House on Manitou Beach

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Last week I was in Bainbridge Island where I saw a house on Manitou Beach Drive that caught my eye. It was a shabby old-fashioned wood-frame house set among flashier million-dollar homes. All of them have eye-opening views of Puget Sound and the Seattle skyline, and it’s a mystery why this old house remains amid the gentrification. But it satisfies my eye much more than the new sterile structures.

Looking up at the house from the beach, you see an even row of boulders placed by the road crew to protect the shoreline. They look boring to me, so I changed them into a line of uneven rocks coming down to the sand.

I made a black-and-white painting to get my values correct, then over several days I made three watercolor paintings. I’m not sure which one is best. Here they are, from the last to the first.

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Pencil portraits

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I’ve drawn pencil portraits for years, but recently I discovered the Loomis Method of drawing heads. Andrew Loomis was a famous illustrator and author in the 1940s and 50s who developed a method for drawing the head using circles and lines. I’ve been using this method to draw portraits and it’s helped me to create better proportions of the head, especially when the head is tilted.

You can click on the images below to see a slideshow. The last image is a drawing of the Loomis head used at the beginning of the drawing to get proportions right.

02-05-Jaclyn
01-30-Jeremy-Koch
02-06-Dustin-Parsons
02-06-Sa-Dor
01-30-Caroline-Cowan
02-05-Milena
01-30-Yaws
02-06-Loomis-Method

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Annette Smith portrait workshop

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If watercolor painting is the hardest medium to master, I think painting the human face in watercolor is even harder! Recently I took an online watercolor portrait workshop with Annette Smith from Scottsdale Artist’s School, a highly-regarded art school in Phoenix, AZ. Annette was a student of the late Charles Reid, whom I greatly admire for his loose, colorful portraits. The workshop met on Zoom on three successive Tuesdays, giving us time to paint between classes. For each Zoom session, Annette painted a three-hour portrait, talking us through everything she did.

Annette draws the model very carefully, taking a long time to get all the features accurately. She uses a measuring stick to compare the distances between features. For instance, the width of the face is often the same as the distance from the chin to the eyebrows. She’s very particular about the drawing.

She then paints the face with a light wash, using the three primary colors of yellow, red, and blue. This underpainting will glow through the other layers painted on top of it. She paints the hair with more than one color, allowing the colors to blend, then she creates the eyes and eye sockets and defines the planes of the face, lips, and chin.

She mixes her paints in the palette before she begins a wash, and she carefully places a brush full of paint on the paper. Then she swirls the brush slightly, cleans it in water, and softens the edges of the brushstroke. It makes for beautiful skin tones in the face. There are very few hard edges in her portraits; everything blends together.

It took me four tries to get a satisfactory portrait of our first model, a lovely young lady.

I only needed two attempts for my second portrait of a young Hispanic man dressed as a troubadour.

Our third and final model was a beautiful black woman with high cheekbones.

I learned a lot from this workshop. Just watching Annette choose her colors and apply the paint to the paper was a revelation. I have a long way to go before I can produce good portraits, but I think I made a big leap forward in this workshop.

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Bay Center harbor

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The harbor at Bay Center, WA, is a jumble of activity with oyster boats, docks, and cranes. My eye was immediately caught by the workers on these two boats and the shadows of the docks when I passed through last summer. I took a photo and made this painting recently in my studio.

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View from a clearcut

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Most people don’t think of a clearcut as a subject for a painting, but when I crested the ridge over Port Hadlock recently, I looked back to see a sprawling view of Puget Sound, framed with an island of trees left by the loggers. What could be more Pacific Northwest than a clearcut view? I took some photos and came back to my studio to paint the scene. My first attempt had too many hard edges, so I painted it again with some soft edges. Here’s my second painting, with the first attempt below it. You can see how I let the bottom edge of the clump of trees on the left blend into the yellow below, and I let the edge of the far gray mountains blur into the sky. I also added some purple to complement the field of yellow in the clearcut.

Here’s my first painting with the harder edges:

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Looking back on 2023

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As I look back on my paintings over the course of 2023, I see some progress. Compared to this time last year, I feel my paintings are more confident and more accomplished, and other people have remarked on the progress. The big watershed for me was a four-day workshop I took with my teacher, Eric Wiegardt, near his home in Long Beach, Washington. Eric uses lots of paint and lots of water, and he paints with confidence. When I do that, my paintings are more lively and more powerful.

Here’s a painting I did in January that’s fussy and disconnected. Things just don’t flow.

Here’s a painting I did near the end of the year, where you can see the brush strokes blending together in a harmonious way.

I made a determined effort last year to learn to paint trees, using a splayed out mop brush like Eric taught us. I think my trees are much better now.

I also worked hard to connect my shapes and washes so that the painting doesn’t look like a bunch of disconnected shapes. I think I improved here, too.

I traveled to different areas in Western Washington on six occasions to paint outdoors, often with other painters, and I learned a lot from these trips. Not that the paintings were always successful, but the experience of painting outside helped me when I got back to the studio.

I’ve tried to choose a wide variety of subjects — beaches, tide flats, buildings, boats, farms and forests — although I can see I have a preference for subjects around the water. It just feels more dramatic to me.

Often it feels that I am fighting a painting. My brush strokes are dry and scratchy, my shapes are disconnected and awkward, and the painting just doesn’t come together. Other times the paint flows, the shapes magically seem to blend into each other, and the painting takes on a life of its own. Let’s hope for more of the latter in the coming year!

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High tide on the Skokomish River delta

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Every Sunday Katy and I drive over the Skokomish River where it empties into tidewater at Hood Canal. It’s a rich area for wildlife and fish because of the mix of fresh and salt water, and it’s visually interesting because of the variety of waterways: mud flats, old pilings, the winding river, swampy low areas, hay fields and old barns.

A couple of Sundays ago, as we drove past, the tide was high and the water was up into the bushes beside the river. I took some photos of the tide flats out of the window of the car (Katy was driving). Later, I used one of those photos to make this watercolor. I painted wet-into-wet for the background to produce the soft layer of foggy trees, than I added the foreground with dry strokes.

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Painting up a storm

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In the last week I’ve painted a number of 7×11 watercolors from photos I’ve taken in this area. Here are a few.

The Skokomish River empties into Hood Canal and forms a tide flat that’s flooded at high tide. Katy and i drive by this section of the river every Sunday on the way to church.
A bigleaf maple tree on the Skokomish Indian Reservation. I like the varied colors of the tree trunk but I didn’t get the yellow leaves as crisp as I would like.
The rear of an abandoned house on Potlatch Road. I like the crumbling dignity of old houses.
Barnes Creek near Lake Crescent lodge, painted from a footbridge that Katy and I have hiked several times. I like this composition and I think I’ll try it again.
A storage shed in the woods for a construction company. Simple but effective.

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A walk up the Tahuya River

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The little-known Tahuya River winds its way out of the second-growth forest near the end of the Kitsap Peninsula and empties into the tidewater of Hood Canal. One morning last week I hiked up the river on an abandoned logging road and explored the grass flats that cover the bottom land. The autumn air was shivery cool and moist; golden leaves covered the grassy track, and deep green shadows emerged from the forest slopes.

The upper reaches of the river were still in fog, while the lower meadows had strong shadows reaching across them. I took a photo and returned to the car. When I got home I painted a watercolor trying to preserve the memory of that walk. Pretty happy with the result. I’m donating this painting to the Bremerton Rotary Club for their annual fundraising auction. It already has a buyer.

Tahuya River, 7 x 11 inches

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An ugly encounter

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An ugly encounter

This morning I parked my car on the side of Central Valley Road, safely off the pavement and well away from the nearest driveway, and walked up the road to take some photos for a painting I was planning to make. The sun was shining on an old metal shed on top of the hill and shadows were streaming across the meadow. A good subject for a painting.

As I came back to my car, I noticed a pickup coming out of the driveway. A large burly man, about 60, got out and started taking pictures of my car. “What the hell are you doing?” he said belligerently.

“I’m going to make a painting of that shed,” I said.

“You’re going to do what?” he said, uncomprehending.

“I’m a painter, an artist,” I said. “I’d like to paint the shed on that hill.”

“Why are you taking pictures of my house?” he asked suspiciously.

“I’m not taking pictures of your house,” I said.

“Show me some ID,” he demanded. I showed him a photo of one of my paintings on my phone to prove I’m an artist.

“Lousy fucking picture. You better get the hell out of here,” he said threateningly.

“I’m just going to paint a picture.”

“Get the hell out!” he said.

“Are you scared of me?” I asked.

He pushed his face right up next to mine and said, “Fuck, no, I’m not scared of you. You want me to beat the fuck out of you?”

I held my ground and stared him down. “No,” I said.

“Then you better get the fuck out of here right now.”

I could see that violence was imminent. I didn’t know what he might try. “I’m sorry,” I said.

“Get the hell out,” he said. 

I turned and walked to my car and drove away. I kept my cool the whole time the man accosted me, but I felt a little shaky as I drove away. This guy obviously felt threatened by my presence. He was belligerent and distrustful of anyone near his property.

I felt sorry for him because he was an angry and fearful person, peering out of his fortress at every potential intruder. Who would want to live like that?

I drove up Central Valley Road and made a painting of an old farm near Highway 303, but I wasn’t able to concentrate very well and the painting was a failure. I came home for lunch and told my misadventure to Katy. She talked me through it and gave me the support I needed.

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