13th and Vine

Watercolor, for a commission. I'm very pleased with how this turned out, and I'm officially calling Operation Re-learn Watercolors a success. Before this summer it'd been a solid ten years since I'd touched them, but I was starting to feel like I needed a bit of a break from working digitally. 

I still feel the urge to hit save or ctrl+z, because that is necessary/will totally work when using real art supplies.

Oh and incidentally, the commission was specifically for "a watercolor showing the architecture of Over the Rhine". I mention this because of all of the art criticism I've read over the years that goes on and on about the deep symbolic reasons that the artist was thinking of for X compositional choice. Let me tell you, I took about 100 photos for this project, and I picked this shot because it had the fewest fire escapes or trees, while still involving more than one building. I suspect that the ancient artists of yore were just as lazy as I am. 

Waiting

I've spent a fair amount of time in airports lately. It's mostly given me a chance to study people playing with their phones. 

Watercolor Fun Day part2

I kind of hate painting trees, especially when it's summer and you end up having to figure out how to differentiate all the blobs of green.

Watercolor Fun Day part1

Another attempt at painting with watercolors, this time in Spring Grove Cemetery. This statue was part of a larger monument to various virtues, I think. This figure was labeled love, there were two others labeled truth and friendship.

The thing about painting/drawing statues is that if you look at them very closely, their proportions are strange. I had a hard time with the far hand (you can see where I kept moving the edge) because I kept wanting to make it the size of a normal person's hand, not the weird metal giant scale. But despite that I'm pleased with how this turned out, especially given that the sun was right in my eyes when I was looking at the statue's head, so I had to wait for the sun to go behind a cloud in order to see, or just make up the detail. 

Also, whenever the art history books go on about impressionists painting outdoors with nature and how wonderful that is, they never mention the bit where bugs try to drown themselves in your paint.

Buddies

More fun and games with ink.

stop lights and street lights

Sketched from a couple of photos I took around my city. I like photography as an art form, but personally I have a hard time seeing my photos as anything other than potential drawing reference.

Also, I've got a thing for power lines. No idea why. Well, ok, that's not entirely true, but I feel like mumble mumble representational of the complexity of urban life mutter human web superimposed across the landscape etc is a bit much to inflict on unsuspecting people of the internet. So we'll stick with that I think they look nifty.

Dragon street

So, uh, I got a little bored painting/drawing the houses.

This started out as a watercolor experiment--it's been a solid ten years since I've used them and let's just say that I'm a touch out of practice. Prismacolor markers and a brush pen were added on top because I wasn't feeling that patient, and in any case I rather like the effect.