Two More Watercolors & Some Quilted Portraits

Three watercolor paintings I did earlier this year will be an exhibit at the Cinema Place Gallery in Hayward:

The Watercolor Show 

Jan. 10- Feb. 23, 2013 

Reception Fri., Jan. 11, 5-7pm

Here are a couple more watercolors I did for my class.

The technique for the first painting was to emulate the texture that Andrew Wyeth used in his paintings. This lantern and the foreground rocks have texture added to them from stippled paint, sanding, and lots of drybrush. This is my husband’s favorite so far this year. I like how most of the painting turned out, but wish the water hadn’t gotten so muddy looking, and I’m not sure about the brown rocks.

The second painting we were to use Turner’s technique of picking paint up after putting it onto the paper to lighten areas. This is a view of Lake Chabot in Castro Valley from an overlooking trail on Fairmont Ridge.

I found a couple of unfinished quilted works I started seven years ago.

 The face on the first is from two pieces of fabric. The face is drawn on with a Pigma ink pen. The shapes and lines are all traced from a photo of Camilla when she was about six years old, but somehow it didn’t end up looking like her very much at all. The part I like best is stalk of succulent flowers I added almost as an afterthought because the bottom seemed to plain, but they never quite seemed to fit with the rest of the image. This one is nearly done except the edges are unfinished. I expect it will stay this way unless I decide to cut it up and use the flowers from it on something else sometime.

I decided to use the same photo as a starting point for a second try. This time I cut all the shapes freehand and went wild with the colors. Maybe too wild. It got put in a drawer at this point and it was forgotten until I dragged it out a week ago. Camilla likes this one, so I decided to see what I could do with it. I’ve added some more fabrics around her since this photo. I’ll post more photos when I see where it takes me.

Watercolor Portrait Completed

When Camilla was two, we were vacationing in Colorado. This watercolor was done from a photo taken on that trip.

The technique for this assignment was glazing, meaning many layers of very watered down transparent layers laid one on top of another to build up the color. I like the results, but didn’t enjoy the process, so this will probably be the last painting I do entirely in glazing. I have used glazing in a limited amount in other paintings where I need to change or darken a color. It also worked nicely to get soft color changes in the face.


Here is a detail of the in progress quilt started last week.

Notan, Gallery Exhibits, & Scrap Starters

Last weekend at CQFA, we did a mini workshop on considering the Japanese concept of Notan in our designs. Here are my workshop results completed with free hand cut paper and glue.

I gallery sat at the Cinema Place Gallery in Hayward for their Abstract Exhibit. It is a nice selection of both two and three-dimensional work. There are three other quilters plus painters and sculptors in the exhibit. Chabot College also has an exhibit there this month. The work in the Chabot exhibit is mostly representational, and is an impressive display of drawings, paintings, and sculpture.

Wanting a small project I could do in between my current watercolors, I thought I would try completing a small quilt started with small scraps. I saw this idea on Franki Kohler’s blog. Franki was inspired by an article by Jenny Bowker in Machine Quilting Unlimited (May 2011.) Here is my start. The idea is to use the small scrap as in inspiration for the quilting design, and then to expand the design into the plain areas of the quilt with free-motion quilting. I am already thinking about how I might add paint to parts of the quilt.

Completed Teapots

More color has been added to the teapot shadow painting.

I was thinking about keeping the background rather plain. But my instructor liked the pattern on the cutting mat that was sitting behind the still life in the reference photo. Square tiles seemed boring. So I considered what kind of pattern I might quilt if I were designing a quilt, then invented a wallpaper pattern.

The foreground seemed week after I painted the back, so I added a wood grain tabletop.

Upcoming Shows

My work will be in two upcoming shows.

The San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles will hold its 5th Annual High Fiber Exhibit October 20 – November 4, 2012. All of the art in this exhibition is for sale at $500 or less, with a designated percentage of the proceeds donated to the Museum. Four of my quilts along with many other quilted and fiber works were selected for this exhibit.

The Cinema Place Gallery in Hayward will be showing Driven to Abstraction November 1 – November 25 2012. All of the work in this show will be abstract work. Two of my quilted wall pieces, plus my quilted rock, will be in the show. Mine may be the only textile work in the show. I expect to see a lot of paintings and mixed media work.

Shadow Shapes

My instructor liked the second Echeveria painting that I brought to class last week. His only suggestion was to darken the lower right corner a little more to keep the eye from wandering off the bottom of the painting.

The first Echeveria turned into my gesso experiment. The experiment wasn’t very successful in its outcome, but now I know how watercolor will combine with gesso. It is difficult to get even washes or dark colors. It might be useful to add texture to part of a painting, especially in a collage. It doesn’t seem to be a good technique for covering large areas intended for watercolor.

I picked a photo I took of teapots a few years ago for the next watercolor assignment. I chose it for the shadows, because for this assignment we are supposed to paint the shadows first, and then lay the color of the objects on top of the shadow painting.

I thought I was done with the shadow painting, but looking at it now on the computer, I see several areas I need to make darker. I can also see now that the pots have changed shape somewhat from the original. Oh well, they still look like pots.

I’m a bit worried about getting muddy looking colors when I lay down the yellow on the front pot. I should do a test to see if I want to change its color before I paint it.

A second Echeveria

Here is the second attempt at painting this Echeveria. I don’t know if this is looser than the original painting, but I have managed to float more color into the washes.

I’ve been thinking about trying to combine watercolor with quilted fabric, and bought some gesso yesterday with that thought in mind.

Having two paintings that meet the requirements for the current assignment, I thought I might add gesso to parts of the original painting, and give myself permission to play. Now where is the gesso? I have misplaced it somewhere since yesterday afternoon. I have looked through the house. Perhaps it fell out of the bag in the car? Or perhaps it never got put in the bag at the store? I will likely find it the minute I give up on finding it, and go buy a second jar.