Watercolor Paintings

I have recently taken up watercolor painting. (Thanks Kathy and Linda for helping me learn how) I really enjoy creative projects, and watercolor is very fun to try. The thing I like most about it is that I can sit down to paint something and be completely finished in a couple of hours. It dries fairly quickly and I can complete a painting without having to wait long periods of time beetween phases. I'm not very big on waiting to finish things. I've been known to stay up until 3am finishing a garment I was sewing because I was too excited to see the finished project. I even took a sewing class in college once and didn't have the patience not to finish the skirt I was making before the instructor could finish teaching how to properly do some things. Anyway. I'm proud of my recent accomplishments, so I decided to share. I'm posting my first six paintings here. I'll try to put them in the order in which they were painted. Hope you enjoy! I sure enjoyed painting them.


Painting #1. What got me interested in watercolor painting in the first place was an advertisement in a flyer that was distributed with our city utility bill. The City Historical Association was looking for paintings of historical sites in the area done by local residents to compile into a calendar for 2009. I decided I'd give it a try since I live right across the street from a cemetery founded in the early days of the town. This is what I came up with. For my first painting ever, I guess it was okay. But I consider it a little too Simpsons-esque for me. Can't you just see Bart or Lisa running down that path doing something mischievous to one of the gravestones or something? Yeah. It's a little to cartoonish to submit for the calendar. Maybe if I try it again in the next few weeks and it turns out better, I'll submit something. We'll see.Now, keep in mind that I wouldn't have posted this one at all, except I wanted to show the progression from 1-6. It's definitely not one of my finer creative renderings...



Here's my painting #2. Kathy and I painted these watermelons from a picture we found on the internet. She was very helpful in teaching me how to paint that day. Thanks Kathy!



Here's #3. These are some peaches I painted to go with the watermelon



#4. I painted these oranges to complete this set of fruits that I want to hang in my kitchen.



Here's the fruit set framed and waiting to be hung until we get into our new house. These ones were all done in the month of March, 2008.




Here we are a couple of months later (mid-May, 2008) and I'm learning to appreciate the awesome beauty of Northern Utah. The weather has been amazing, and the scenery even more awesome. Late Monday night, I was coming out of a store and walking to my car when I saw the moon emerging from behind the mountains. It was a beautiful, clear night, and the moon was absolutely magnificent. If I were a little more talented at this painting thing, I probably could have captured the stunning scene that I saw in person that night. Here's painting #5.



The next day I saw a huge plume of smoke rising from somewhere off in the distance and decided that I wanted to try my hand at painting landscapes. Here's the result. I'm not completely satisfied with the depth of this one, and I wish I had left the two mountain peaks to the left of the smoke out, and maybe added a bird or two, but this is what I turned out last night. Painting #6.



Here are those two, framed and waiting. I'm not sure if I want to keep these two together as a set or separate them, or paint new ones to match (like maybe another nightscape for the moon one, and a dayscape for the smoke... I'm undecided). Any suggestions or opinions on that matter would be appreciated. Do you like them together? Should I separate them into two different sets? Or keep them as singles?



Here's the whole lot. They're standing on my piano right now until I decide to pack them up for our new house.