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“Iris Watercolor Painting with Travel Palette”

Me painting with sketchbook and watercolor palette in one hand.

I decided to put that little travel watercolor palette to test. I picked up a gorgeous iris and lily yesterday, sketched it out and started the first stages of painting. My objective here was really to test out the palette, watercup arrangement and holding the light board all in one hand. I want to see if I can use it like this in the field without an easel for little studies. You can click on any picture to see enlarged views.

My travel watercolor palette with watercups attached

I show a close up of the arrangement so you can see the watercups; they are actually for holding mediums for oil painting, designed to hold the liquid even when tipped slightly on a hand held palette. They worked fantastic! I had to get over the habit of looking for my watercup on the table! You can see the ‘sticky tack’ or ‘blue tack’ in my palette. Yesterdays blog explained that better, so they get tested today and it worked wonderfully! Yay..two experiments that worked.My hand got a bit tired from holding the board and palette but this set up is supposed to be for quick studies, I worked on it longer than I would in the field.
The pictures are to show the stages of my painting, start to finish.

Iris pencil sketch

starting to lay in some colors

Putting on the blues, make sure yellow is dry first

Adding more details now, layering on more blues

Adding final details and darker values

Finished!

Click here to see Note Cards of this painting,

and Click here for magnets in my shop!

“Quick Watercolor of an Iris”

This is a watercolor I did of an iris that I approached spontaneously. No sketch, just direct painting with the brush, I did it rather quickly in a regular sketchbook (thin paper). I’ll have to get my chinese brushes out and ‘brush up’ with them, I used to paint everything with them!

Buffalo Botanical Gardens 1-11-08

Click on any picture to view larger. (the photos of me working are compiments of Daniel M. Cox, thanks Dan!)

Today I went to the Botanical Gardens with the intention to play around with my travel sketching kit that I put together. Well, being that it was my first visit, I found it very hard not to spend most of my time exploring with my ‘good’ camera (Canon 20D slr). So I did some tiny little sketches, tried out my watercolor pencils a bit, then ended with one or two quickie watercolor sketches. I scanned the 6″x 8″ page from my sketchbook for you to see. I don’t think I like the watercolor pencils as much as regular watercolor…when you wet it, the colors change so much, they get so saturated and vibrant, I don’t like surprises. I guess I’m just used to ‘what you see is what you get’ with regular colorpencils.

Here are some photos, so hard to pick from so many beautiful flowers and plants! Here’s a link to their home page: http://www.buffalogardens.com/