I stuck with the Cotman paints and waterbrush just for the sake of seeing whether I could keep things from getting too messy.

The main issue I have with this is that I don’t think I got quite enough contrast.  This has been an issue that I’ve had from the beginning; though I do feel like I’m slowly improving in that regard.

I eschewed the under-drawing, opting instead to lay down the paint directly.  Accuracy suffered, but I like the looseness of the image.  I also opted to use my student-grade paints and a waterbrush for this one, because they are just less hassle to deal with; and tonight was all about minimizing hassle.

I had great plans for drawing and painting for hours at a time.  But the reality of camping in Yellowstone and Custer State Park (South Dakota) was that we were either driving, hiking, sight-seeing, or cooking/eating/washing-up almost every waking hour.  We did manage to shoot close to 1400 photographs while we were out there (hooray for digital photography!  I would NOT want to pay for all that film to be developed), so maybe I’ll try drawing from some of the pics we snapped.

I did manage to spend one afternoon painting at our campsite.  This was our home for most of the trip.

There are a few things that scare me (from an artistic perspective).  Water and people are at the top of that list, so I had to work hard to stifle the voices in my head saying, “what are you doing?  You can’t paint that!”  The water didn’t work out as well as I had envisioned; but given that I was going for something of stylized painting and not realism, I’m really happy with the group of picnickers on the grass.

People who dine at this building in the Lincoln Park Zoo have a nice view of the lion habitat.  The lions have an equally nice view of the people.  I wonder who enjoys watching whom more?

This building caught my eye a few weeks ago, and I’ve been waiting for the perfect day to go back and paint it.  Today was that day.

I arrived before the cafe opened, and sketched out the contours.  I layed down the first set of washes, and then wouldn’t you know… someone came out and opened all the umbrellas.  I decided to leave them closed in this painting and just rely on memory for the color and shadow.

One thing I learned from this painting is that I need to get faster.  It took me an hour and a half to get the painting to its current state.  And, while I’m relatively happy with the end result, it still looks to me like a rather quick sketch.

I’m still having trouble getting really dark darks.  I’m not sure if this is a limitation of the medium or if I’m just doing something wrong.  Given some of the better watercolor paintings I’ve seen, I am inclined to believe the problem is me.

Another thing I learned today is that people will leave you alone at the zoo.  Everywhere else that I’ve drawn in public, people had no qualms about walking right up to me and looking over my shoulder to see what I was doing.  Today, people walked by as if I weren’t there.  That almost more unsettling than the other way ’round.

This is the first traditional watercolor I’ve done in a while.  I’m not sure which I prefer doing: traditional, or ink and wash.  I suppose I’ll have to continue working on both until one emerges as a preference.  The ink and wash sketches are certainly faster to finish; but that may just be a matter of practice.

Note: The scanner washed the colors out slightly.  Bad, scanner.

Yes, that is a Garanimals key chain.  No, I don’t have kids.  Yes, I am a full-grown adult.  That’s just how I roll.

And for the record, I don’t actually wear Garanimals.  Although if I did, it would certainly have prevented a number of fashion faux pas committed by yours truly over the years.

I’ve been in an artistic funk for the past couple of weeks; waiting for inspiration to strike.  It hasn’t.  Fortunately, the Everyday Matters list has lots of things to choose from — no need to wait for inspiration.  Too bad the list can’t come to my house and kick my lazy butt off the couch sometimes.

I stopped on my way home from work this evening to sketch parts of this tree in Oz Park.

Oz Park was commissioned in honor of L. Frank Baum who wrote the Wizard of Oz , and also lived in the area at the end of the 19th century.  It has statues of the Dorothy, the Tin Man, the Scarecrow, and the Lion throughout the park, and is a nice place to go watch people play with their dogs.

This sketch was the result of some recent advice I offered to an aspriring sketcher who was trying to deal with a paralyzing case of fear of failure.  One of those bits of advice was “set a timer for two minutes; go!”.  It occurred to me that the same advice could also be used to overcome the ‘I don’t have time’ excuse that I like to use.  So this is my two-minutes worth (well, actually, the line drawing was two minutes; adding the color was probably only another five or ten minutes after that).

There are plenty of things wrong with it.  Certainly, the colors are completely wrong, because I didn’t have any paint with me at the time; so it was ‘get home, get out the paint, and fake it as best I could’.  And that’s all fine.  The point of this exercise was not to be realistic.  It was just to keep the creative juices flowing.

I’ll tackle something a little more serious when I have more time.  When I don’t have that kind of time, I have to make myself do more of these quickies.  Sometimes quantity is just as valuable as quality.

My plan for this sketch (another view from the back of our condo) was to make the telephone pole the center of attention.  I thought framing it with the flowers and planters we have on our deck would help with that.  Unfortunately, I think the foreground objects have taken over instead of retreating to the background.

I think the single biggest mistake I made in this regard is that I made the plants too colorful, and added too much contrast.  I think if I had made them more sillhouetted, that would done the trick nicely.

Or, I could have cheated, and just done a strategic crop.  But what would that have proven?

I’m also not happy with the how flat the background buildings came out.  I wanted to push them to the background, so I knew I had to leave details out and avoid putting too much emphasis on their color and structure.  Unfortunately, I think I went too far the other way.

Oh well, they can’t all be winners.  Plus, I learned something as a result.  And hopefully, I won’t have to make the same mistake a hundred times before I finally learn how to deal with it.

This lion is the one on the north side of the entrance.  His unofficial name (given to him by the sculptor) is ‘On the Prowl’.  When one of our home teams is in the playoffs, the lions are dressed in team jerseys.  They even have super-size helmets for the lions for football season.  Since it isn’t playoff season, the lions are naked.

I did the line drawing during lunch this afternoon and painted it when I got home this evening.  There was just barely enough time to eat, walk over there, draw, and walk back.  But the weather was really nice today, so I felt like I had to take advantage of it.  People hovered around and looked over my shoulder.  I could hear them whisper to each other, “Ooh, he’s drawing the lion!”  It was, simultaneously, nerve-wracking and exhilarating.

This was real challenge for me for a few reasons: 1. I am intimidated by drawing living things, even if (as in this case) that living thing is not really a living thing; 2. Mostly related to number 1, I actually included a human being in this sketch; and 3. I had to paint from memory so I was left to my own devices with respect to color and shadow.  The lion’s looking a little chubby, but overall, I’m happy with how this came out.