New prints!

It's that time again...time for new things to go up in my print shop!

"The Ceremony", watercolor and ink

 Some of these date back to December of last year...the only camera we have that takes high-resolution photos had its battery completely die.  As in, would not take a charge for mysterious reasons known only to the battery.  So when my husband got a replacement battery I was immediately like, "yay, prints!"  I get really excited about these...

I also want to ramble about a couple of these new pieces...brace yourself for art-geeky talk about colors and stuff...
One of the pieces I just put up is the one I finished this weekend, "Sowing."  Check out this side-by-side comparison of my color study to the finished piece...

Keep in mind that the one on the left is a reeeeeeeally rough sketch colored in photoshop, and not necessarily indicative of my abilities. */disclaimer*

I actually got the colors pretty close to what I had envisioned, which I don't always do...sometimes halfway through painting I end up saying, "you know what?  That color I picked SUCKS."  Maybe it just doesn't translate well to paint, or I realize that I made the painting too dark, or that I didn't differentiate enough between objects so it looks like things blur together, or you name it.

But with this one, I think my initial concept of how to do the colors turned out well in the finished painting.  And the things I did differently (extending the green all the way up to the hills, slightly different gradient in the sky, house colors) turned out for the better.

Whereas with this piece...

I got the general color story in there, but I think the finished piece ended up being more vibrant and having a lot more depth.  But it was worthwhile to do a study, because I posed myself a challenge with this one: use NO blue (well, okay, technically there is some blue pigment present, because there's green, but there's no purely blue object).  That was a fun experiment!  I get bored of painting blue for the sky color all the time (as evidenced in "Sowing" too), and I thought a pale yellow sky would look cool and give the painting an even more mysterious and otherworldly feel.

So what's going on in that painting?  I left it open to interpretation.  Why is there a spiral staircase built around a tree anyway, do people live up there?  What's that book she's carrying?  Is she running away from something, and why?  Who the heck IS she anyway, a regular person, or an elf or a sorceress or what?  It's all up to the viewer...I love looking at and painting paintings that could be interpreted in hundreds of different stories, depending on what the viewer wants to see.