When The Child Is Away, This Is How I Play!

New painting in progress


My daughter is off at camp for a week.... lucky girl!  And I miss her dreadfully, but to fill the void - I am getting to spend some quality time in my studio!! HOORAY!  Because I normally work full-time, getting long periods in my studio is a very rare thing.  SO what have I done?  Well, I've played with my new camera (hoping to learn enough to get some good bird shots to use as reference for painting), I also have been cleaning and organizing my studio space, AND I've been painting.   

Am I getting 8+ hours a day of painting done?? No.  sigh.  It's amazing how so many things crop up to kill my "free" time (sick dogs, household chores, multiple date-nights with my wonderful hubby, and a guilty pleasure I like to call Pokeman Go).    




The under-painting for shadows 


Here is the beginning of my current painting.  I started off under-painting it with shadows (an experiment based on Judy Treman's book Building Brilliant Watercolors, in which she expounds about the magic of disappearing purple).  The theory is you paint the shadow first and then as you paint over them with other colors, the purples just seem to disappear into your painting.   Some watercolor ideas do work for silk painting, so I thought I'd give it a try.   



The tree and branches
painted in... shadows gone.    
I painted in the tree and branches first.  While I like how it's turning out... the shadows were pretty much completely hidden/lost - especially in areas where I applied a lot of resist as moss.  

The disappearing purple did work somewhat in the flowers... (see the first picture) but the dyes and the resist are too strong and covered up a good deal of the purple completely.  Kind of a bummer since it means I will have to go back over the painting and apply shadows later.   But a fun experiment!    Once I get better at watercolor painting, I will try it out this technique again!!  

It has been fun to experiment and I've really enjoyed getting some quality painting time in!   

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