Saturday, January 22, 2011

Fortunate Event Number 4

This fall stacked up to be a series of fortunate events that began when the printer head clogged beyond repair. Weeks of brain-draining research and assessment later, that decision was made which opened up art card printing right about the same time I was making concept break-throughs that needed a different media than Pastels. I just didn't want to even think about these using pastels.

That's where I was back in November when I discovered Joseph Raffael. He was featured in Watercolor Magazine. After a visit to his website I bought his book, (which I highly recommend). I fell in love with his process and especially his older work. In it I saw what floats around in my head: A mixture of abstraction, realism, and jewel-tone color. It combined neatly with what I was discovering about value, color inversion, and abstraction through Photoshop.

So in the first week of December we had a morning with pretty light. I went to the garden to see what could be found – Joseph Raffael abstraction+realism still strongly in mind. For an instant I was disappointed-what will I find in a garden of brown bushes and sticks? And then I kicked myself. “Think like an artist, look for the shapes of shadow and light, the edges, the movement of these shapes and spaces…color can come later.”

Here is 'Spirea Dreams 3' from that session. There were quite a few that worked out (7) and I had fun turning them into cards…which I’ll post on the card blog. I keep thinking they would make really cool watercolors if done much larger than life. It will be a while before my watercolor legs are strong enough to take on a project like that, so until then, the digital versions are really cool.

6 comments:

  1. Hi Carol,
    It is so wonderful to read about your art journey. I still struggle with my art voice so it's nice to know others do, too. I also enjoy seeing how others approach solutions. Thank you for sharing some of yours.

    May you find peace at the easel,
    Sandy

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  2. Thank you Sandy. I often wonder if babbling on about my juvenile discoveries is just tedious to others, but I am enjoying the journey!

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  3. Thanks for stopping by my blog. Looking at yours I am very impressed with your sense of colour and composition. Love what you can do with your photo filters and PhotoShop, both of which I am not tech saavy enough to spend time learning more about! These efforts would definitely work well in watercolour and pastel. Keep up the good work.

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  4. Beautiful post,
    great harmony!
    congratulations

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  5. I just received traffic to my blog from yours. I would like to follow you, but noticed you haven't posted since February! Are you still around? Are you doing art? In this last post, you sound so excited about this new technique. Would love to hear from you. I'll follow just incase you decide to post again...

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  6. I agree that Joseph Raffael is an inspiration. I was fortunate to see an exhibit of his work locally last April and I was blown away! The work on his website looks incredible but when you see those huge paintings in person they are unbelievable.

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