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My first blog post!  I’ve been saying I’d do this for weeks and now I’m at the computer…WRITING!  YIKES! 

Sooooo…I decided my first post should be about my approach to a recent painting.  This gets a little technical, but I’m trying to be clear and in future I’ll vary my posts so they’re not ALL technical, but I do enjoy learning and sharing what I’ve learned—let me know what you think and if you’d enjoy more like this! 

The painting here is “Kittens Should Nap!” (see below)—still very fresh in my mind. 

As a beginning I decided to use the circles of the cat towers to lead the viewer’s eyes through the painting.  Then I asked myself the same thing I always ask myself when starting a painting: “What do I want to achieve?”  In this case, it was: (1) to tell a story—that was already there for me—a wide awake kitten-cat ready for fun and a drowsy, somewhat disgruntled one wanting that kitten to be quiet; (2) to create depth, which meant I had to be sure that my background colors, even the lighter ones, stayed in the background, so the light to dark ratio and detail (or lack of it) had to work for me, and (3) to develop texture and soft fur the viewer wants to touch.  Those last two needed some thought and study.  If you want to learn, learn from the best, so I looked at Andrew Wyeth’s watercolors.  The only information I found about his technique was this quote:

"I work in drybrush when my emotions get deep enough into a subject. So I paint with a smaller brush, dip it into color, splay out the brush and bristles, squeeze out a good deal of the moisture and color with my fingers so that there is only a very small amount of paint left. Then when I stroke the paper with the dried brush, it will make various distinct strokes at once, and I start to develop the forms of whatever object it is until they start to have real body. But if you want to have it come to life underneath, you must have an exciting undertone of wash. Otherwise, if you just work drybrush over a white surface, it will look too much like drybrush. A good drybrush to me is done over a very wet technique of washes. Drybrush is layer upon layer. It is what I would call a definite weaving process. You weave the layers of drybrush over and within the broad washes of watercolor.”

What he describes is a time-consuming process and takes a good deal of patience, so his comment about emotions getting “deep enough into a subject” is very real—you must be involved in, focused on, and committed to the work and the process (which is always true anyway!). 

So I took his advice:  (1) I began with wet color in layers as a foundation, especially in the darks.  When that had dried I used drybrush to work texture into the cat towers, but it had to be a very different, closer-woven texture from the cats, so I used bigger brushes and shorter bolder brushstrokes than on the cats’ fur.  (2) Then I laid a wet foundation for the cats’ fur, waited for it to dry, and used many (many, many, many!!!) short, very small drybrush watercolor strokes with varied color to give the fur depth and a soft texture. 

Throughout this process I constantly stepped back to see the whole painting as it grew, comparing areas, seeing where I needed more work or changes, constantly working on the whole as well as the parts. 

Well…that’s the short version!  Part of the joy of painting is problem solving and learning every time, thinking through the process.  Then again, that sometimes becomes frustration too!  Let me know if you enjoyed my first post and if there are some painting (or cat!) topics you’d enjoy in the future.