south shore (Lake Superior) painting July 2019

I had a lovely week off with my pals Peggy and Susan and that whole story is elsewhere. I did manage to paint almost every day. I started a couple of watercolors but couldn't wait for the layers to dry and they were put aside. Mostly I worked in the gouache. I decided I like landscapes. I sort of like gouache especially for travel.

I often take photos during my work in case I wreck it. In this case, I liked the early versions better than the finals. This one, I wiped sections of paint off the paper and started over. The end result is not as pleasing and I'm not posting. It's gouache; maybe I will fix it. Even this one is a bit weird. This is at the beach at Cornucopia. There was a tree but I rubbed it off.

Mostly I spent the week looking at the clouds and the water and the horizon. It was a hot and stormy week at home and up at the Lake there was some weather but not as much as home. The clouds were incredible; I have loaded up my iCloud space with hundreds (I may be exaggerating) of cloud photos.

Watercolor with obvious ink. this was looking towards Sand Island from Little Sand Bay where I spent much of the day. I had made a gouache painting of the nearby marsh and then it started raining and the paint ran all over. Of course I didn't cover it on purpose because I wanted to see what would happen and what would I do with it next.

Portrait of Peggy. She was painting the landscape near my tent area and I asked if I could paint her while she painted and she agreed. She is concentrating, not not mean like maybe I painted her. This was in my Strathmore 500 notebook and is gouache and ink. I have to fix her eyes and maybe her mouth.

I did a few more small gouache landscapes that ended up looking not very much like what they really looked like. I guess realism isn't quite my thing. This one is a small painting on a larger page where I have some text and collage bits. This might change again. This is between Bark Point and Bark Bay Slough. It's probably called Bark Creek or Bark River. Between Cornucopia and Port Wing.

This is the watercolor and colored pencil sketch of the landscape that is also the gouache above. Not much resemblance anymore.

My lesson here was that I was going to make a simple sketch with colored pencils and add in some of the color with the watercolors to make sort of a thumbnail (postcard size) to get my hand and brain in the right place. I don't like it and I'll eventually paint over it. I do like the gouache version.

Why? I think I like that the gouache colors are more intense although I still have to think about value and contrast. With watercolor I feel like it's all wishy-washy watery and lacks interest because of my lack of contrast and value with the waters.

In my endless quest to figure out what is my media, I think I'm getting closer. For home life I think acrylic and for travel life gouache. I might need to work bolder with watercolor. I like the colored pencils for details and will work on incorporating them with the gouache. Soft pastels are still a total 100% mystery. I brought them along and thought they'd be good for a sunset sky and all I really ended up with is dirty fingers and a muddy looking sky.

All of these paintings are on the small size. The biggest one is about 5x7"; most are 4x4" or 4x5." I like working small I guess.