Cleaning up one of my old, old Quiller watercolor palettes. After all these years I decide how much I still love colors by Blockx and Marimeri Blu. Soon it will be time to shop for new paints. Tomorrow I will photograph the 2 new palettes I bought. ONe is rugged and small for plein air.
This woman is a weaver and she was sitting in a dark corner of the marketplace. The sun shone through the archways of the Mexico town plaza. The cobblestone streets are a maze of patterns and colors. Piece by piece, she is coming together. I will add some cast shadows and some detailed drawing elements to help define her more.
This is large, a full sheet watercolor. When you get away from working big, it is scarey to pick it up again. This painting will help me re-discover my old self, when I painted big all the time.
The pallette is my full plastic stephen quiller pallette, now a good 15 or 20 years old. When I grow up, I will get the porcelain studio pallette.
What can I say. I am working hard trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t work in photoshop digital painting. I’m still getting layers mixed up and even though I am still scrambled eggs about it, I am so happy to have learned a new thingy in this one. I found an old abstract painting and brought it in as a background and tilted it, blew it up, changed the levels a lot until I got a nice contrast between the background and my sweet fairy. With that as a positive, the negative is that I feel I lost an opportunity to paint the corn as it should look in moonlight. The same can be said about miss fairy herself, although I like her weird hair with the red maple leaves all over it. I won’t do that again though because I don’t think it worked. When you add something and it looks added and is not inspiring, it will always be a dead issue and is better off left dead. But alas, every time I paint one of these, I get a little closer to getting the concept.
This is the old corn fairy from 2005. I like the idea but I am surely not there yet. All in all, this is the better work but I will meet the challenge of reviving it. It is always good to save your work. It is much more rewarding to revise your own stuff that to just grab something off the web. I love the corn in this and the corn colors. I also think her skin tones are pretty cool. I may try this whole thing again at some later date.
Here is the abstract big watercolor. I changed so much of it –changed the levels and saturation in photoshop. See if you can guess which little section of this I used and manipulated. The original painting is misty and washed out just as it looks here because I washed and tried to scrub out what I had painted a long time ago. Because I used Arches 140lb. cold press, I could not get it all out. Now I am so happy about that because I can use this artwork for so many digital applications now. How cool is that? The other option is that I could paint over it but I think that would ruin it. So I will leave it as it is: a hidden treasure.
This started out as a pencil doodle. When I brought it into photoshop, I adjusted the levels to make the greys of the pencil as dark as I could, and the lights as white as I could. This gave me a little template to build the digital painting on.
There is a lot of painting involved here and a lot of colors and brushwork too. It took a long time. I am learning to navigate through my Wacom tablet which saves a lot of time. Learning shortcuts is amazing. I wanted the wife to have pears on her dress but they are not joyous colors. Because of the situation farmers find themselves in, nothing here is joyous. I hope their expressions reveal what is going on in their lives.
I usually don’t do political drawings but I thought I would have a little fun with this. It was pretty easy choosing an appropriate font for a title. I called it An American Experience because there was a PBS series with this name for a long time. It was a documentary series about cultural phenomena. This font is Goudy Stout. I love the name and think it’s sounds exactly what it looks like.
My favorite part of this piece are the two types of bodies. She is a plump pear and he is a skinny dude. They make a perfect couple that we see in real life just about every day. Regarding the coloring; my favorite part is his blue jeans. When jeans get old and worn, they look kind of yellowish/grey sometimes. There are many layers and tones of the colors on everything here, and I sing the praise of “multiply” brush effects. It adds so much depth and dimension, as it picks up the colors underneath with every stroke.
An additional treat is that it was saved for web as a png file and therefore it can be printed transparently on to different fabrics. This piece ended up looking great on lots of textile products and it really surprised me.
Here is what it looks like on a grey sweatshirt product
This kitty is covered in orchids. I had orchids sitting in front of me from my patio garden and I drew the simple outline of kitty, added wings, a little bird and some fun and not so ordinary color palette. Then I drew abstract fragments of the flowers on his body. The little bird ended up having one of his wings looking like another bird facing in the opposite direction. a perk from heaven.
The font is Gigi. I got the color just by going down a few shades darker than the orchid flower on the color wheel. The whole drawing was done in photoshop with a few simple brushes. lots of layers: orig. scanned art, outline, coloring, text, and a white layer in there to be able to see what it finally would look like.
I love getting comments. Let me know what you think: either about this revision series or any comments on the art are appreciated.
Painting Mexico 
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