Latest painting experiment & Illustration Friday: Impatience

Well, after painting on smoothly primed canvas with pastel for a while now, I decided to see how this smooth canvas would work with watercolor. I put one of our homegrown tomatoes on my paint rag in my studio to draw up & paint a "quick" study. Of course I forgot that working in watercolor (for me anyway) is anything but quick! Ha! Even though the canvas was a small 4"x4" it still took me a couple of days to finish this little gem. The joys of waiting for watercolor to dry! Since I have been working with dry, soft pastels I only have to wait for something to dry when I've covered the surface completely with pastel---then I spray with my diluted PVA size & sit back to evaluate where the painting is going while it dries. When I work in watercolor I have to wait for different areas next to one another to dry before proceeding if I don't want the color to bleed into a still wet spot. When working as small as I was, that seemed to occur a lot! The good thing is it gave me a chance to paint another pastel while this one dried. I'll share it later---since I'm waiting for the acrylic painted "frame" to dry. Actually in the time it took to paint this little watercolor, I started & am almost finished with a 2nd pastel.

This painting also fits this week's Illustration Friday theme: Impatience. You see, when I'm growing tomatoes, I have very little patience waiting for them to get all the way red---I often pick them while still on the very orange side of red (ripe). The nice benefit of this though is that if I want to paint one of my tomatoes, I don't have to worry about being real speedy---they can slowly ripen while I paint!

Here's the watercolor painting, and a couple of the side views to show how the painting extends around all 4 edges of the gallery wrapped canvas. I think I'll call this one "Homegrown", however since I feel a series coming on, it might change to "Homegrown 1".




I've been attracted to the texture of watercolor lately, how the colors change & mix when water is added, or subtracted, or how when the paint is allowed to drip or bloom it creates new color shapes & values. Something I encouraged with this little painting! It's been sprayed with an acrylic uv matte clear finish to protect the surface - which made me a bit nervous since I wasn't sure if the painting would change once sprayed. Happily, it changed not a whit! Yay!