Starling Flight

"Starling Flight" watercolor 9"x6" (c) Susan Bertke

I'm in the process of setting up my gallery at Daily Paintworks (DPW). This may take a little time (a day or two), but it will enable me to actually sell my paintings online!

Like most artists, I have a terrible time pricing my work. Several artists have told me I'm pricing way too low. (If so, why aren't my paintings flying off the wall like hotcakes?) DPW offers an online auction as well as straight purchase, so in the beginning I may put some things up for auction to see what my "market will bear."

Also, any painting I post here on Blogger will automatically be picked up by DPW. So if you see something here, you can buy it there! That includes my "Starling Flight" shown above.

Wish me luck!

Come see my show at the Fairborn Art Association gallery!

A One-Woman Show
by Susan Bertke

Sunday, February 23, 2014
1:00-4:00 PM

Fairborn Art Association Gallery  

In the rear of the Fairborn Senior Apartment Building
221 North Central, Fairborn, OH

Map to FAA Gallery

Watercolors, Acrylics, Pastels, and Drawings representing thirty years of art-making.

Demonstrations by the Artist

Keep me company!

Tables will be available for anyone who wishes to bring their own supplies and draw or paint with me.

Prize Winning Iris

Iris #2 (c) Susan Bertke

My watercolor painting "Iris #2" won an Honorable Mention in the Fairborn Art Association's Members' Choice contest at the May meeting. Given the quality of the paintings that were submitted by the members, this was a real ego boost for me.

Christmas in October

Yesterday, one of my students was working on a painting for this year's Christmas card. I had that in mind today when I dug through my "morgue" and found a house I'd photographed years ago. (Sorry, I don't remember where it's located.) Anyway, I changed the season to winter, hung some bows and a wreath on windows and door, et voila! It was fun, and I got it done in an afternoon.

I'm reasonably happy with it. Or at least I thought I was. Now, as I stare at it on my screen, I see a blue million little flaws. Maybe I can claim the builder was a little bit drunk on this job?

"Christmas Card House", about 10x10 inches, watercolor on 140# Lanaquarelle.

Paint the Forest, Not the Trees

This is an exercise in "negative painting." I started by painting the entire surface with yellow ochre. Then I painted around the foreground trees with Pthalo blue. Then I painted around the next layer of trees with more blue. Repeat. The idea is that you never actually paint the trees themselves--only the spaces around them. Yeah, I know. Clear as mud!

Actually, the trick is to avoid mud. The more different pigments used, the muddier the color becomes. (See my previous comments about the petals of flowers.) So I stuck to Pthalo blue until the very last, darkest layer, where I used Daniel Smith Blue Apatite Genuine.

The other challenge in this exercise is compositional: there is a tendency to have "cookie cutter trees" that are uniformly spaced, sized and/or slanted, which is not good. So each time I paint around a tree, I have to make sure that it is different from the trees on either side of it. Each tree is an individual, not a clone. Not as easy as it sounds, believe me.

I'll use this as a demo painting for this afternoon's class.

When you don't have fresh flowers, use silk!

I needed a quick "model" for a demo in my Tuesday watercolor class in Kettering, so I grabbed my digital camera and shot a dozen macro pictures of silk flowers I had on hand. I liked this shot the best. I didn't take a lot of pains with the drawing (obviously) because my students were primarily interested in figuring out how to make petals look 3D and how to not get "lost" in all those petals. Still, I think the resulting painting came out pretty well...

For any students out there, this was a limited palette painting. I used quinacridone red and permanent alizarin crimson (both pigment PV19) for the petals. The background is a mixture of quinacridone red and pthalo green just slopped on very loosely. Background petals were "desaturated" with just a TINY bit of pthalo green. There is a little bit of negative painting here and there at the bottom. The yellow center was added with Naples yellow and American Journey Sour Lemon.
If you have trouble keeping the color of your flower petals bright and clean, try to avoid mixing two or more different pigments together. It's very easy to unintentionally include a neutralizer in the mix. For example, if I'd mixed a red-orange with alizarin crimson, the slight blue cast in the alizarin would have dulled the red-orange a bit, and vice versa (blue and orange are opposites on the color wheel and neutralize each other).
Now, if I really wanted to make this daisy a bit more orange, the way to do it would be to paint an underpainting of yellow, dry it completely, and then paint red over it. The yellow glows through the red, and the result is gorgeous. (Yes, this means you have to think ahead. LOL)

Cascade

Here is the finished version of "Cascade." As you can see, it's come a long way since the underpainting was done.

"Cascade" (c) Susan Bertke 2011

Red Daylilies

Being heartily tired of rocks and waterfalls, I decided to do a floral. Here's my attempt to capture the brilliance of my husband's red daylilies.
It's transparent watercolor on an eighth sheet of Arches hot press watercolor paper.

"Summer Woods"

"Summer Woods" by Susan Bertke (c) 2011

When I started this painting at the first Brown Bagger session at Rosewood Art Centre, I shocked everyone by working on an Arches watercolor block instead of a canvas. Coming from a watercolor background, it seemed perfectly normal to me! I see several advantages to working on a good quality rag paper:

• I'm not crazy about the woven texture of canvas, especially when I'm working with thin glazes. And watercolor paper comes in three different finishes (hot-press, cold-press, and rough).
• It gives me the option of starting the painting with watercolor or acrylic thinned to the consistency of watercolor -- which gives a transparency and luminosity that I haven't achieved with opaque media.
• I have more framing options:

1. Under glass with a mat (I'm not sure that having the glass in direct contact with the acrylic paint would be a good idea.) in a standard frame (not necessarily a canvas-deep frame).
2. Framed with neither glass nor mat, so it looks more like a canvas work. 
3. Dry-mounted to a support of some sort and hung without any frame at all. (I haven't tried this, but I'm sure someone has.) Chris Leeper actually mounts his paper to a board before he starts working.

That said, I have had one problem with working this way: for some reason acrylic washes seem to soak into the blank paper more than watercolor does. I can't imagine why this is so, but that's my experience. It's not a problem if I start with watercolor washes, or if I thoroughly pre-wet the paper.  So maybe I'm simply not using enough water in my acrylic washes. I also know that some artists prime their watercolor paper with gesso, gouache, or matte medium. Any of these would cut down on the absorbency of the paper.
Anyway, this painting is acrylic on Arches 140-lb cold-press watercolor paper, 14" x 20".

Another Stream: Work in Progress

I'm still mining my stash of vacation photographs. I think the source photo for this painting was taken somewhere in Colorado, probably in the Keystone area, though it's the sort of picture that could have been snapped almost anywhere.

I'm working in transparent watercolor on a half sheet of Arches 140lb cold pressed paper. I want to keep the colors fresh, so I'm being a bit more cautious than usual with my washes.

I'd say this painting is about half done. It's mostly still underpainting.

Little Rose

This little painting is about 4x6-inches on Lanaquarelle CP paper.
     The rose is from a photo reference, but the leaves were an exercise in negative painting and came out of my head.

Work in Progress 4 (Finished?)

     I have reached the can't-stand-to-look-at-it-anymore stage, so I'm declaring it finished, at least for now. Maybe someday I'll go back and redo it, maybe in another medium besides watercolor. I could see this subject in pastel or acrylic.
     If anyone cares, the pigments used were Prussian blue, cobalt blue, Winsor yellow, hansa yellow, brown madder, and poppy red.
     If I don't sound enthused, it's because I'm not. It's rare for an artist to not find something to criticize in their own work. (I've heard that Leonardo da Vinci worked on the Mona Lisa seventeen years!) And right now my inner critic is pointing out all the areas that are overworked, ill-composed, poorly rendered, etc. You, on the other hand, are probably looking at it and thinking, "What, is she crazy? I wish I could paint like that!" But you are seeing it as it IS, not as it SHOULD BE. So which of us is right? Let me know.
 

Work in Progress 2

     I'm feeling a bit better about this one today.
     I've discovered that Prussian Blue and Brown Madder make a nice black that can easily go either warm or cool by altering the proportions just a little. Add a little lemony yellow (in this case Winsor Yellow) and it becomes a very dark green.
     I started this painting because of a challenge in an online watercolor group -- to do a green painting without using green paint. But this is turning out overwhelming green. I need to pull in more warmth. Maybe I'll let the darks go more brownish red than I've done so far and see how that works.
     My other concern is that, when I did the initial underpainting, I lost all of the whites. Truthfully, there are no whites in my reference photo, but I may have to do some scrubbing or use some opaque white at the end, just to relieve my eye from all this yellow and green.

My latest painting

White Petunias (c) 2011 Susan Bertke, watercolor 14x10"

I struggled with this painting off and on for a couple of months. Really. It was an exercise in trial and error. Lots of error. Several times I had to resort to my kitchen sink cure: take the painting to the kitchen sink, turn on the water full blast, and hit the trouble spots with the sprayer.

Isn't it strange that I've never seen that particular technique in any of the art books I've read?

Start at the Beginning

Back in the 1970s I took my first watercolor class. The instructor was Roger Middleswart (1916-1994), a truly excellent teacher for beginners. Watercolor is a technique-intensive medium. It can be very frustrating for a beginning painter. But Roger began with the basics, and each class built on the previous one and demonstrated increasingly complex subjects. For the first seven weeks we dutifully copied his paintings. At the eighth class we were free to paint our own subject. 

I painted "Forest Meditation." 

It was the first painting I ever did that I really felt proud of, the first that came out just the way I envisioned it. So here it is for the world to see.