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Returning to My First Love

topdogArt and Design

About fifteen years ago, a local estate sale organizer tipped my wife off about a couple estate sales, strongly urging that I attend. My wife was one of her regular customers, and somehow she knew I was an artist. So I went, and scored a huge supply of oil paints, canvas, brushes, palettes, paper stock, and even a large flat file on rollers. The flat file was an especially large wooden monster with 12 drawers …

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Watercolor Failure 13

topdogArt and Design

Watercolor camp continues this week. I don’t have a lot to say except my failures are starting to look better. Not good. Just better than before. That’s progress. There are quite a few things I need to work on, among them: Don’t be afraid of color. I tend to wimp out on color saturation on the early washes. I need to be bolder. Save the details. I tend to overwork the details way too soon. …

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Relearning Watercolor

topdogArt and Design

It was about 15 years ago that I painted my last watercolor. Since then I switched to almost 100% digital illustration. The long-term affect is that I no longer have the ability and familiarity with watercolor. With retirement, I’ve made a commitment to get back into traditional media, starting with watercolor, knowing full well that watercolor has, with a couple exceptions, been an extremely difficult medium for me to figure out. Coming from an oil …