Painting to the Sound of Rain

Yesterday was a pretty scary day here in Maryland. Plenty of rain and wind and snow and did i mention rain? Courtesy of Hurricane Sandy, now known as Superstorm Sandy - the worst storm in the history of the United States. Kali and I rode out the storm in Maryland as we waited to hear if she would be able to take her entrance exam for the pastry college today. And while I waited - I watercolored.

I began by drawing my outline. I left my circle template in Florida (can't believe I did that!), so I scouted the hotel room for circles to trace. The smaller, inner circle is from a hotel water glass :) and the larger, outer circle was made by tracing the lid of the ice bucket :). You gotta do what you gotta do! Then I divided the area into sections.

Tangling was the easy part. Then I stippled the heck out of the center. I did something similar once before - except that turned out to be a flower. This looks more like a math project gone wrong. OR a fun math project!

The project I was working on for my class called for a prismatic approach, so I drew a string in and around my sections and background . . .

. . . and began laying color. The thought was to make my focal point stand out from the background by my color choices. Of course I used my Derwent Inktense Pencils. The only way to go with watercolor. Well, not really, but it's my preferred way because the colors you get are so bright and vivid and intense. A waterbrush and pencils. Easy peasy.

For the most part, I tried to separate the colors where the string line made divides. Didn't always accomplish that, but I tried.

I figured the central focal part would be the hardest, so I did all of that first. I went with variations of purple, pink, and blue because I really like the way those colors look together. I have actually had my hair all these colors - one at a time, not all at once, although I'm not totally unfond of the idea. 

Then I picked out yellows and greens to do the contrasting background. Once this was dry, I went back to my copic multiliner and added the penwork shading. All shading and detail work was done with this multiliner. It's always a challenge for me to figure out shading on color - the black penwork is the way to go! This was a fun project, not hard to do, and I was very satisfied with the results. I am not one to be able to draw awesome pictures of flowers and ladies and animals and landscapes, but I can tangle me up a bunch of artwork! Throw some bright color on there and I am one happy lady sitting in the midst of one scary, scary, scary hurricane! (And I still have the heater set on 82, trying to warm up! Florida, oh how I miss you!)