Oriental Strokes & A Thank You!

This month, Colleen has been having us work on our Oriental Strokes.  It's Sumi-e painting to a certain extent but she wanted us to take into focus all of the possibilities/styles of oriental strokes including the Chinese strokes too.  She wanted us to look at the different aspects and rules of Western art/composition versus the aspects/rules of Eastern art.  She talked about the four gentlemen of Oriental painting-- the plum, the orchid, chrysanthemum, and bamboo.  Last week, she did a demo of all the various strokes and did this wonderful quick demo of painting a wild orchid.  This last week, she allowed us to bring in our own painting ideas.  I brought in a photo of a local building and this is what I worked on...

"A Tree Top & Spire"; Watercolor on 12" x 14" Sketch Paper.

It's loosely based on this photo of one of my favorite buildings...
Salt Lake City's Columbus Community Center

Part of the process was to try to simplify the original  down to it's essential parts.  That is easier said than done.  After I had lightly sketched it on the sketch paper then it was time to paint.  I tell you it is hard to keep your brush vertical and your wrist stiff!  But for a relatively quick in class painting, I think it turned out kind of fun!

You may have remembered that I posted a painting of the Popette a little while ago.  Well, tonight I'm taking her along with me to Colleen's Gallery Open tonight during the Sugar House Art Walk.  The Popette was SO pleased with her portrait that she wants to thank Colleen personally.  Here's the Happy Popette with her painting that I gave her for her birthday this last week...

Photo- The Happy Popette and her painting!

Thanks for stopping by and please feel free to leave a comment!

"100 SLC Porches, No.11 & 12"

"100 Salt Lake City Porches, No.11- watercolor on 9"x12" paper"

I've been working the last two weeks with the sumi-e style of painting in my watercolor painting class.  This week I finally felt that I produced two paintings that I could take photos of.  The above porch I used a great deal of the bamboo strokes and some simple line work to produce this wonderfully simple porch that is made even more warm by the wood siding that makes up most of this house.  This porch inspired me to try some of the simple and clean sumi-e brush strokes.  I also had fun with the trees on this.

The other porch below held an architectural outline that suggested an oriental treatment.  It's a very common house that you find in the Salt Lake Valley.  They are often referred to as "Bungalow" style.  I was drawn to the greens and the warm wooden railing that stretched across this one.  However, on this one I was not able to stick as closely to the sumi-e style of painting because the yupo paper did not want to "play" well.  In other words, I discovered the hard way that proper sumi-e painting is best done with paper that absorbs water.  This is not what happens with yupo paper.  So I decided to add ink to finish out the outlining on this porch.

"100 Salt Lake City Porches, No. 12- watercolor & ink on 9" x 12" yupo paper"

Watercolor Painting Class- Sumi-e

Cherry Blossom Season from the Gallery of Kazumi Cranney.

A New Year and here I am back at my watercolor painting class.  This Wednesday, Colleen focused on Sumi-e.  Sumi-e is the Japanese ink wash painting that focuses on simple lines and open spaces.  It's beauty lies in its simplicity.  Colleen started our lesson by showing us a series of examples; quite a few of these wonderful examples were on Kazumi Cranney's website.  Cranney is an amazing sumi-e artist that was born in Japan and later relocated to California.  I was especially fond of her Cherry Blossom Season pictured above.  Her little birds are just amazingly simple and I thought SO cute!

Next we went into practical mode and Colleen showed us examples of the simple brush strokes.  She showed us how to load the brush with paint.  Then, she continued on showing us how to hold the brush in order to do the brush strokes properly.  She made it look very simple, and I mistakenly thought it would be simple to learn.

Here Colleen is showing us an example of the "Bamboo" brush stroke.

Then my classmate, Anne and myself "tried" these simple strokes.  I can safely tell you that it's hard to be simple.  I REALLY struggled with most of the brush strokes except for the "Smoosh" one.  I was a natural at that one.  But this is giving me ideas for trying this style with one of the 100 Salt Lake City Porches Project.   I may try it on one of the SLC Porches in next week's class. This was Anne's second try at this style of painting and she was doing much better than I was!

A smiling Anne with her latest piece of artwork.