Thursday Art Walk

 

In Which I Painted!

It's been a hot minute since I did a proper watercolor! I'll admit, it wasn't what I'd planned for, either. I had wanted the image to be a pencil sketch, not a painting, after all.

But it just wasn't coming together. In fact, nothing I tried seemed to work right. I just kept putting pencil to paper and producing garbage.

The first time I actually succeeded in making something un-sucky, though, I went and botched it. See, I drew a desert/mountain landscape in my sketchbook, and then I added color. That's fine, my watercolor pencils are good wet or dry, and I started laying in colors - darker towards the foreground, lighter into the distance. All was well until I backed away from it and realized that what I'd taken as good layering of pencils was instead really patchy and scribbly in a bad way.

So I may have uh... used a water brush to blend things.

In a standard sketchbook.

Yeah, that piece is now a ripply mess. I had to start over.

Thankfully, I remembered that I have a hot press watercolor block, so I started to try recreating the image on a much smaller scale and much nicer paper.

The layering still kind of came out sucky when it was dry so I grabbed my water brushes again! This time, the landscape came together in a much more dreamlike and flowy state.

I waited for it to dry, signed it, then decided to photograph it.

"At Distance" watercolor pencil, 2023 [LOCATION]

I wasn't quite satisfied with the photo, though, so I headed down to the basement to pop the 6"x8" (15,24cm x 20,32cm) piece in the scanner only to find that somehow the hinges had completely detached and the machine had a jam in it somewhere. After much squinting and shimmying, I managed to put the flatbed/printer back to rights and slid my art onto the glass before jogging back up to my room.

Now, hinges aside, I have a major complaint about this scanner. It's too bright. Everything gets super washed out by it. I really should just pop a piece of black construction paper in there with my paintings because it can be very very hard to get things situated properly, color-wise. That being said.... sometimes it does things that surprise me:

Scanned Version of "At Distance"

See, it's super washed out, but I kind of... like it? It's so bright and while a lot of detail gets lost, it's so much more vibrant and you can see the edges of the colors more and it looks more like a sun-drenched dreamscape!

What do you guys think is the better version? Do you have any suggestions to help make scanning easier and more effective?

Next week's guaranteed category is my first Word in a long time! We'll see how this goes!

If you want to add to the pictures I put up, you can request a category via Ko-Fi!  Just buy me a coffee and leave a message with it telling me which category (Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, Dedbert, Location, Geometric, Word) you'd like to see, and I'll draw or paint it and put it in the blog!

Go Enjoy Something!

FC