Painting the sea in the winter - on a Sketchbook Tuesday!

I was very inspired thinking of the colors, the smell of salt, splashes of water... and movements of the waves - the everchanging sea in November.

This time I used gouache and mixed media - paper scraps, glue and pencil for the first one, and then I painted the other ones very fast mostly with gouache, but one also with watercolors.

 Which one do you prefer?

Still life Challenge - Part 2 - loose watercolor painting!

The very first approach, this time I'm painting wet in wet. No drawing, just a light layer of color to mark the volumes and shapes.

What I adore most in this photo, is the blue shadow of the jar of water!

Usually I would have painted the light green tomatoe first, but since I had started with deepening the reds, I was obliged to let the greens wait a while, not to mix up everything. Since I couldn't keep my hands away, I went along with the browns of the jug meanwhile.

Here you can see the proceeding of the green color and the table. The background is still very light.

The result is fresh and loose and I left it aside to dry.

In fact, I wanted to paint a third one - THE painting, but because of my time restrictions painting was postponed ...

But, once this painting was dry, I went back on it with the finishing shadows and more details. I also painted the background darker, to make the objects stand out more.
I did enjoy the whole painting session a lot, especially sketching in a loose way!

You can click on the link of Paint and Draw Together to see the source photo and more paintings of the same subject, as I mentioned in my previous post.

Still life with tomatoes - a new Challenge!

This is my first painting  to participate in the latest Paint and Draw together Challenge. Click on the link to see the reference photo, and the other participants beautiful works.

Step 1 - first layer of color.

 Step 2 -adding more color, some details and structure to the table with salt.

Step 3 -was adding the background and more detail and contrast through shadows, for example.

Some details of the work in progress.

As usually, it's hard to know when to stop. I tend to overwork my paintings, losing the initial freshness. That's why, whenever I have time, I do one or two additional, fast paintings, which I personally like more. I will upload he pictures of the progress of my second painting very soon!

Hope to see you again!

Painting Cats with watercolor in my sketchbook!

It's a National Black Cat Day in Italy Today -

This is to get to know them better and stop superstition

That's a great occasion to make a few fast watercolor sketches of my black cat.

This means that this will be my Tuesday sketching-daily-post one day earlier.

Painting with masking fluid in my small sketchbook

Even if I don't have too much time to make full size finished paintings, I try to do daily painting in my sketchbook(s). I love to try different technics, and in my sketcbook it doesn't matter what the final result is, so I find that painting becomes free and more expressive. Often the subject is from my fantasy, as here.

 This time I started with painting directly with the masking fluid (that I usually don't use), and then added a few layers of colors...  

Some is wet-in-wet, some is wet-on-dry...

Finally I removed the masking fluid and added some more detail.

Working with the masking fluid allows you to paint very freely and that I like, even if the outlines of the white is quite hard, and you have to soften it either with color or water.

 Next time I want to do a larger painting, taking away and adding the masking fluid in different places while proceeding...

Still life with persimmons

When the weather is getting worse, flowers are sleeping and it gets dark early, you end up painting a lot of still lifes...

From my sketchbook - cats!

Some time ago my dear friend Laura brought me a new watersoluble graffiti pen. So I sketched cats, and then I used water to soften up the drawings. A funny mix of sketching and watercolors!