watercolor experiments!

Hi everyone!
(I know it hasn't been a full two weeks since my last post. . . but I figure more often is better than less often. And I might as well take advantage of the three weeks before school starts when I still have free time!) Today I have some watercolors I did last week.

I was recently reminded of how useful drawing from life is. With that in mind, these first few images come from a "travel journal" I kept while on vacation. One of my favorite things about visiting new places is seeing the huge variety of people, so that's what my journal is-sketches from people watching, sprinkled with maybe a few landscape drawings and observations. A lot of the sketches are pretty caricatured, while others are more realistic. Some of the proportions and such are kind of wonky, but my main goal here was playing around with colors and getting the ones I want from my watercolor set, so I'm happy with how most of them turned out.

To make these watercolors, I picked out a few of the drawings I felt good about from my sketchbook, redrew them in pencil (I used pen originally) and painted them. I haven't worked very much with watercolors before, so this was fun to do!

This one ended up coming off the side of the paper, so you get a lovely view of my paint box and countertop as well :)

This last one I'm including largely as a reminder to myself to finish things! I started this Narnia-inspired painting at the end of last school year for "project of choice". My art teacher had us design our own project without direction from him, and it had to be something we hadn't tried before. I chose to do this watercolor because I hadn't worked with watercolors before except for an abstract assignment which wasn't very difficult. I didn't finish by the end of the week, which was okay because the point of project of choice is how hard you're working and how good your idea is, but I did want to finish it. I had this painting lying around in my "unfinished" pile all summer long, and I finally finished it on Thursday. By that time, however, I realized that there are a LOT of things I would change about this if I were to do it again, mostly in the composition and draftsmanship on the lamppost. Maybe someday I will.