Watercolour landscapes Summer 11

I've been traveling around to my girlfriends hometown, a bit of Europe and home in Norway this summer. Brought along a compact easel and my watercolour kit and did a bunch of studies on the road. Not much to say about these, other than that they were a lot of fun and I feel the practicing is coming a long. Really great to get challenged by the always changing scenery.

1-2 hrs each
(click the images for larger scale)

Live Drawing

A little collection of some of the figure drawing I found time for this spring. Some are straight Gouache, the black and white just Charcoal and/or Conte. The drawings are all the way from 1 minute, up to a couple of 20s.














I am spending the summer backpacking around with watercolours and a sketchpad, so I hope to come back strong in a few months with some landscapes and stuff. Really excited to be going to the East-coast, then through a bit of Europe before touching base back in Norway for a month or so :D

The Information Officer

I have been developing visuals for this book I read, The Information Officer, for the last 6-7 weeks. Doing something on a large scale like this has been new, but interesting. Its great to see how quick you can develop something that already has a context. The story takes place on Malta during the 2nd world war, and I have been trying to keep things fairly realistic. I tried imagining that this would eventually develop into a feature film in the nature of ww2 pictures such as Saving Private Ryan or Band of Brothers. We had to throw these two presentation boards together for my Advanced Perspective class, and since my classes are over I am gonna stop working on this for a while. It's fun working on something set in a specific time-period, but I think I want to do something a bit more creative and less realistic for a while. Explore some different kind of styles!

(Click on the pictures to see them bigger)

Colournotes

Here are a few colournotes, trying to work out some general moods in these. Have hardly done any oils lately, and only work with watercolour once a week so it been a while since I have had some fun with colour. Been doing a lot of these, the 5 here are a the once that I find most successful so far. Maybe I'll touch them up a bit one day. Still working on speed, and these are between 3-4 hours on average.

... still working on my Maltese WWII story

Isometric Perspective

Two quick Isometric sketches to get a feel for some of the elements that will play a part in a WWII story I am currently working on. First one is a crew working on a spitfire, second one is a Maltese airbase after a bombing raid.

Muir Beach

I went with Liz's painting class to Muir Beach, it was a sunny but incredibly windy day. It's just north of the Golden Gate bridge, and a short bus ride from downtown SF. Still working in watercolour, and I am getting more comfortable with a bigger more loose application. Liz agreed to dress up as an Eskimo, and pose a little bit. Nice to do some figures in the landscapes.

The Three Billy Goats Gruff

I am taking a visual development class this semester. It has proven very challenging since the concept of focusing on the development aspect over a finished rendering has been new to me. For my first attempt I chose to develop the old folk tale "The Three Billy Goats Gruff". Dealing with stylized animals, or animal drawing in general was a new challenge. I did learn a lot about animal drawing, but I still cannot say I am completely satisfied with what I came up with. I decided to wrap up the project and move on, so I quickly blocked in some compositional roughs and cleaned up my character designs.

I started working on a more comprehensive detective story set in Malta during the second world war. I am very excited about developing that, and hope to post some images from that story later.

Advanced Perspective

I am taking Advanced Perspective at school this semester. Great class! I am getting much better at perspective and speed. I did not time myself doing these, but if I was forced to guess I would say around 3-6 hours each from concept to finish.

Plein Air Watercolour

I have had the pleasure of going out Saturday mornings and enjoy painting the beautiful spring in the bay area. As part of the (very official) plein air painting league we even had access to a car one day and did some painting in half moon bay. It was supposed to snow (!) that day, but as you can see from The beach scene below we had a clear yet ice cold day. The other guys did some great paintings, big thanks to Mark David Noel for hooking us up with the ride.
I usually spend somewhere from one hour to close to two on these.




And a watercolour test I did on hot-press paper. Finally found a block of it, instead of individual sheets. Excited to see how it will work with landscape painting.