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MARSHA REEVES ART
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Beginning Watercolor, Lesson 1: A simple landscape

2/18/2015

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The following is the first of a series of lessons for beginners in watercolor, which I am presenting to a class at Butterfly Gallery in Dripping Springs, TX, Feb 14-March 14, 2015.  I am posting these for the benefit of my students, and for anyone else interesting in learning watercolor painting.

 Concepts:  graded wash, wet-in wet painting, mixing greens, scraping, wet on dry painting, negative painting, Aerial perspective
Materials:  1/4 sheet of watercolor paper, drawing board, masking tape, your largest brush, a blue paint, a yellow paint, and a brown paint and water. (I used Pthalo blue, Cadmium yellow, and burnt umber). You will also need something to scrape with.  This can be the side of an eraser, an old credit card, a palette knife, or even a kitchen spatula.
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Use Masking tape to tape your 1/4 sheet of watercolor paper to a drawing board. I am using Saunders Waterford Rough paper.
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Dip your brush in water and then into blue paint. Mix the paint and water into a puddle on your palette. The Pthalo blue I am using makes nice greens, but is a strong, staining color. Make a puddle of a yellow(I used Cadmium yellow) and a brown(I used burnt umber).
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Use your largest brush to thoroughly wet the paper by brushing water across it. Tilt the drawing board to pour off excess water. Dip your brush into the puddle of blue. Paint the blue in a horizontal line across the top of the paper moving l-r. Without dipping into more color, make a second horizontal line under the first, moving l-r. keep moving down the paper, l-r without dipping into more color, until you have covered the paper. This will be your "sky".
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Dip your brush into the puddle of yellow. Brush on a "hilside" of yellow into the wet blue paint. The yellow and blue will combine to make green.
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Add more yellow and blue to the page to make different kinds of greens. Tilt the board and let the colors blend naturally on the paper. Add some brown for rocks. Try to make your colors darker and stronger as you approach the foreground. Wipe excess liquid from the bottom of the picture.
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Use pale blue paint to incicate a distant hill. Use a tool(I used a palette knife) such as a palette knife, old credit card, the side of eraser, or other tool to scrape "rock" shapes into the hillside.
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While the paper is still wet, scrape in some "grass" and "twigs". Let the paper dry.
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This is the actual painting from the class demo. After the paper has dried, Use wet green paint on the dry paper to add some background trees and brush. Use the darker green paint to paint around the tops of the yellow grass on the top of the hill, so it appears to be growing in front of the trees. Use brown to add some twigs. Add any needed light blue paint to the distant "hill". As things recede into the background, they become lighter and bluer. This is called "aerial perspective".
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After I got home, I added some darks (some dark blue and some brown paint) to the hillside to add interest to the picture. I also added some darker patches to the bushes and trees in the background. I made the "birds" in the sky from a grey mixed from blue+brown. When this dries,(several hours) I will sign it, and carefully remove the tape by pulling it AWAY from the paper.
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Plein Air at the Old Bakery

11/11/2014

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PictureMe and my "masterpiece"--a view of the Old Bakery's porch, as seen from the garden and park area at one side of the building.
I spent my birthday, October 25, doing something that scares me a little--painting plein air.  It is comfortable and safe in the studio, I am not rushed for time, and nobody has to see me mess up.  Painting outdoors, or plein air, means that I have to deal with weather, time limitations, and often LOTS of people to see me mess up.  Nonetheless, I have always had a yen to challenge myself to do that which is difficult and scary.  The opportunity arose when Waterloo Watercolor Group, to which I belong, wanted volunteers to paint outside the Old Bakery and Emporium, to publicize the Exhibit we had there as part of the Texas Book Festival.
    Painting outdoors requires lightweight, portable equipment, and I have been collecting materials to use, and ideas from other artists for years.  I have a lightweight Stanrite collapsible metal easel that tilts for watercolor painting, is adjustable for sitting or standing, is inexpensive, (and actually made in the USA)--available from Jerry's Artarama online.  Some Arches and American Journey watercolor blocks supply pre-stretched paper, a Mijello watertight watercolor palette keeps my paints from running out all over everything during transport, some paper towels, pencils, erasers,brushes, a squirt bottle, and a good hat completed my kit.  My family gave me a lovely collapsible cart to transport my materials to the site, so I was ready to go.
    The Old Bakery and Emporium is a lovely building from the late 1800's, which is located on the corner of 11'th and Congress, across from the State Capitol.  Owned by the City of Austin, it has space for changing Monthly exhibits upstairs, and a shop featuring handmade arts and crafts downstairs.  Waterloo Watercolor group had a month-long exhibit there, called "For the Love of Books" which coincided with the Texas Book Festival.  All the paintings in the exhibit were literature inspired, including two paintings of mine:  "Hot Silence of Summer"(inspired by Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles), and "The Red Wheelbarrow II" (Inspired by the poem by William Carlos Williams.
    The trick to plein air painting is to get the basics down as quickly as possible, before the light or weather changes for the worse. You cannot waste time on details. You have to simplify, and indicate things as sparely as possible, letting the viewer's eye finish the picture. To do this, I had to throw out my perfectionist instincts, and just play with the paint.  It was liberating!  I had a lot of fun interacting with the crowd at the Book Festival as well--they were all very kind and encouraging.
   

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Return to Lady Bird Lake

8/1/2014

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Organic and Inorganic Structures

PictureRailroad bridge over Lady Bird Lake.
I live in Austin because I think it is a beautiful place,  Every where I look I see something I want to paint.  One of the lovely things about this area is the many places where water provides a cool retreat from the hot, dry landscape.  Lady bird Lake, Barton Springs, the Highland Lakes, Onion Creek, Hamilton Pool, and Krause's Springs--these and many more are favorite places where water creates a unique mini environment within the Hill  Country Landscape.  My recent projects have centered around Lady Bird Lake.  I like the juxtaposition of the urban structures, including buildings, construction cranes, and bridges, with the organic shapes of the water, trees, and birds.

PictureRAILROAD BRIDGE OVER LADYBIRD LAKE, unframed original, $350
When painting this scene, I decided that the tree next to the bridge pillar on the center right was the center of interest.  I wanted to add more contrast between warm and cool colors to the picture, so I changed the foliage to Fall colors.  In fall, the bald cypresses and sumacs in the area turn brilliant oranges, reds and yellows, and I used those colors to make certain trees, plus the bridge come forward in the picture,  Cooler colors in other foliage and the buildings made them recede.  Some spritzes of water from a fine mist sprayer helped keep the details in the biggest cypress in soft focus, so the eye could go on and travel into the picture.


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Painting Lady Bird Lake

6/28/2014

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Evening Bat Watching Tour

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One of my favorite things about living in Austin, Texas, is the part of the Colorado River known as Ladybird Lake.  It flows right through the middle of town, and it is one of my favorite sights to look down and see paddleboarders and canoers on the lake as I drive overhead on the Lamar Street Bridge.  A specially nice thing about visiting the lake is how quiet it is, since gasoline powered boats are not allowed.  A year ago last spring, I took some visiting friends for a boat tour at sunset, to see the flight of the Mexican Free-tailed bats from under the Congress Ave. Bridge.  I took a lot of photographs.  The challenge now is to turn some of them into paintings.

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I was especially drawn to the bridges on the tour.  As the sun went down, the light on them became more and more golden.  As the boat passed under the massive spans, and past the columns, there was a feeling almost of apprehension, like crossing a portal.  You could feel the heat still radiating off their cement columns as the boat slipped past to the other side.  As the sun got lower and lower, the contrast between cool shadows and water, and warm sunlight grew greater and greater.

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My favorite shot was taken just after the sun went down, as the boat was about to pass under the Lamar Street Bridge.  The sky and water were golden and ephemeral,contrasted with the massive bridge.  Off in the distance, rowers were moving their boats into some unseen place far ahead.  My first attempts at painting this scene were total flops.  Mistake #1 was interpreting the scene too literally, and trying to put everything in just as it was in the photograph.  Mistake #2 was in trying to paint the bridge too accurately.    The bridge became a big impediment, and not something you could pass smoothly under.

On Exhibit at the Dougherty Arts Center

At right is my final version, titled "Passage".  I chose to use a "soft focus" approach to the bridge, trying to give it the effect of being bathed in light.  I rearranged trees and boaters to assist the composition. This painting recently won juror Alexis Lavine's "Top 3" award in the "Windows, Doors, and Gates" exhibit at the Butridge Gallery, Dougherty Arts Center, in Austin.  The exhibit, which includes three of my paintings, will be up from July 9-August 4, 2014.  The gallery is open M-Th from10:00AM-9:00PM, Fridays 10:00-5:00, Saturday, 10:00-2:00, closed Sunday.  There will be a reception July 16, 2014, from 6:00 to 8:00 pm.  I hope that you can come!
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Painting Cerro Castellan

5/28/2014

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Turning a trip to a favorite place into a painting

The way I work has been slowly evolving over time.  Gradually, I have come to realize that the advice of my teachers to do a value sketch before I start to draw on my watercolor paper really IS a good idea.  I am trying to do more of my sketches plein air, but often, when on vacation, that is not practical.  The day we visited Cerro Castellan, in big Bend National Park, it was August and very hot, so I tried to take the best photographs I could of this dramatic volcanic formation.
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Simple value sketch. I often make a grid on my paper to help me place objects.

Color Sketch

Recently, I have added the step of making a color sketch before touching my watercolor paper and paints.  This allows me to experiment with color combinations and object placement.  These sketches are small, only 5"x7", and done in watercolor pencil.  I draw the shapes in lightly with pencil, then add color with the watercolor pencils.  Next, I wet the colored areas with a brush, and spread the paint around a bit.  When the paper dries, I add final details with watercolor pencil, and sometimes pen and ink.  Since these are just experiments, I can work without much stress.
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"Cerro Castellan", 13"x19" watercolor on Saunders Rough paper, $300, unframed.
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Cerro Castellan, In Big Bend National Park. Santa Elena Canyon is in the distance on the right.

Value Sketch

My goal with this little sketch is not to record details, but to work out the placement of shapes and values.  I decided that Cerro Castellan had to be the darkest value in the picture.  I moved the mass of vegetation from left to right to better balance the picture.  I also moved "Santa Elena Canyon" a little to the left, so it would be a recognizable element of the picture.  It is a landmark that is visible from many points in the area.
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Color Sketch: I use graphite pencil and watercolor pencils to refine the shapes and experiment with colors I want to use.

The Final Painting

Now that I have a clearer idea of how I want the painting to look, I can draw my image on the watercolor paper.  I use a 3B graphite pencil to draw the image on 140 Lb Saunders Rough watercolor paper.  No matter how well you plan, a watercolor painting takes on a life of its own during the painting process.  I like the scattered blue passages, and the way they stand out against the orange/sienna colors.
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Drought and Dead Madrones

5/21/2014

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More about the paintings of the little tree in Big Bend National Park

    As summer comes on, and the usual spring rains do not appear, it becomes evident that the drought is still with us.  Reminders are everywhere.  The one that resonates with me personally is the image of the Dead Madrone.  For my most recent Madrone painting, I used a brush instead of pouring, so that I could get more intense reds and yellows in the branches.  My inspiration for this color choice was my memories of science labs in my teacher days.
    When I was a high school science teacher, one of the labs I did was to burn steel wool, in order to demonstrate that burning is a chemical reaction between a substance and oxygen.  Students were asked to record their observations of the steel wool burning, and to record the mass (weight) of the steel wool before and after burning.  They were always surprised to find that the steel wool weighed more after burning, because of the addition of oxygen to its chemical formula.  During the burning process, the color of the steel wool changed from yellow in the hottest parts, to orange, then red, and finally a bluish grey as it cooled.
    I used these colors to describe the dead tree, burning slowly in the summer sun as it gradually decomposed.
Picture
"The Dead Madrone Iv", 15"h x 11"w, Original watercolor on paper, $200.
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Dead Madrone

5/2/2014

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The madrone tree in better days, mid 1990's. It grew in Green Gulch, on the road up to the Basin in Big Bend National Park. In 2010 a severe drought,accompanied by extremely hot summer temperatures, and record cold winter temperatures began in Texas and has persisted up to this day
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"The Dead Madrone", 21"x29". My first painting of the dead tree, done this past fall. I used layers of poured and masked watercolor to create it.
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"The Dead Madrone III", 15"x21", watercolor on paper. Unframed original, $400.
    I have loved this little tree for many years.  Madrones are beautiful trees with red, exfoliating bark, elegant twisting branches, and bright green foliage.  They are truly wild things:  difficult to cultivate, they resent being transplanted and will sicken when watered with treated city water.  Madrones have to be appreciated as and where encountered, on their own terms.
    This particular madrone inhabited the edge of a scenic pull-out in Big Bend National Park.  I always looked forward to sighting my old friend as I neared the end of my 10 hour drive from Austin to Big Bend.  Because I only make it to the park every year or two I was not there to witness its final struggle as another victim of the Texas drought.
    Its dead remains, still standing in the spot by the pull-out, were a shock to me when I visited in the fall of 2012.  Even in death the tree was an elegant natural sculpture, standing as a decaying witness to the losses of drought and climate change.  Friends who have recently visited the park tell me it is still standing there, quietly disintegrating into the landscape.
    The image of the Dead Madrone finally made its way into a painting in the fall of 2013.  Recently, I have finished a second Dead Madrone, and a third is in progress.
    Update:  the third painting , "The Dead Madrone III" has been completed.
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"The Dead Madrone II", 13"x19". This is my second version of the subject. A third is in progress.
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The Garden and Art

4/16/2014

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My original photograph of geraniums destined for my back porch, in the process of being potted.
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"Spring Geraniums I", 21"h x 29"w, unframed original, $700. My first painting based on the geranium photograph.
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Spring Geraniums II, 15"w x 21"h, Unframed original, $400. The second in the series.
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"Spring Geraniums III", 15"wx21"h, unframed original, $400. So far, this is the last of the spring geranium series, and the only one painted in the traditional way, with a brush.
    Every year, spring brings on a form of insanity in me.  I become a compulsive gardener.  Although my rising time the rest of the year is 9:00 am or later, in the spring I get up with the sun, and can't wait to get out the door and dig in the dirt. 
    I prefer to paint the things that are close to my heart, and I try to have my camera ready whenever I am outside.  You never know when a painting will suggest itself.  As nice as photographs are, they tend to do a better job of telling how a scene LOOKS, as opposed to how it FEELS.  So my challenge in painting a scene is always to express as much about how it feels as how it looks.  Given that I love to experiment, and that I am never 100% satisfied with any one painting, I often find myself painting a series of different approaches to the same subject.

Using the Pouring Technique

For the first painting, "Spring Geraniums I", I decided to use poured color.  After the initial drawing, I used liquid latex to mask the areas I wanted to remain white.  I then mixed containers of three primary colors, by combining tube watercolor with water and mixing until it is about the thickness of milk.  I then wet the paper with a sprayer, and pour small amounts of the paint on.  The colors I chose were quinacridone red, cobalt blue, and gamboge.  The trick is to let the colors flow and mix unevenly. 
    After the first layer of paint dries, I then mask the lighter areas with latex.  When the mask dries, I wet the paper and pour some more of my three colors.  I repeat the masking and pouring process, until I have most of the paper masked, and am just pouring my darkest darks.
    When the paper is bone dry, I remove the latex mask, and apply final details with a brush.
    After painting version I, I began to wonder what it would look like if I did a version of the scene using a vertical orientation, with a narrowed view.  I changed the placements of some things, notably the decorative detail on the pots.  For "Spring Geraniums II",I chose to use the same pouring technique, and  the same three colors as before.  No matter how hard one tries, no two paintings come out the same, and in this case, the same colors provided more contrast in the picture.  This painting is called "Spring Geraniums II"

Traditional brushwork

    For my third version of the scene, I wanted to paint with brushes.  I used the same three colors as before, with the additions of raw sienna, sap green, cobalt turquoise, and french ultramarine blue for the darkest darks.  I decided to add a nozzle to the hose to make it more interesting.  The result was "Spring Geraniums III".  I am not sure if I am done painting this series, or which painting I like best.  I will have to let them sit for a while and come back and look at them.
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What to Paint?

3/15/2014

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This was a tough winter, not just climatically, but artistically.  Living in the South, I'm used to Spring starting to happen in February, and look forward to planting my garden and driving around looking at nature.  Not this year!  Winter stayed very late, while my garden tools gathered dust in the garage.  My attempts at painting all went awry, No one will ever see those, except as recycled collages!  I tried looking through my store of photos for inspiration, but nothing seemed right.
    Then I hit on the idea of painting my frustration.  I realized that I had been spending waaaaay too much time staring out the kitchen window looking at sleet and rain.  The potted tulips I always buy as an early harbinger of spring were starting to look ragged,  Household chores were piling up(depressing, ugh), and the little light that was coming through the windows was filtered through rain and frost.  The composition for "Not Quite Spring" was born.
    The most difficult part was depicting the light coming through grungy, frosty, rain-drippy windows.  I used salt to create some of the 'frost" patterns.  In addition, I dropped rubbing alcohol into the wet paint in places to create disturbed areas that might be ice crystals, and ran beads of water down the window area of the painting.  I was careful not to paint too evenly, and to concentrate the pigments around the edges of the window panes, letting the winter "light" shine through the rest.
   
Picture

"Not Quite Spring", 10 1/2" x 14 1/2".
Unframed original, $250

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A "Tail" of Two Cats

2/14/2014

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Picture
"Lurker in the Tomato Patch I", 14 1/2"w x 21"h, Watercolor on paper. Unframed original, $400
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"Lurker in the Tomato Patch II", 14 1/2"w x 21"h, Watercolor on paper, Unframed original, $400
I sometimes work in series.  Whenever I paint, my brain is always thinking "what if"?  What if I change the colors, reposition the objects, use pouring instead of brushwork?  Working in series allows me to explore the many possibilities in a subject.  The catch for me is to not let myself get obsessively stuck on one thing, or to get stale.  The two paintings above were attempts to paint my cat, Albert.  I love to garden, and Albert likes to nap half hidden under the foliage.  I'm not the best weeder, and often my tomato patch takes on the appearance of a jungle.  He has startled me on numerous occasions while reaching through the leaves to pick the tomatoes.  Although I like the sunny quality of version I, I kept thinking about possible changes I could make.  In painting II, I darkened the darks, changed the foreground, and added tomatoes.  Which is your favorite?  Both paintings are for sale--$400 for either, unframed.
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    Marsha Reeves is a watercolor painter living in Austin, Texas

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