New Watercolour

This 15" x 22" watercolour is the first in a new series of paintings inspired by a recent trip to Southeast Asia.

This one is called "Morning - Phnom Penh."

Portrait of a Young Woman

This is a recent watercolour portrait, painted from life, of a young woman.

Wednesday Night Drawing

This is from last Wednesday night at my drawing group. A twenty minute painting of the model from behind. I am fairly happy with this one.

Sunday Portraits

At the art club that I am involved in Toronto we do a couple of informal portrait sessions a month in which club members sit for the other members for short (25 minute) pose. This painting was from the most recent one that I attended. It is one of three that I did that day and I consider it quite successful. Unfortunately I did it on an old piece of watercolour paper and the sizing had deteriorated or been damaged so that it didn't take the paint properly. Ah well!

Portrait

This is another portrait painted at my regular Tuesday evening session.

As I was just starting out to draw the figure I noticed how the line of the shirt front (where it buttons) makes a nice subtle curve which starts at the top of the head and follows down the neck and down the shirt.

This forms a good gesture line for the portrait.

Figure Study

As I have previously mentioned I belong to an Art Club that provides the opportunity to paint and draw from a live model several times a week. This is the figure study which I did yesterday. I have cropped it down from 15 x 22" to about 11 x 16 because of some overworking on the left hand side. 

Overworking is the bane of the watercolourist. It usually starts with an attempt to improve some part of the painting, which most times leads to then trying to fix that part because the improvements didn't work. It may stem from the feeling that whatever one is painting is the best one has done or at least pretty good and in an attempt to make it even better, ironically it gets worse. Many an artist talks about how they reached a certain point at which they were very happy with what was going on and then proceeded to ruin it.

It has been said of painting in general, and this applies particularly to watercolour that it requires two people to paint; one to do the painting and the other to take the brush away and say, "Ok, you can stop now, that's enough."