The Making of Dotty .... and an update

It's been a long time since I was here, or visiting your blogs.
Even longer since I've done a step by step painting.

Yesterday I got the time to paint - and I painted Dotty, from beginning to end. Taking pictures of the progress, we start at pencil drawing and end at the completed tabby cat that is Dotty.

I hope you enjoyed the step by step ... and the final painting too.

Dotty was painted on Saunders Waterford 140 Rough and is 15" x 11"
The paints I use are Winsor &Newton Artist Quality

The update on our situation is that hubby is still improving, but the progress is slow. We're not out of the woods yet. Thank you for your continued prayer and support.

alphabet in progress, 3

wet the violin body and added one last wash of wr/bs. Leave to dry.

 Wet the sound hole, drop in indanthrene and paynes grey. That fixed my "mistake" . Wet the top shadow of the fingerboard and painted it with an indanthrene/aliz crimson mix, dropping in some burnt sienna. Wet the lower plate and drop in the ib/ac mix only. That's because it is a plate, not a shadow! Let it dry.

 Paint the shadow to the bridge and the string shadows.
Wet the area of the shadow - but also the back of the bridge, then wash with a dark sticky mix of ib/ac and drop in some sticky mix of bs.
Drop in and walk away!
Leave the paint to mingle to produce interesting shadows. Use a few flicks for string shadows.
Let it dry

 Remove the masking on the strings.
From here there's a bit of tidying up to do to make the strings look neater. Some dry brush in sepia on the curve, then she'll be done!

 Next time you see the violin , it will be the finished picture. I hope you've enjoyed the step by step process.

An alphabet painting, in progress

Its been such a long time since I've done a step by step post, that I thought I'd do another! Photo courtesy of Morguefile's copyright free photos.

You can follow along or even paint along if you like!
If you do that and finish it, post it on your blog and I'll link to it :)

Either way, I hope you enjoy the following.

First the pencil drawing of the violin

then mask out the strings. I use W&N Masking Fluid, but any rubber mask will do. Its just to resist the paint when you paint the body of the violin, without any fiddly paint all around the strings !

next I'm painting the bottom right corner, which is background to the violin.
Wet the curved corner first, then drop in some alizarin crimson, some burnt sienna and some payne's grey. Leave to dry.

Last for today, wet the whole violin and then drop in - in a random fashion - some new gamboge.  As you can see, I accidentally touched the corner of the background and it flared a little into the violin. Don't worry if that happens. blot it quickly with a dry brush and leave it be. Once overpainted, it will add character to the violin !
You can see I'm from the "don't panic" school of painters :)

Until next time...

A Crystal painting - further steps

we have some more steps on the way to the crystal painting.

Firstly some washes of cobalt blue

then a second glaze of cobalt blue, in selected areas only. That will deepen the glass and help to make the crystal more 3-D

Adding in some cadmium yellow on certain segments

And a wash of gamboge overlaid with red (makes the reds sing) in selected spots

adding some dark tone in, to tie in the shadows to the peacock. French ultramarine+alizarin crimson mix

All I have to do now is remove the masking and tidy up any areas I feel need a little more zing - and the painting will be ready. I'll post it tomorrow.

A Crystal painting step by step

I have a crystal ornament or two :)
The one that I wanted to paint is a peacock.
It casts some beautiful rainbows, but you have to look very very closely to see the colour in it.
So I took a photo and blew it up and from there I started to draw, mask and paint.

Here's the drawing on a quarter sheet, with all the facets and shapes of the colours drawn in

and here is the masking laid down to preserve the whites

the sky through the window is french ultramarine and the door a gold ochre. The shadows on the window and sill a a very weak wash of winsor green and alizarin crimson.

The deeper shadows are french ultramarine and alizarin crimson

and the tips of the feathers and body of the bird are gold ochre.
The base of the mirrored stand is a weak mix of the winsor green and alizarin crimson.

more to follow another day...