Bunny rides a bike

I am impressionable and @treelobsters on twitter encouraged me. Also, Prismacolor markers are fun.

Winter sunset

With this painting I feel like I'm finally getting to where I want to be style-wise with watercolors. The trick for me seems to be to just go for it, and resist the urge to fuss too much--this guy took about 30 minutes and I didn't draw it out at all before-hand. 

Bunny!

Marker and brush pen. They're making friends!

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.