Well, I decided to join a Painting Guild, in the hopes that this would get me in the studio more.  I was supposed to go last Thursday, and didn’t think that I was AT ALL nervous about it, but apparently I was.  I felt the need to have some paintings partially prepped; I didn’t want to go there and start a painting from scratch.  This is because I didn’t want to have to draw in front of anybody.  Now, this is silly, really.  I can, in fact, draw quite well (https://groovydoovyartstudio.com/drawings/).  However, I rarely do it, so I get rusty.

Anyway, I decided today to just DO a painting or three, since I chickened out last Thursday.  My plan was the same drawing, but three different ways.  I’m using 140 lb watercolor paper cut to 9.5″ x 9.5″.  If they turned out well enough, I would have mounted them on 10″ x 10″ cradle board.

I drew this same image three times.  The first one has Frisket on it, to save the whites.

Here’s the first attempt.  Fully painted, and you can still see the Frisket.  I really love the look of this, and in the photo the frisket looks almost like gold.

Frisket removed.  Still pretty cool.  It has a sort of batik look to it, I think.

I thought it would look cool if I went over the white lines with a gold pen.  Yeah, it wasn’t cool………

This next one was drawn using an Elegant Writer pen, which bleeds when it gets wet.

I then used a wet paintbrush to drag the ink around for shadowing, a bit of detail, etc. and I added a teeny tiny bit of color.

Kinda cool.  But too boring for a picture that you’d hang.  More like something you’d do in a journal.

And lastly, same drawing, with frisket for the whites.  I used salt for the background.

This time, I just used a wet brush to soften all the white lines.  I like it.  I wouldn’t put it in a show, but I like it.

This was a great exercise because I could really play around with the images, and the materials, and the colors, without feeling that I was going to wreck a “good” painting.

This might become a thing for me…………..