A messy pile of brushes.

Inventoried and repaired.

Picked up a copy of Lessons from a Lifetime of Watercolor Painting by Donald Voorhees. I’m going to go through this entire book this winter. First step is to get my brushes inventoried. A few of them were broken so I fixed them (no need to spend money on more).

We’re repurposing our wine rack into our new TV stand for the new apartment. By we, of course, I mean Eliza is doing all of the work and I’m taking photos of her and posting them on the Internet without her express permission.

Eric Fortune goes over his process from sketch to finished piece. Not only is this a good glimpse into a good artist’s process but also how the process ends up playing a big part in the style of the piece.

I love stuff like this.

Source: Creative Process: Eric Fortune.
Via: OMG Posters.

Speaking of Bob Ross, you can watch a ton of his episodes online. Not all of the videos are complete episodes, so you’ll have to watch the duration closely. But, there are some gems.

I blame Troy Rutter for me taking a stroll through my memories and wanting to watch a ton of Bob Ross videos.

Source: Google Video Search “Bob Ross Videos”.

One of the great things about the Web is that inspiration can spread in ways it never has been able to in human history. Whether you blog, Twitter, or use any of the social services now available – remember that anything you do or say could inspire someone else to do something (and in my cases in an even greater way than you could have yourself).

Thanks Troy, you’ve inspired me to someday take up oil painting so that I too can live-out my childhood memories of watching Bob Ross “just beat the devil out of it”.

Source: Lessons Learned in Painting.

I’m going to try to keep doing watercolor paintings, maybe even one each week. This week I really wanted to do an owl, so here I present my fifth watercolor in this new effort; The Owl.

I tried a few techniques this time that I hadn’t before. Some of them worked out quite well, like under-shading on the Owl (probably hard to see in any of the photos).  Some of them didn’t work out so well, because I did them wrong, like the snow by using salt.  I didn’t use enough water to make the salt effective.

The salt, if done right, will cause the watercolor to separate and move away from the salt. It would end up causing a neat effect that would work well for snow, stars, or other textures. But, again, I didn’t use enough water for this to work.

There is a lot that I would do differently, if given the chance, so I’m really looking forward to my next crack at another painting next week.  Overall I’m thrilled with the way this painting came out – but there are a few subtle things (like the snow) that I wanted to add to this and I simply didn’t do it the right way.

Live, learn, move on, try again. Here are some more photos of my watercolor paintings. Next I think I’m going to tackle a Japanese sign.

There isn’t much of an inspiring story behind either of these pieces. The orchids painting was a lesson from a Japanese watercolor painting book that Eliza picked up for me. The birch tree I wanted to do because, for whatever reasons, birch trees are some of my favorite trees.

I plan on doing this same orchid painting at least a few more times.  The techniques in the book are beyond both my abilities and, I think, the abilities of my brushes. My watercolor brush set isn’t of the highest quality. In order to have the reeds, or leafs, in this painting be much better than they are in this first try – I will need to get the technique down.

I’m fairly pleased with how this piece came out. It took me about 3 and 1/2 hours to complete the painting, since I had to allow the paint do dry between “coats”. My impatience near the end is probably what caused the tree, specifically the trunk, not to turn out exactly like I wanted to. Less a problem of technique and more a problem of patience on this one.

I’m looking forward to doing many more this winter. My goal is to get good enough at watercolor to make a piece that I want to hang in our apartment.

It turned out really great and makes our living room much more cozy than it was a few days ago. Our entire apartment is now really beginning to become my new favorite place that I’ve lived. Now, if we could just transport our current apartment and rent price to the North Shore on Oahu, Hawai’i we’d be all set.

Thanks Eliza and Carla for your hard work.

Date taken: August 17t, 2008 | A huge ceramic vase in a hallway in the Bellagio Hotel.

Eliza and I wanted to invite a few of our friends over and I thought it’d be a good opportunity to create an invitation since it is something I’ve been waiting to do for a while. Being that I’m not all that creative or talented I decided to do something simple.

Here are some photos to show the process of creating our invitations in a bottle.

Simple custom DHARMA logo made in Illustrator.

Used watercolor paints and coffee for dirt and blood effects.

Dried the paper a few times between paintings.

Cutout art paper for name tags.

Same dirt/blood treatment for name tags. Spatter!

Crinkle the paper, a few times, to make it seem aged.

The finished invitation.

I used Dollar Store bought bottles, wrapped up the invitations like a scroll, and tied a short piece of twine around them to keep them from unraveling and threw them inside. The corks were from our cork collection, so they were easy to find.

All materials used: Art paper, water, watercolor paints, coffee, a lighter, hot glue gun, twine, bottles, corks, my printer, printer paper, Adobe Illustrator, some scissors and a pencil.

I’m pretty happy with how they came out and I already know what I want to do for next year (something completely different). Have you ever done your own custom invitations? Care to share them?

Date taken: December 1, 2007 | E.T. phones home. Maybe he didn’t like the movie.

See, the tenants that lived here prior had a few kids and a few dogs. I’m not sure on the number of kids, but I am sure on the number of dogs, two. And not your run of the mill puppies either – a pit bull and a rotwilier. From what I’ve been told the two dogs wreaked havoc in the apartment all day long tearing apart wood and such. Our landlord had done a very good job of repairing the damage by the dogs.

But, did he do just as good of a job repairing “the damage” from the children? My current office is the old kids-bedroom. Here is what the bedroom looked like prior to us moving in.

The office before we moved in
Complete with elephant border

Yellow and ?turquoise? with an elephant border. Not exactly the image I had planned on projecting with ChanceCube, so it had to go.

Over the few weeks preceding our move-in, we stripped off the wallpaper, put down a coat of primer, two coats of paint, one coat of trim color, and generally cleaned it up. Here are a few photos showing that progression.

Scoring the border

Border = scored

See ya elephants

Removing outlet covers

Fixing holes and trim

One primer coat

 
Nearly done

Painting the office

For whatever reason my other two helpers on this project are not in any of the photos – probably because they were the ones taking the photos. Eliza and Mike helped me through each and every step of the process, so thank you both for helping me out.

The completed office

You can see the end result and it was truly worth the effort as I now have a place, free of elephants, that I can get my work done.