Wrenaissance Art

Think of stippling as pizzicato for the watercolor brush.

After pumping up the orange and blue values in the bracts and petals, I found the blue petal in front had lost its values. A few touches of Chinese white in the highlights and a stroke of ultramarine in the foremost shadow, and the painting is finished!

As a botanical illustrator in training, I really need to increase my painting speed. Margaret Mee painted over 500 finished works in 40 years—not including sketches! So my goal for today was to finish this watercolor of Stelitzia that I began over the weekend. Here you can see it as it was at 7:30 this [...]

Last week’s progress on this bromeliad painting: definition of shading and striping on the exterior side of the leaves, plus increased definition of the roots.

I’ve been working on this botanical illustration of a porcelain orchid from Chile’s Patagonia region for quite a few months now. I laid it aside while in the botanical illustration course at the Jardim, and have just returned to it in the last few weeks.

The bromeliad illustration after yesterday’s session. It looks a bit squashed from the tilted angle of my work table and the camera.

I’ll be having Christmas lunch with my Art Chicks on Wednesday. It’ll be a farewell lunch as well , as I think we’ll be moving before the painting class starts up again in late Feb. I’m making some little panorama format sketchbooks for the ladies, using my Fabriano hot press w/c paper and some chipboard [...]

Botanical illustration of a bromeliad after the initial washes have been laid in. As progress continues, I’ll post later stages.

Sketched this out Friday.

I was able to locate a copy of the Fables for Telephone children’s short story collection by Gianni Rodari. The Portuguese translation was kind of stiff to my unfluent mind—maybe it was translated into Portuguese Portuguese for the entire Lusitanian world, then simply repackaged by a Brazilian publisher? The story about the wizard who made [...]