What else?

On the drawing board today... plastic mermaids:

Wired again

Potential, watercolor, 6 x 8 inches

Watercolor birds

Matches on the drawing board -- still unfinished. Watercolor is generally considered a fast medium, unless you happen to be me...

Upcoming at the Santa Monica Museum of Art

My first ever square watercolor... "Conjoined," 2014, 7 x 7 inches:

Match game continued

These are the steps...  First, outlining some contours prior to taping:

 

 

Painting the background with various areas taped off...

 

 

Some seepage under the tape has occurred, per usual...

 

 

I scrubbed off some of the black seepage, but there are still plenty of fix-ups left to do.  Watercolor basically gives you one and a half chances to get it right.

 

 

Darkening all those feathers and matches will keep me busy for at least a few more days.  Thanks for looking in!

Match point

Still painting a lot of safety matches.  I want to get the foreground objects rendered at least lightly, so the pencil lines don't get pulled off when I mask everything to paint the dark background.  Because the thick watercolor mix I use for that has to go on in one pass, everything else will get the maximum tape treatment.

Okay, some shadows...

More on strike anywheres

Yes, painting still more matches...

It seems like every watercolor I've ever worked on (which I'm guessing number somewhere from two to three hundred total at this point) has gone through at least one phase where it seems like it can't possibly work out, and you find yourself thinking it's never going to look anything like you want it to.  Usually this crisis comes somewhere near the beginning, but often there's a final struggle near the end as well.  I think I'm near one of the early doubt attacks with this one.  What to do?

Simple answer...  Change the water and keep plugging away.  It always gets worse before it gets better, and sometimes it's awful before it's excellent.