Autumn leaves, watercolor

This is my favorite time of year, and with the beautiful weather here in California, I have been enjoying going for walks along the American River.  The fall leaves have slowly been turning colors, and it just amazes me how the colors just blend into each other on every leaf, each one a little piece of art!
I decided to try my hand at blending the leaf colors together. I worked with wet-on-wet to bleed the colors together, with lots of little accidents along the way...some good and some bad.
And here are the results...

Experimenting with watercolors

I taught a class about water coloring to my Artist Way group, focusing on different effects that can be created with watercolor. We started by talking about the different consistencies of the paint, depending on the water-paint ratio: tea, milk, or cream.  Start with tea, and work your way up to cream.  We discussed the nature of water always going to where it is dry...going from wet brush to dry paper, or wet paper to dry brush. I showed how to do washes and wet on wet blending of color, as well as resist with crayon, blotting, and even trying a salt effect. Sometimes I think I know just enough to be dangerous! It was just a fun night of playing with watercolor. Here are a couple of pieces I created...there was no plan, both of these just developed into something from trial and error.

Evening landing of a mallard watercolor

"Evening" by Mikko Tyllinen

Happy New Year! My resolution this year is to paint more...so here is my first painting of the new year. I am trying to loosen up my paintings and not get too caught up in details. The inspiration for this piece was "Evening" by Mikko Tyllinen.

I really like the wet-on-wet effect that I got in the sky. I think I was able to catch the style and color of "Evening", not so much though with the foliage...

Detail of mallard

Funny story with the mallard, it was supposed to be one of the little birds that I was experimenting with. But the paper was still too wet and it bled into a large mess so I decided the blob looked like a bird coming in for a landing.  So I added in some detail and voila! I guess I just couldn't stay away from the detail...

Meditating Buddha watercolor

Another Christmas gift...for my wife to put into her meditation room. This was started about 8 months ago with a sketch of Buddha. Next, I drew a pencil outline of the buddha and painted just the background in a wet-on-wet style.Then it sat for about 6 months.  One of the reasons I've been practicing portraits is so I could feel confident in finishing this piece.  The hands are still the part that trips me up, and these where in a particularly challenging position. This is one of those paintings that I could continue tweeking, but at some point I had to say I was finished.

Wet on wet (on wet!)

On a cold winter Saturday morning, I went down to the American River to practice some wet-on-wet techniques. The sky was more of a dark grey, and the trees were probably not as green as the color I picked, but I was just laying some background color in to represent the far bank of the river. The near bank was just mud and grass so I started with laying down brown and some green highlights.

At this point, I've been wetting just the area of paper that I'm going to color and then laying in the color, moving it around to cover the space, tilting my pad slightly to allow gravity to help. I tried to keep a thin area of dry paper between each section to keep it all from bleeding together (had some trouble with that on the far left). 

And then it started to rain! So my very wet paper started to get even more wet, but each raindrop was creating a nice effect on my painting. (I wonder if I could recreate the effect in a controled environment?)  At some point though, I had to cover it for fear of complete destruction of the peice, but in the process of trying to protect it from the rain I touched the wet paper causing blemishes on the left side.

So the question that I have now: Where do I go from here? Add in details- trees, reeds -to cover the blemishes and finish the scene I started? Or, as I look at this scene now, I'm more reminded of a starry night on Lake Tahoe.  Or just paint the Golden Gate Bridge and make the foreground San Francisco and the background Marin County. What do you think?