Coronavirus Crafts: J at the temple

So I let J choose, between two pictures, what I would paint for her birthday. She chose the one of K and J splashing in puddles. This was the other option. And Aria stood by her 3-year-old's choice, but we both knew that Aria wanted to see this one in watercolor. Well, it just so happens that Mother's Day isn't that far away from J's birthday, so I just did both. 

Happy Mother's Day, Aria!

I did not expect the temple to be so hard to draw! I guess I don't have a lot of experience drawing architecture, and somehow doing it at a slight angle is infinitely more difficult than doing it straight on. But I think it came together pretty well.  

Does the quality of the watercolor paint have something to do with the vibrancy of the color? The slightly higher-quality set I got when I was 12  (or maybe 14) is essentially dried out at this point, though I can still use some of it. (That's the magic of watercolor.) The new set I have was much cheaper and lower quality and I've noticed naturally brighter hues. But for a tropical Hawaii scene, bright colors really fit.  

Yellow highlight on the top of the bushes. Darker green detail. 

The sidewalk and her cute little shadow. I felt a lot better about the stairs this time, but maybe that's because there's only really one. 

I was very carefree with the sky. Part of that is because the original photo portrays a fairly washed-out or too-light sky, so I knew it would be up to my artistic interpretation anyway. I liked the thought of capturing movement and change in the sky, since that's what I've usually experienced in Hawaii.

Goodness, these windows were difficult. They had to be very small, very even, and very symmetrical. And they all had to be like that. Even though it's just a handful of rectangles, I think it was the hardest part of painting this piece.

I added the rest of the detail to the temple. I was a little at a loss for how to depict the relief sculpture at the front of the temple. It's too far away to show in great detail, but it still has to look purposeful. So I looked at the relief sculpture and narrowed it down to the most basic shapes: lines, curves, circles, and L-shapes. Then I painted those. 

Also, J looks like a cute little ghost child here.

Skin color is always a bit of a hit or a miss, and there are more highlights and shadows than you'd think. I think this came out fairly well. 

Her dress is mainly pink with some variegated pink-and-orange tulle. I tried to capture that in the little folds of the dress. 

J has lovely blond hair that curls naturally in her humid Hawaiian home. I tried to copy over as much life and spontaneity and color into her hair as possible without making it too dark. 

The letters on the temple were another tricky part. I know that they read "Holiness to the Lord -- The House of the Lord," but the perspective of this painting places the letters too far in the background. The viewer shouldn't be able to read the phrase on the temple. However, the lines should look like the phrase even if they aren't clear enough to really read. So I wrote out the phrase on piece of scrap paper in a larger scale, imagined the essential elements of the letters and word groups, and wrote that. It worked out well, so I added it to the temple. It could probably be centered better, but it's not bad. 

Finished, scanned product.

Coronavirus Crafts: April Wedding Watercolor

I love weddings. I caught three bouquets last year, and one of them was for my dear Hermana Stapley (who is no longer either an Hermana or a Stapley). She is one of the few people who has ever taken me up on my offer (my standard wedding gift for good friends) to do a painting of a wedding photo. And though I just missed their anniversary, it still made a good (rather belated) wedding gift, a house-warming gift, and a Mother's Day gift. Here are my progression photos of the project. 

1. The original. I'm a little bit picky about the pictures I'll paint. I have to really like the picture, I have to feel (at least moderately) comfortable in being able to do a good job of it, and it has to have a good composition (or the potential for it).  And lately, I've been a bit more up to a challenge. This painting is a first for me in the following ways:

• A temple (I think)
• Full, standing figures interacting
• White-on-white-on-white-on-white
• Stairs (probably, or at least this many)

Original photo

2. The sketch. I borrowed a ruler and had to label the sides of stairs ("top" and "face") so I could keep the silly things straight. And, as usual, I struggled with drawing the groom's face. (Why are men's features so hard?!) But I'm happy with how everything else turned out in this phase. 

The sketch

3. The mountains and our paint night. My family members in Hawaii and Las Vegas joined me for an evening of watercolor painting. It was a first attempt at watercolor for some of them, and I'm quite proud. 

Paint night

4. Full mountains, some green added (I mean, it looks like a desert mountain for now, but it'll get there.)

Full mountain

5. Temple detail. Painting white isn't the easiest thing in watercolor, and it's easy to over do it in the gray. But I'm generally happy with how it turned out in this stage. 

Temple detail

6. Windows. I added the blue detail with the windows in the temple and finished the rest of the temple. I'm not thrilled with the right side or the top left part of the temple, but I think the overall structure turned out well.

Window detail

7. Stairs and cement. Telling the difference between the different sides of the stairs is a bit tough, and it's hard to know whether you've succeeded until more of the painting is filled in.

Stairs and cement

8. Flora. The trees had white blossoms, which, again, are hard to paint. So I focused on trying to paint the negative space. It's not something I'm super familiar with, but I think it came out well. The tulips came out okay, too. 

Flora

9.  The suit and the dress. I was lucky enough to have an old tube of dried-out watercolor paint in about the right color for the suit. And the great thing about watercolor is that you can always re-hydrate it. I did make a silly mistake, painting the area I had sketched for his white collar blue because I thought it was the lapel of his suit. That was unfortunate, and there's not really anything you can do to fix a mistake like that in a watercolor painting. So I let it be. For the dress, I used the lightest grays I could to suggest folds while still preserving the whiteness of the dress. Getting the two layers of fabric was mostly trial and error, going for the lightest touch. 

The suit and the dress.

10. Skin and hair. Hermana Stapley has the most incredible white-blonde hair! And boy, that was difficult to translate, but I tried to really read into the highlights and the colors in the photo and paint them sparingly. Skin is always difficult, especially with shadows and highlights. I definitely had some trial and error there, but I think it came out well. 

*It's worth noting that the paper curls up at the edges after I paint it: I promise the stairs didn't suddenly go crooked. It's just the paper.

Skin and hair

11.  Face details. One of the hardest things about painting or drawing a face is drawing what you see instead of drawing what you think. If you think "eye" or "ear" or "nose," you'll draw what you expect it to look like, which is often very different from what it actually looks like from a specific angle or in a certain setting. I'm much more satisfied with the groom's face in the transition from the sketch to the painting. Also, it's very hard to get the right paintbrush with the right amount of paint on the fewest hairs in order to get those tiny, crucial lines on the face. I'm generally satisfied with how it worked out here (though I did have a couple serious scares).

Face details

12. The sky. Honestly, it was a little intimidating to fill in something so simple, so visible, that takes up an inordinate amount of the painting. It had to be free and open without drawing attention to itself. And there's nowhere to hide mistakes. I may have cheated a bit and ensured that the angel Moroni was in front of a cloud so I didn't have to worry about getting the blue too close to the yellow. But what is art if it doesn't improve slightly on reality? 

The sky

13. Final details. So one of the most difficult parts of this project was adequately and accurately portraying the white-on-white details. I tried doing it in previous projects with just watercolor paints and watercolor pencils, but it was barely visible. My little sister mentioned using a white gel pen for some detail in watercolor paintings. So I found one and went for it. Mixed media! I really love how it turned out, and it was a lot easier than I expected! I added some white highlights to her hair, then I used the pen to outline the edge of the veil and the dress, add buttons, create the lace texture, and enhance the nuance in some natural elements. 

Final details

14. Final product. I'm really happy with how it turned out in the end. I found this great frame at the discount section at Michael's when I bought the gel pen. The minor tragedy is this: my paper size was 9x12 and the frame was 8.5x11. I have a growing frustration with the absurd lack of 9x12 frames, as I've either had to plan ahead or cut down a painting to fit. Cutting this one down, when I felt like I had really zeroed in on placement and formatting way back in the sketching stage, hurt more than I thought it would. Still, I think the final setting worked well.

Final product

It was bitter sweet saying goodbye to this piece today. I had expected to be able to hold onto it for another day and get a proper photograph or something, but the timing didn't quite work out and I rushed the framing a bit to get it ready for pickup. I looked at it for a good long while, trying to savor my final moments with a masterpiece (which is definitely an exaggeration, but those were the words that came to my mind at the time). 

I started doing these painting commissions to push myself to do more art and to give meaningful gifts. And it's been incredible. Still, it's kind of sad that I don't own any of my own recent originals. So, maybe someday soon, I'll have to commission a piece for myself.