Alldredge Gardens Orchids

From when one of our watercolor groups had their garden center paint out, I have been antsy to paint pale yellow orchids.  First image is without any background then the bottom is with the darks added.  This paper is handmade Indian A4 (8.5x10.5) I bought at the Tate Gallery in St. Ives, Cornwall and has a rough texture.  I was not sure if I could do a decent floral on it or not; it is cold pressed with uneven edges, finished last night because today painting a crow after seeing Janet's photo had me going.

Arches Watercolor Board and Vacations

This is a demo I did on the new Arches watercolor board.  It can be varnished and hung without glass or mat and comes in great big sheets (32 x 40).  I found it excellent to work on.  Classes are almost over - Tuesday is my last one and summer, here I come!

Most beautiful sunflowers

Thanks to all my Artcolony friends for the most beautiful bouquet of yellow sunflowers and blue irises. The funeral director must have thought so also for the flowers were placed on the front table with the guest register. Sunflowers always make me smile. My dad would have been so proud to see all the family and friends gathered in his honor. Friday morning at 10:00am we gather again for the funeral service.

Watercolor class

Today's class was all gals who had never used watercolor before.  This lady did a great job.  She developed a few "blossoms" which we thought were interesting enough to leave alone.  These classes are provided free to members of a S. Calif medicare insurance provider.  They offer a class of some kind almost every day for their members who are so happy to take advantage of them. I was hired to fill in for an instructor who cancelled for the month of May.  Hopefully, I can continue.  It's fun.

Yellow Wild Flower

I have been trying to do some acrylics along with some other stuff. I am snowed under (or sanded under!)haha.. I haven't been here on the blog much, trying to keep up.I am teaching a 2 day

 workshop this next Friday, then the festival in Lubbock, then another workshop. 

It is with Watercolor sketchbooks  though. Am looking forward to it. This little flower is 

growing behind our barn..it is really a weed, but I don't call them weeds, I call them Wild flowers!

 We still haven't had but about 2 inches of rain, and nothing much is growing except these little things.

It is just a 5x7 because I wanted some small things to take to the festival.

Ona I found him

I found the missing animal Ona, he almost got away he was hiding under my bed.

Let me introduce him his name is Fat Cat.

It's Competition Time!

Ok folks... time for some fun :)

I've now finished painting all the teddies so I just have the one mystery 'teddy impersonator' left to paint. My Ted 'models'  gathered round this evening for another look at my progress. Your challenge is to let me know what each of them is saying. Imagine each has a speech bubble.... what would you write inside?

The person whose ideas make me laugh the most will win one of my small -Ted themed giclee prints.... how's that for an incentive to have a go :)

The competition will run on my own blog, here on the Art Colony blog and on my Facebook page. Just add a comment with your ideas to any of these or e mail me at ona@onak.ca. I will announce the winner at the weekend.

A special thanks to one of my facebook friends Gill for the idea.

Ona

Janet here's my twin to your leaf-lette

Okay, Janet.  Here's some encouragement for you to enter that leafy lovely of yours in some competitions.  This "Sunny Day Cherries" got a merit award in a local show and a merit in the Blossom II international competition. I'm sure you'll do better than that!  I painted this on a large 24" x 34" watercolor board and it was a real pain.  The paint soaked in and would NOT lift. It was watercolor paper mounted to illustration board.  I had the board for maybe 20 years before I got around to using it.  Maybe that was the problem.

Flamingo Friends

I paint a lot of flamingos and thoroughly enjoy each endeavor as all the birds are different.  Every time we visit Las Vegas, I go to the Flamingo Hilton to take more photos of their wonderful flock in their own enclosed habitat.  Size is 20x30 watercolor on Strathmore 500 series heavy wt. plate illustration board painted Saturday in about 2 hours 25 minutes.  I had not worked on IB in many years and it was quite fun, different from Yupo but still allowing for looseness and depicting these water birds in watercolor. 

Solitude

 A small painting to get me back in the painting mood.  



Friday's oil and acrylic class

These gals were fun in class today. They're so energetic and creative. They each brought previously done large canvases that they wanted to add koi to. The gal with the clouds wants a private lesson next week to work on her clouds. I wasn't going to teach next week, but I'm going to squeeze her in.

There was another lady at class, also.  She kept mentioning paintings of mine that she had copied and even sold one . Geez didn't she even consider that I might not like that too much!

Mysterious Murder of Crows!

May Challenge!

While on my recent trip to Vancouver to visit my beautiful daughter Jenn, we went walking almost every day with Oliver  (Jenn's very photogenic and playful Irish Setter).  Pretty intriguing how every day at suppertime, the trees were full of crows... fascinating and creepy as well.   Well, the intriguing part won me over and I kept taking photos of them.  Jenn thought I was nuts - think she still does!

More on the crows - apparently every night at sundown they fly to Burnaby  (this link takesyou to the story about thier nightly migration)- no kidding - weird or what!

Anyway, thinking I may see a series in this....

Oh yes, a gathering of crows is called a murder of crows

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Impersona-Ted WIP1

I've had a tough couple of days trying to cope with the side effects of the next stage of medication increases so thought I would start painting a fun, cuddly, feel good painting to cheer me up... I get to cuddle teddies as I look at them and paint too which can't be bad:)

Yes, I'm playing with the -Ted theme again ... this time using the word 'Impersonated'. At the moment the painting is still very much a work in progress but i couldn't resist sharing this  fun photo of my teddy models inspecting the painting so far... I hope they approve :) Can you guess from the shapes left still to paint who or what the impersonator might be? :)

The painting is a gallery wrapped watercolour stretched over 12 by 28 inch stretcher bars. I expect my progress will continue to be closely monitored as I finish this painting :)

Leaf it to me

I don't think I ever fought with a painting like I did with this one. Although it is framable and may grace the corner of a room in my house, it will never see the inside of a competitive show. There are wonderful spots that make me really happy but other areas that I scrubbed the life out of the paper. Done on Arches #140 but the left corner may be down to # 90. ( Do they still make that ? )

Buttercups & Spring Lambs

I'm getting a lot finished today - here's Buttercups, watercolor on stretched paper.  My initial washes of color were wonderful, but they lost a lot of their pizzazz when I put all the detail on.  It's okay anyway.  www.debwatson.org

Red Wine and Cherries

This one is finally pretty much finished...goodness...it's taken longer than usual to paint.  I'll admit that all the work has been done while at art retreat on Tuesdays, and we do too much giggling and talking to be working on something this delicate and needing as much focus...I seem to get side tracked too easily...ha.   I've added more layers of burgundy in the decantur and may still add a touch or two more under the neck area.  I have a new monitor (my son thought I needed one as he claims mine was like a "bag phone" in quality if any of you remember those relics) so the reds are out of whack until I can get it adjusted better, but I think I'm on to new stuff.  I'm doing some demos for our PaintingFriends group in Florida again this summer, and we're doing more crystal, some silver, and some collage and weaving that Suzy Powell taught while she was here earlier.  I need to get to work on painting and stay out of the flowerbeds...

Deer on Watercolor Canvas.

This is watercolor on Fredrix watercolor canvas.  I still find canvas difficult to work on and continue to experiment with some of the new materials.  The classes I teach are over at the end of the month and I can work on finishing all the paintings I have started.  That means more painting - yeah!  www.debwatson.org

Down on the Farm

15x22 watercolor on 300 lb cold press paper, begun yesterday then finished after work this evening.  This scene is on our home place between Ackerly and Vealmoor TX and I photographed this cute brown calf et al years ago but never painted it.  You can see the old cement stock tank in the background and of course dust everywhere.  I especially liked the long evening shadows from the animals' bodies across the picture plane foreground.  Fence posts were negatively painted and Daniel Smith pigments were used.