"Leaf Duet"

($80.00.......8" x 8"......watercolor on Fabriano 300 lb. CP....mounted on a flat panel)

"Fall duets hang on with fierce determination." Fall is definitely here and so I have my North Carolina leaves from last year all mounted in a journal for easy reference. This is my favorite time of the year!

If you have ever been on a trip to the "Smokies" or the East Coast during the fall, you will undoubtedly love to bring some of those treasured leaves home with you. You might even find some in Central Texas worth preserving. I will share my way of preserving them just in case you're interested.

After gathering your leaves...tuck them between wax paper and place them in a book. (preferably with a rock on top to give them a good pressing) When you return home, take them outside and spray them with Spray Acrylic Coating and lay them out to dry. (both sides)

You are then ready to mount them in a journal with gel matte medium (undiluted). Glob a lot of medium over the stem area and then leave to dry overnite. It does take awhile since you must wait for the gel matte medium to completely dry before going to the next page.  The color will stay for a long time...like several years or longer. They also look good just piled in a wooden bowl for a centerpiece. 

The leaves today were begun with a soft neutral tint in the background on very wet paper. I did a bit of writing in the wet pigment with a bamboo pen and then left it to dry.

The leaf color was not painted with one glaze. After drawing the leaf shapes on the paper very lightly with a pencil, I painted them with a dilute portion of raw sienna on dry paper...blotting every so often with a kleenex. This first glaze was dried with a hair dryer and then I began the second glaze with green and raw sienna fairly diluted and also blotting with a kleenex. This glaze was then dried.

The last glaze was sepia + the green color + a touch of alizarin crimson. This was applied and dried in the same fashion. The last bit was the leaf tips and a few spots of sepia with a bit of the last glaze. After painting in the leaf tip, I banged the brush in water and squeezed out the excess water and then softened the edge of the leaf tip and spread the brown out a bit. The spots where placed on with the tip of the brush and then some extra was splattered very finely into the background. I also did a very, very light glaze of the yellow green mixture from top to bottom...right over the leaves.

Lettering was done with a mechanical pencil sharpened on a sandpaper block and held completely vertical to get as fine a line as possible and to shade the down strokes. And there you have it...just a few more things to think about.

"Psalm 103" (draft 3)

(image 1)

(image 2...cropped section from image 1)

On this occasion of Mother's Day, you will be blessed by Psalm 103:1. This is the last draft and so I will be posting the final with lettering tomorrow. Enjoy your day!

Since yesterday, I have added more plain rice papers to create some more translucency and transparency. I then sprayed it with spray acrylic coating and decided it needed a touch of color. I chose not to use mono printed rice papers since that would create too much texture and compete with the texture in the glass.

Soft pastels came to my rescue...again. And they really must be soft pastels which contain enough pigment to do something for you. Chalk pastels are cheap and should be thrown in the trash. They are useless. After choosing my color to go with the blue/green in the glass, I used a break off knife to shave some onto a foam disposable plate. Using a hake brush or something akin to a blush brush, I placed the brush in the pastel powder and brushed it onto the rice papers. It was stronger than I wanted so I took a kneaded eraser and removed a lot of it until I had a light tint.

Soft pastels are useful for delivering color to a piece without creating hard lines when you need some color in a particular area. It works with any medium. If your surface is too slick to receive it...sponge on a coat of Liquitex Clear Gesso which creates a textured surface for this very purpose. The last thing I did today was to use a regular .05 mechanical pencil as well as a charcoal pencil to create some erratic line work and a few words. I then smudged the lines with my finger and also used the kneaded eraser to make it a lot more subtle.

And lest you think that you might be copying someone else's style by including these erratic and gestural lines in your work...not to worry. Every mixed media artist on the planet knows how to do this and many make it the hallmark of their work. Katherine Chang Liu....Fred Otnes...Peggy Brown...just to name a few. These lines add energy to the piece and also make connections between the shapes. It's like advanced "scribbling". If you know how to scribble, you can do this. And there you have it...just a few more things to think about.