Thursday Art Walk

 

Today's Theme: LOCATION

Today was... hot.

It was so hot out.

I am not built for 77% humidity and 86℉/30℃ heat that feels more like 96℉/35,6℃ heat and no breeze...

But I am built to paint, so I did it anyway!

I've technically attempted this painting before. I've done it a few times, actually, but I wanted to see if I could actually replicate it with any accuracy now, so I pulled up the Nianiani video on the "Sparkly Shoreline" painting and set to work. Since she's a legit pro, she makes it much better, but I figured I'd try to follow her steps to the best of my abilities and see how it turns out.

Here's my process (more or less):

Blending sea & sand

Laying the blobs, finding the shore

Layering more and more blobs, redefining the shore

Struggle with white paint, think you're done...

I was not, of course, done with that last image. No, no.  I had to add more white, and also redefine the shoreline again, and then I had to go pray for the scanner to work, and then I smoothed a few things out digitally.

"Beach Day"; watercolor & digital; 2022

I really like how much warmer it looks scanned. That's closer to what it looks like in real life! I used my cheap Emooqi paper for this one, and after having used it a few times now, I have to say that it's pretty good practice paper. It has a very noticeable ridge pattern to it, but it holds paint well and it flattens out after you paint on it pretty well, too.

I can't recommend using white watercolor and white gel pen in the same image, though.

The white takes way too long to dry when layered thickly enough to become opaque, and the gel pen can cut into the page, but all it takes is a 127 opacity layer of white to hide the worst offenses in Paint.net. I also added a few more spots here and there with the digital adjustments. No color besides white was added, and when I say white, I mean 255/255/255 maximum white.

If you want your theme covered next week, feel free to drop me a coffee via my Ko-fi link in the sidebar and attach a message stating which category you'd like (Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, Location, Geometric, Word)!

And Go Enjoy Something!

FC