5.03.2006

IF: Under the Sea 2



In my continued experiment with watercolor, here are two more pieces. The top one is my second submission for Illustration Friday. It's a very very old picture of my sister in our grandmother's pool. It's a work-in-progress. When it is done, I'll post the final result.

The second one was more of a color-study for a drawing I was planning on painting in guache. I kinda like the looseness I got from trying it in watercolor.

6 comments:

Christine Walker said...

Those drawings are really good. The first one really captured the feel of water.

gudbrandsdottir said...

I really like the first one....I like the "unfinished touch" - really under the sea!

Heather Sybil Chavez said...

I really .like the painting of your sister, its realing interesting to stare, i shall stare some more

John_Fountain said...

Hey, Anna...
Nice to see you experimenting with a different medium... it's always advantageous to explore outside of your usual 'comfort zones' from time to time.
Since you mentioned it in an earlier post (about wanting advice on working with watercolor), here's my two cents on watercolor:
The nice thing about it is that it's got a very dualistic nature... if you get the right thickness of paint mixed with the water, you can almost get an oil-painting look to it (if you're inclined to do more naturalistic-style paintings).
My college paintings were meant to look relatively 'realistic', but I hated oils (they just take too damned long) - so I used watercolors and people would tell me all the time that they looked like oil paintings.
Of course, the REAL fun with the medium is when you do the OPPOSITE and embrace the somewhat chaotic nature of watercolors.
The idea is to simply be as loose as possible and play around with just letting the water force you to be loose and gestural - worry less about form and more about motion and spontaniety.
I would do some watercolor 'sketches' wherein you literally just scribble with it on the paper and get used to how it behaves with varrying degrees of wetness until you get a feel for it.
It's fun and helps you to be loose.
Hope that helps,
John

Anna Woltz said...

Thanks John! I appreciate the advice! I'll keep posting my experiments - I feel like I can already see my progress. ^_^

Tricky Trev said...

It's cool that you're experimenting Anna. I haven't done watercolors in ages and I think I may take a stab at it sometime this week.

I like the effect that you achieved with the first painting. The second one's good too, I especially like the soft tones. It just scares me because for some reason I keep seeing Dubya in its face. I know, that's weird...

Keep experimenting!