Back of Hand / City in Blue

Royal Talens were nice enough to give me some supplies to try out (no strings attached). You can read my reviews at these two previous posts:

Brown Eyes/ Figs

Blue Eye/Tagliatelle & New Equipment

Now that I know the paints properties, I have added them into my permanent studio & travel palettes. They have seamlessly integrated in and so my next step is to try them with various types of paper.

When I Initially became serious about my painting, I was mainly using blocks of cotton watercolor paper. This is not ideal to travel with. I had found that it was also very sensitive to weather, one season in Paris it seemed to rain for almost a month and each layer of paint took forever to dry and it didn’t blend as well. These factors plus the increasing price of my preferred brand made me start to explore.

I ended up for a long stretch using a spiral bound pad of Canson watercolor paper. Easy to travel with, not cost prohibitive and of good quality.

In art, I am completely self-taught so I do not know how it may be for other artists, but I see the size a piece is meant to be in my head before ever touching brush to paper. I began to envision works both smaller and bigger than the Canson pad. While continuing to use it, I tried other pads too, preferring the pads over blocks as they are easier to travel with.

On the road my go to pad has been Talen Art Creations Multimedia Pocket Pad 4×4 inches. What I like about it is that I can use it for my Lyra water soluble graphite pieces, watercolors or just drawing. It eliminates my having to have multiple pads in my bag. I do still always have my trusty 3×5 pad in pocket regardless.

At home I mix it up size wise going all the way up to 11×17 size.

In my exploration of the added paints to my palette with various papers I decided to first try them with my old favorite the Canson pad.

Canson Montval Watercolor pad. Spiral bound 140 lb. cold pressed. 5.5×8.5 inch

In doing an extreme close up it presented an interesting challenge. To be able to show volume and mass without the help of showing the outline of the hand which would have served as a guide/clue to the viewer’s eye. The piece is almost abstract. Keep looking, you notice the volume and mass, keep looking you notice little things with each new viewing.

Back of Hand

I have done a lot of portraiture of late but have also always enjoyed doing cityscapes. I want a style but never mere mannerisms and a key to this is to always be challenging myself. I decided to do a cityscape, a nice challenge on a smaller sized paper, especially as it has been a while since I have done one.

City In Blue