New Work

Time to start a new painting. As usual, I spent several days or weeks waiting for inspiration. Luckily, the fall colors have started to appear. We don't have the glorious display here in California that the East Coast enjoys, but I have an eye out for every possible colorful tree. There are a few crepe myrtles across the street which were looking quite intriguing with the sunlight coming through them. The leaves have turned yellow, light green, and crimson. Not bad, at least up close. I took my camera and tried to capture a few close ups of colorful leaf clusters against a bright robin's egg blue sky. After some adjustments in photoshop, I've put together a composition that might work. First thing will be to get a sketch done on my newly soaked and stretched sheet of watercolor paper. After that, there will be a few days of refinements. Finally, I see a watercolor painting in my near future.

Friends of the River

The new painting is done, and it has a new title. It's now just "Friends of the River". This is a bit less unwieldy than "Flora and Fauna of the Eel River Watershed". More stream-lined. (Get the pun?) Besides, the whole thing was inspired by Nadananda, founder of Friends of the Eel River. The scientific identification chart is ready to go, too.

I may play around with scanning a new watercolor painting of sky and clouds and add it to my digital file in Photoshop, but the original will stay the way it is now. I also look forward to separating out portions of the painting to use for different purposes. Now that it's been photographed and I have a very high-resolution scan, lots of things are possible.