Aug 06

World Watercolor Month 


31 Days of Painting with Watercolor
A Charitable Event to Support Arts Education

Charlie O’Shields started to capture little bits of the world in ink and watercolor in July 2015. Even though he hadn’t picked up a pen to sketch in over 20 years and he’d only just used watercolor for the first time that day, he got excited about it and Doodlewash was born.

Vocabulary - Inspiration and Afflatus
Inspiration might be described as a breath of fresh air, and so it is appropriate that inspire derives in part from a word meaning "to breathe"—Latin spirare. Afflatus is a lesser-known word for inspirationthat followed a parallel route. 
Afflatus, which in Latin means "the act of blowing or breathing on," was formed from the prefix ad- ("to, toward") and the Latin verb flare ("to blow"). That Latin verb gave us such words as inflate and (via French) soufflé. The Roman orator Cicero used afflatus in his writings to compare the appearance of a new idea to a breath of fresh air. Nowadays, one often finds the word preceded by the adjective divine, but poets and artists can find afflatus in the material world as well


Instagram Account
For All You Tech Savvy & Happy To Be So Peeps
Our watercolor community now has an Instagram account: @watercolorcommunitysf.
If you have any digital pictures or your paintings, please send them to: watercolor.sf@gmail.com. It is a great way to share our work with each other and expand our audience for our shows.
- This forum is kind and generous, not mean and nasty like some others.
- It is a visually strong forum, but a few words attached to each picture gives the image some support.
- Your name does not need to be attached to the picture if you don't want it there. Totally up to you, just let me know. If you have your own account, and want to be tagged, I can do that, too.

This image is an example of a post, from David Hockney's account.


Jun 29

10 Painting Principles
This is a great list for checking out anyone's work. When I am not sure what to modify in a painting that needs something, this is pretty much what runs through my head. 
10 Painting Principles

Gregg Kreutz is the author of this list. He is an oil painter, but I am including his website so that you may see his work and how he uses the above list.
Gallery

This is a great little video at the end of the article that you may miss. I love it!
A creative pick-me-up


Painting With Greens

This article strips greens down to 4 colors.

As Pablo said -
“They’ll sell you thousands of greens. Veronese green and emerald green and cadmium green and any sort of green you like; but that particular green, never.” -Pablo Picasso
4 Color Combination for Greens


Jun 22

Vocabulary - Grisaille
The colour grey has been used throughout art history. The technique Grisaille relies on it. Here the background and outlines of a painting are composed in grey and white, the colours then applied on top, and the underlayer giving a helpful shading effect. Rembrandt, an expert at mixing a wide variety of greys, used this technique for many of his portraits. Another artist known for his use of grey was James McNeill Whistler, who mixed a very particular grey for the background of his 1871 painting ‘Arrangement in Grey and Black No.1’, best known as Whistler's Mother. Whistler's extensive grey tonal subtleties went on to directly influence the French composer Claude Debussy’s 1899 musical composition ‘Nocturnes’ of which he wrote "an experiment in the different combinations that can be obtained from one colour – what a study in grey would be in painting."
Wikipedia - Grisaille

Jun 15

9 Ways to Paint Impressive Watercolor Flowers

I don't usually include outright ads in this blog, but ArtistNetwork has some great videos, created by artists that many of us are familiar with, from their books. I don't know the pricing of these classes, but they look good.
Here are some of the artists:
Hazel Soan
Soon Warren
Jean Haines
Julie Gilbert Pollard
Paint Impressive Watercolor Flowers



How to Place Figures in Your Landscape Paintings

"Even just a single figure, carefully placed, can add life, a sense of scale and real interest to your landscape paintings."
Place Figures in Landscape Paintings


Jun 01

Kyle Gallup




Kyle Gallup is an American artist living and working in New York. 

She was invited to a Winsor & Newton International Residency.

This is her website
This is her Watercolor/City page


May 18

Backgrounds









Some Types of Background
None added
Vignetted
Simple and plain
More detailed
Background as the main subject

How to Choose the Best Background for Your Artwork

May 11

Smart History


Smarthistory is a non-profit collaboration that brings art's global history to everyone.
 I just found this site and think it's a great resource. There are videos about individual artists and/or painting that highlight the different periods and movements of art history.
SmartHistory