Catching Up with some more orphans

I love just about everything about blogspot except my inability to put pictures where I want them to be. This layout doesn't make me happy but it's the best of what I can come up with! You'll just have to use your imagination and move the cat up to the big open space at the top middle, where she belongs LOL. 


I was going through a few of my old sketchbooks looking for some small images to put into Cooking at the Hedge and found these few, that with a few adjustments, would work nicely. So here they are here first. 

Gothenburg, Sweden

Today I decided to work on finishing up some old pieces that have been hanging around waiting for some attention. 

This is a street in Gothenburg, Sweden that I did as part of the September 2014 Virtual Paintout destination. 

My perspective is a little wonky but given that the original is 4 x 6 inches, I'm going to cut myself some slack about that. 

If I were going to change anything it would be to lighten the window in the front door of the first house - the contrast against the bit of white from the porch pillar really draws the eye and I'd rather the eye go to the bow of the boat against the reddish purple foliage. 

Hoarding Bits and Bobs

I'm always amazed when something that seems to have gone wrong in the first pass can eventually be turned into a much better something with a little time and perspective. 

This was a random doodle basically done as a stream of consciousness painting last Fall. No pre-planning just sketch out a pumpkin and some indian corn using only my brush. 

Wasn't happy with it - the husks from the corn were going every which way, defying gravity; it just wasn't speaking to me. And yet, I couldn't put it in my scrap/testing paper pile. Fast forward to this year where I had forgotten what my original intent was behind the exercise and sat down to see what I could salvage. This is what I came up with.

The husks are still as willy nilly as ever but i feel like this was more what I was hoping for. Knowing me, I'll continue to play with it - the husks continue to cry out for more attention in terms of texture and shadow - but at least I don't feel like I should be using it to test colours on either. 

Another Orphan

 Have been sorting through my abandoned orphans drawer and picking out pieces to work on. Most of them, as this one is, are from some of my very early watercolour classes. This one is from the fall of 2007.

I was studying with Johnnene Maddison, a wonderful local artist who was instrumental in teaching me the fundamentals of watercolour. Being new to the medium, I often only got the lightest of values down in class with notes taken on how to complete each painting later.

Now watercolours, by nature, dry considerably lighter than when they're first put down. During the week between classes, I'd get out my notes and tackle the midtones. Annnnnd that would be as far as I would get. I was so fearful at the time of ruining what I had done LOL.

As my confidence has grown over the years, I am really enjoying going back to these pieces and pretty much approaching them with reckless abandon! As it stands now, they're just scrap paper so I may as well do something to them. Being able to finally put in 'the darks' just makes them come off the page for me.

I still have lots more playing to do with this one - the left side has been terribly neglected so far - but I'm very pleased with the progress!

It's beginning to feel like Spring

Poured Daisies (c)2015 Susan Langdon
7x5 in on 140 lb CP Strathmore paper

Temps are rising, snow is melting and it truly feels like winter is letting go. My personal challenge to do something art wise every day for a month is definitely working.

Some days it's new work and other times it's searching through my orphan drawer and taking out a half finished piece and working on it. That's what happened here.

This was a poured piece that I did last year, oddly enough during this same period of ennui. It was okay but didn't feel finished, yet I didn't know what it needed. This year, apparently, it needed a little ink work.

It's different for me but that's okay - I'm in a mood to break out of my norm and try new things.

Another revisit to 2007

It was during this time period that I started to realize that I couldn't paint and learn at the same time. Learning is left brain for me and painting is definitely right and the structure of J's classes was she would demonstrate for ~10 minutes, we would return to our seats and try and emulate what she had done and then it was back up to the front for the demo of the next stage.

Needless to say while I was learning, I was not overly joyed at my output. It is satisfying to me to go back and see what I can do to resurrect some of these early works. Not all are salvageable but I'm pleased that they're better than they were left originally and that definitely shows me I've learned some things along the way. Gosh after the bad grammar and poor sentence structure I'm glad no one but me is seeing this.

Okay here's where it started

2007

And here's what I was able to do with it. I could've done more with the branches but I didn't like it to begin with so this is as much time as I'm willing to spend on it LOL.

2014

I didn't have the original photo to work from so all additions are made up by me. It's funny, the 'darks' are what makes a piece for me and yet because of the way things generally work In watercolour - moving from light to dark - that's the thing that's missing from so many of my early pieces, because we never/rarely got that far in class!

If I find I pick this up again to do the darks on the tree branches I'll post an update here.

Another forgotten piece altered



2007

2014

Dug this piece out of my orphans' drawer to see if I could improve it. It was from a class with J done in the winter of 2007. She has an amazing ability to put blobby brush marks together and have it make sense, a skill I still lack to this day. At the time, I was just thrilled that my birdhouse looked three dimensional! 
However, after playing with some glazes to cool certain areas down, I was able to create some depth of field and I think it's somewhat better. At least there seems to be some order to all the chaos in green rather than the messy jumble in the original.

My orphans' drawer is populated with lots of these pieces so I will likely be doing this again and posting them here so I can compare them.

A disaster remastered

This piece evolved over a period of many years. Originally the leaves were to have pink edges and blend into the green - that was the disaster part. I clearly didn't know what I was doing and it didn't work. Hard edges everywhere and no blending LOL.

So I painted the bud and cropped it digitally to use for cards. End of story or so I thought. Jump forward to yesterday when Nan was looking for something to take as a housewarming present for a mutual friend who had been asking about my artwork.

She liked this and asked would I give it a try and see if i could fix it. And this was the result. Not bad considering I didn't have a reference to work from, nevermind I was unsure of what colours I had used. I've cropped it again here in order to eliminate a big magenta blob that somehow had worked it's way onto the original - probably because it had been relegated to the scrap pile in my head LOL.

Nan is off to find a mat and frame so she can take it to dinner at A's tomorrow night. Hope she likes it. Can't deny I'm a bit chuffed with how it turned out, hence posting it here.