I’ve painted quite a few fall leaves in the past couple of weeks, but I was especially struck by the deep, rich colors of these leaves from the Kousa dogwood tree in our yard. It seemed like every possible autumn color was right there in the leaves on this one twig – deep burgundies, rich […]
Category: Watercolor
Nature Sketching
In September 2015, I’ll be teaching a four-day workshop called “Sketchbook Journaling in Nature” at Touchstone Center for Crafts. Touchstone is a residential learning center located in the Appalachian mountains about 60 miles south of Pittsburgh. We’ll be visiting during one of the prettiest times of the year and will have plenty of opportunities to […]
Out & About
One of the homework assignments I give my sketchbook journaling students is to paint a variegated wash on a sketchbook page without any thought as to what they might decide to draw later on the page. Then, after the wash dries, they are to begin their sketches, using the earlier wash as a unifying color […]
Sunflowers!
10″ x 8″, ink & watercolor on 140 lb. watercolor paper I plant a packet of mixed sunflower seeds in my garden every summer. I water them, weed them, and prop them up when a storm blows through. I don’t harvest the seeds to eat or to fill our bird feeders. The birds usually cling […]
Blue Hydrangeas
My hydrangeas barely bloomed at all this year. The winter of 2014 was so harsh that every one of my hydrangea bushes died back, and it took all summer for them to recover and reach any size at all. Two of them began to blossom around the end of August and are now covered with […]
Adapting What You See…It’s Your Artistic Prerogative!
This painting of a Tudor house was one of my reserve paintings during the Mount Lebanon Plein Air event. I sketched it on a sunny day last summer, sitting on my little three-legged stool across the street from it, then finished up a lot of the details back home in my studio. But as you’ll […]
“Old Red”
I was walking through Mt. Lebanon one day and was stopped in my tracks by a red truck parked in front of Rolliers Hardware store. The red truck with the pink, white, and red geraniums in front of it just screamed “Paint me!” Trouble was, once I got home and looked at the photo I […]
“Uptown Mt. Lebanon”
One more in my Mt. Lebanon series… 10″ x 8″, ink & watercolor on 140 lb. Canson Montval paper This view of “Uptown” shows Mt. Lebanon’s bustling central business district, with shops, traffic, pedestrians, and people sitting at outdoor cafes. As usual, I did my layout first in pencil, then inked the drawing and began […]
“Springtime on Jefferson Drive”
I gave you a sneak preview of this painting in an earlier post, but I thought you might enjoy a closer view. “Springtime on Jefferson Drive”, 8″ x 10″, ink & watercolor on 140 lb. paper I drove up to Mt. Lebanon, PA, several times over the summer to scope out the town and the […]
Plein Air Painting #4 – Gilfillan Farm
On the final day of painting during Plein Air Mt. Lebanon 2014, I left the city behind and headed out to paint at Gilfillan Farm, which was on our list of suggested painting sites. The farm sits right in the middle of suburbia, but is owned and maintained as a working farm by the Upper […]
