I entertained myself by messing about with a tube of indigo watercolor paint -- a very deep, rich color that is fun to play with using wet-in-wet techniques. This is just playing to see what effects I could come up with:
It would work great for stormy skies, or in the next one, maybe a mysterious forest.
In this one, I tried to create a kind of Chinese-style landscape:
It rained a LOT. The next thing I did to entertain myself was to take an online class on craftsy.com
called "Dynamic Detail in Pen, Ink, and Watercolor". The fellow who teaches it, Steven Reddy, has a distinctive style using contour ink drawings, various gradations of ink washes to add value, and a final layer of watercolor. Then he adds hatch marks in pen at the end.
It's not my style of drawing/painting, but I enjoyed the course and picked up a few new tips.
On Friday, Nicole and Tina and I joined the Seattle Urban Sketcher group at the Burke Museum on the UW campus for a couple of hours of drawing fun.
Steven Reddy lives in Seattle and is a member of the group, and he turned up that day, so I was able to show him the one drawing I did in which I used a few of his tips and techniques.
We weren't allowed to use liquids inside the museum, so instead of ink washes, I used three different shades of gray ink-brush pens. Mr. Reddy did the same thing, and we compared brush pens, and he liked the way mine worked a lot better than his and plans to get some of my brand (Faber-Castell).
On Sunday it was both rainy and quite windy. Nicole and Tina came over to my place for a cozy afternoon of still-life sketching, playing/testing out with new materials, and watching some art technique videos. This was just messing around with granulating watercolors:
Nicole brought along her hurdy-gurdy, which she put together from a kit (from the same company, UGears, that I did my little theater kit from). It actually plays--Nicole demonstrated it! I tried to draw it but the design was so complex that about halfway through I gave up trying to get all the details.
And now for a big doggy update. Here is Truman at the pet store, annoyed at my attempt to accessorize him, and blissfully unaware of the huge change that is about to happen in his life.
And here is the huge change:
This is Thumper, a male longhaired dapple dachshund puppy.
He is eight weeks old, and assuming all goes well with his vet check up, in two weeks he will come to Dog End to be Truman's new buddy!
Oh boy, puppy training! Housebreaking! Teething! Craziness! And most of all, extreme adorableness!! Whee!!!!
That was certainly a very busy week despite all the wetness! Can't wait to see how Truman reacts to Thumper and vice versa. I see lots of adorableness ahead.
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