Month: June 2018

Swallowtail Butterfly Watercolor

Posted on by Michele Clamp

I still haven’t moved over to the new palette as I’m trying to use up all the paint in the old one (amazing how long it lasts).    I’m left with a lot of orange, red and pthalo blue so colorful butterflies came to mind.

 It was good fun to use some bright colors for a change and he came out fairly loose.  Pretty happy I think.

I did a quick sketch in the small 5×7 sketchbook :

swallowtail butterfly watercolor sketch
swallowtail butterfly watercolor sketchswallowtail butterfly watercolor in progress

This actually came out cleaner which is often the way.   Easier on a smaller scale though.

For completeness here is it part way through when the initial orange washes went on :

swallowtail butterfly watercolor first washes
swallowtail butterfly watercolor first washes

The Zbukvic Emulation Experience

Posted on by Michele Clamp

After the french village post-mortem I was musing about how to go about simplifying my buildings paintings.    Going smaller was my first thought and all of these are done in a 5″x7″ Strathmore sketchbook.    The paper isn’t my favorite by a long chalk but it dries very quickly and forces me to work fast.    I wanted to do multiple copies of a fairly simple Joseph Zbukvic painting and see if I could get better at seeing the big shapes and get the values.

So 4 small paintings done in a couple of hours.  You can see how things changed over the 4 paintings.   The first one is a little bitty.   I’m not getting the big value areas well and the colors are a little slapdash.  Paintings 2,3, and 4 are much better in both regards.   It was a really worthwhile exercise to do.   Seeing them all together shows a big difference to me.  Strangely I didn’t notice any difference as I was painting them.

Here’s the original Zbukvic image  – lovely isn’t it?

Original Joseph Zbukvic street scene watercolor painting
Original Joseph Zbukvic street scene watercolor painting