Painting Ideas
Searching for Shapes, April 2014 Issue of Art Journaling by Somerset Studio
A Day in the Life of – a Photo Story, Summer 2014 Issue of Studios Magazine by Interweave Press
jonradio-remember-me
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action or later. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 6.7.0.) in /var/www/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6114Searching for Shapes, April 2014 Issue of Art Journaling by Somerset Studio
A Day in the Life of – a Photo Story, Summer 2014 Issue of Studios Magazine by Interweave Press
It will be on in stores available for purchase on April 1, 2014. My article is about using shape to design journal pages.
This photo did not get into the article so I wanted to share it with you here. Here is what I write about this page in my Patagonia watercolor journal.
One of my favorite journal pages is one where I painted a meadowlark and a vista behind him. The meadowlarks were plentiful and darted about the brush flashing their red bellies. I often heard their melody as we hiked. Instead of just painting a scene with a meadowlark in it, I wanted to try a different point of view. I painted him much larger than the vista and had him placed off to one side to help frame the page. He is looking back over landscape as if to say he is the guardian of this remote area.
Then add smaller shapes within your large initials.
Pick a color scheme warm or cool. I chose a warm palette so I painted all my shapes with yellows, oranges, reds and combinations of these colors. The gold leaf pen lines will act as a resist to the paint.
This is my final page in my watercolor journal
Check out my Daniel Smith Watercolor Kit for great deal on watercolor paints. If you are just getting started, this is the kit for you! |
Our guides took very good care of us, offering lots of tequila, fresh fruit, and fresh caught fish. Happy hour awaited us every day when we returned from a day of bird watching, whale watching, hiking and kayaking.
I added at least 15 new birds to my life list. I started this list as a young teenager in Alabama so you can imagine how exciting this is for me. I finally see blue-footed boobies!
Zoom in to see the blue feet! |
I see two birds that are endemic to Baja California, the Belding’s Yellowthroat and the Gray Thrasher.
There is no menu and we satiate our appetites by ordering from the kitchen window. The rancher’s wife quickly warms up our food on a wood burning stove. Delicious! We all order seconds. I wander outside to find meat hanging to dry like freshly washed laundry. Surprising, there is a flock of brightly colored yellow birds.
I take photos and identify them as Lesser Goldfinches. Off in the distance at the tip of a cactus I take a picture of another, not so colorful bird and find out that this is a Gray Thrasher found only in this region. All this is wonderful inspiration for painting in my Arches watercolor journal that I brought on this adventure. I had to pack my traveling light kit, as I knew there would be limited space. Here are some photos of how I prepared my small Winsor Newton palettes. I filled one with my warm colors and another with my cool colors.
This is a photo I took of a Black Crowned Night Heron who was doing some fishing right in front of our restaurant on the water in La Paz, Mexico…. (a painting waiting to happen!)
A Page in my journal showing a map of Baja with a painting behind it |
Here is a photo of one of the Whale Sharks we swam with. Thanks Michi for sharing this awesome underwater photo. Look at those fabulous polka dots!!!
There are also several great articles in this eBook about art journaling prompts, journaling tips and a review of writing tools.
Just click on the link and you can download the PDF file for your use!
The second article that I wrote for the 2014 summer issue of Pages is about starting out with black on your journal page. We will be preparing some of our journal pages using this technique in my upcoming watercolor workshop, the Colors of Umbria, Keeping a Watercolor Journal, in Orvieto, Italy. There are just a few spots left if you want to join us!