Three Choppers (9 x 12 watercolor) $150

A couple of Sundays ago I spotted a group of perhaps a dozen RUBs (Rich Urban Bikers) haveing coffee at Starbucks.    The parked bikes obscured  some but not all of the leather clad men.   The image is grand, but I expect it will be difficult to paint the men, the men seen through the chopper windshields, and choppers all at once and still get it right.   So started with just three of the bikes and Starbuck’s window.

I hardly ever paint real black black black.  I find it makes a dead spot in my paintings so I always use dark blue, purple, maroon, or green instead.  This time I opted for dark purple and dark blue.  Having painted purple bikes, I decided to use the wall to make it a complementary color scheme.

I like it.  My preteen girls hate it.  They hate the subject, the colors, and everything else.  I think they are thinking of the Hell’s Angels and drug gangs, but I’m not sure.

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Reflections in the Late Afternoon (14 x 19 watercolor) $250

This is Gig Harbor, Washington in the late afternoon, though it could be almost any harbor for pleasure craft. I love to do reflections and docks are a great place to find them. In the late afternoon, the water gets almost black and the reflections of white boats become even more dramatic. But it was the contrasting wooden hull of the right most vessel that really caught my eye.

I often delete the names of boats, but I liked the name Simplexity so I kept it in. I”m not entirely sure what “simplexity” means, but my painting is of a complex scene much simplified by the process of elimination, so it seems to fit somehow. The brightness of the light eliminated some detail for me and the deep shadows eliminated some more. I just went with the flow and removed some background boats, a lot of rope, and much hardware.

The real trick was getting the orangey wood of the boat to carry enough to make it the center of interest despite the extreme contrast of the white boats against the blue-black water. To get the orange I wanted I mixed burnt sienna with new gamgee. Then I glazed portions of it with quinacridone Rose Madder and more new gamgee. I deliberately downplayed the flag in favor of the hull. Down in the reflections the flag does become a secondary center of interest.

My palette also included cerulean blue, phthalo blue, and cobalt blue.

I worked without mask this time painting each boat, in tandem with it’s darker less vivid reflection. After I finished the boats I added the water in phthalo blue dulled with burnt sienna.

This painting is currently for sale on line at my Etsy shop. Or purchase a print here.

Tulips, Jade, and Books (watercolor 8 x 11) $100.00

Our house is covered in floor to ceiling book shelves.    So it was really only a matter of time before the shelves showed up in one of my still lifes.  This time they feature only as a reflection.

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Jade and Tulips (watercolor 11 x 14) $250

Years ago I celebrated a new job by purchasing a jewelry box I had coveted for several years.  I love oriental furniture with it’s brass hinges and inset  jade and soapstone.  I find a whole room full of  such furniture much too heavy.  But the jewelry box was everything I loved about the furniture in miniature.  And despite it’s exoticness, it looks perfectly at home on my plain pine dressers.  And it has the added advantage of actually looking better half open with the jewelry hanging out than it does closed.

It took me some time to compose a picture with my jewelry box at the center.  The problem is that the box’s shape  is really just that,  a vertical rectangular box.  Compositions with the complete box were brought to a complete and boring full stop by the edge of the box.   In the end, I subordinated the box to the tulips and  cropped it along one edge.  The dark open door of the box makes a beautiful foil for the bright tulips.

Once composed, painting the picture was relatively straight forward.  I masked the highlights and then began with the tulips painting them in a various combinations of hansa yellow, hansa gold, yellow ochre, cadmium yellow, and cadmium red.  The leaves are combinations of the same yellows with cobalt and phthalo blue.   I used the same colors for the jade necklace and insets as I did for the foliage.

I went on to painting vase and metal hinges using primarily yellow ochre, raw sienna and burnt sienna dulled with cobalt blue and cerulean blue.  I added the box in combinations of burnt sienna, quinacridone magenta, and dioxazine purple.

The dresser top is layered washes of burnt sienna, raw sienna, and burnt umber.  The wall yellow ochre and dulled with dioxazine purple. Layed the wall on very heavily to allow the tulips to pop.

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