Study of a bearded iris, watercolor

I have not done very many watercolors of flowers...it seems to be a popular subject though, and spring is the perfect opportunity to get some practice in!
From a photo provided by fellow artist, Ute Sturm, from Google+ community Group Watercolor Painting, here is my attempt at a bearded iris. I challenged myself with not tracing the photo reference I had, but I did do a quick pencil sketch. I layed down yellow on the top of the flowers. Then I wet the bottom of the flower and dropped in some maroon perylene. It quickly took over the bottom "beard" petals as well as half of the yellow I had already laid down.  It was a great effect but I needed some of the yellow back. After it dried, I had to go back and add in more yellow.
The last couple of paintings I have done have had a dark background, and this background was white. I had to put in a little color on the background.
Taking a step back, I can see my lower flower is "floating", and I forgot to add a stem for it. Oops.

Watercolor of a Goldfish

I challenged myself with painting a goldfish. It has been a while since I painted any animals so I found a pic on Google images and started painting... 

As I added in the shading with blues and black on the fish, I couldn't help but ask if this fish is gold and white or is it really blue and black!?

Tapping into inner child through art

I usually paint from a photo or plein air. I rarely paint straight from my imagination, but it's good to exercise my imagination once in a while. In our Artist Way group we had a meditation to tap into our creativity and childhood memories of it. What do we remember about being creative as a child and how has that changed as we became adults? Many times we fall into a routine as adults and forget to make time to be creative in our busy, hectic schedules.
I cut "doors" into either side of the paper before I began, writing a word from my childhood inside on the top, something for my adult self on the bottom. Then I created this whimsical piece with watercolor pencils and colored pencils. 

If I was to do this again, I would have cut the doors after the piece was finished so it would not bleed through to the paper taped behind,  but it is harder to cut into art that has already been created.

Lily pond in watercolor

This is the second challenge that I have taken on that was presented by the Google+ community Group Watercolor Painting. The concept behind the group is that we all paint in different styles, and to demonstrate this, we all paint the same picture in our own way.

I'm not sure if there is much difference between a lily pond and a lotus pond, and I took a similar approach to painting both this piece and the Lotus Pond that I painted 6 months ago.  Both were from a photo, then traced onto watercolor paper. The lily pads really make or break the perspective of both pieces. This one had so many lily pads, it got a little muddled. Some turned out really well, while others, not so much. (My eye keeps focusing on the manatee shaped leaf on the bottom right) I can't  even imagine Monet's garden with hundreds of lily pads.

Pheasant in watercolor

I seem to do well with a challenge someone gives me, or a competition. I never seem to win but it gets me motivated. So here is a challenge that some fellow watercolorists in the Google+ community Group Watercolor Painting gave me: a photo of a pheasant. 

It took me a while to figure out where to start, but I decided to trace the outline of the bird right off the computer with pencil first, then traced it from there onto watercolor paper.  I decided not to worry about the background shown in the photo, so I threw down some background color around the outline. Not sure if my choices were too close to the color of the pheasant...

After that dried, I put in the main colors of the pheasant onto the body, while leaving the neck, beak, feet, tail feathers and some of the back white. I tried to blend the colors together so it transitions smoothly from one color to the next. Then I added in some black detail. It seemed like it needed some "grounding" so I added a shadow underneath. I went back in and reworked a few areas, like the wing which does not seem to be placed quite right.

American river plein aire, Untitled

Many artists that I have talked to do value studies with a quick pencil sketch before they start a painting. I usually just throw a couple of pencil lines down on my watercolor paper to help with placement but don't really think a whole lot about values. So I decided to give value studies a try to decide if it is a value-able use of time and effort :) 

This pencil sketch only took 5 minutes and I can see how important it would be if I was going to take the painting back to the studio to work on it. Instead, I finished painting all on location and found that it was easier just to refer back to the real scene than my sketch. I did find that some of my artistic choices were thought out ahead of time with the sketch instead of while I was painting.

Since I was experimenting with value studies, I decided to do another sketch that I will take back to the studio and see how that works out...