on the picture.

I repeated the mask and pouring process two more times masking two sets of medium values.  The last time I poured only shadows and underbrush.

After the painting had dried completely, I removed the mask and assessed the results.  I had beautiful varied greens in the bamboo and nice dark shadows, but bamboos were mostly one value and looked flat.  I darkened the rear bamboo, and shadowed the sides of the bamboo to round it.  I dropped some color into the highlights on the path and added some blue to the sky. I soften the skyline foliage and varied the greens a little there.  I had left a roadway from my reference photo running across  the painting  just below the skyline foliage.  I decided that that was a distraction and painted it out.



 

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May 3, 2010 6:54 am

The Bamboo Grove

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by Jenny Armitage    in landscapes,postcard,sold,watercolors

The Bamboo Grove (watercolor 5 x 7) SOLD

This was an exercise in mixing greens.  The more I looked at this little clump of bamboo, the more I realized just how many greens were there.  To get some of this variety  on paper I used two blues, cobalt and phthalo and three yellows, hansa, new gamgee, and cadmium.   As most of the greens I mixed were blue-greens I used a little bit of  blue green’s compliment, red orange to set them off.  Burnt sienna was perfect for the purpose without any mixing.   I carried the blue-green red-orange motif into the path, painting the red Georgia soil it’s natural red and overlaying it with blue-green shadows.

Funny thing about red soil.  My husband talks about red Georgia clay and how hard it is to dig in or clean out of clothes the way mid-westerners talk of mosquitoes  and three feet of snow.  But here in Oregon we have more than plenty of red clay.  From the mid Willamette Valley south the ground is red as red can be.   And yes it’s hard to wash out of pants.

 

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