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Somebody asked about the process of painting in watercolor.
So I’m posting 10 digital pics of paper pics - Sorry dial uppers.
Somebody may find it interesting to read about and see the painting in progression.
This first pic is the actual photograph of the doorknob (that I took of the doorknob in the kitchen on my 1928 house) that I painted the painting from.
Pic #1:
Pic #2 Here is the painting. (In person the colors and values and contrast are much closer.)
Sorry the lighting is uneven on many of these - it's too dim at the bottom.
Pic #3:
The glass doorknob seems overwhelming complex when considered in its entirety.
So I broke it up.
There's a 1/2 inch oblong shape, the left side is brown and the right side is bluer with some white streaks in the middle.
Then the next tiny shape.
Tiny fine brushes and an attitude of unlimited time.
Actually it only took a small fraction of an 80-year life.
Surprisingly the wood was the hardest part to paint although it was the easiest part to see.
The paper for the entire wood area had to be just the right amount of wetness at the same time.
All the previous work was at risk of being wasted; I should have done the wood first.
Too bad I don't have a pic of Kenny biting his nails.
Fortunately the wood came out well, always a surprise.
For the wood I needed large brushes and tons of paint prepared in advance.
One large good brush can be $200+.
With watercolor you work light to dark, large to small, general to specific.
First a bright yellow (new gamboge) over the entire wood area.
When that completely dried I rewet the ENTIRE wood area.
I couldn't work in pieces like in the doorknob (since pigment would travel to the edge of the wet area and leave a line) then layers of mixed red (probably cadmium) and brown, burnt sienna - more to build up the darker areas.
Using the wet-into-wet technique results a soft blurring of the color that simulates the look of real wood.
When that completely dried it was time for the wood grain - which intentionally looks different from the real wood you see in pic #1. (Yuck to reality!)
The grain was put in with a wide flat 1-inch kolinsky sable brush that was wetted then most of the water was removed with paper towels.
The bristles were separated to leave space between each streak of grain.
Bite nails again.
Then dip the mostly dry brush into very dense pigment and dab off extra moisture again with paper towel.
On bone-dry paper apply streaks of grain with long continuous stokes that varied from moment to moment just like the moments of happiness and sadness in a life.
Variations in grain came from forces acting on the tree, rain and drought, warm and cold.
We all have variations in our grain, especially us old trees.
Start on the metal, pic # 4:
Seeing that it was green was hard.
What interests me about painting is how hard it is to see.
The brain wants to paint what it knows, not what it sees.
In fact we stopped really seeing long ago.
If we always saw everything as it really is we would go into overload.
Aging is a process of ignoring.
We “know” metal isn't green.
But if you cut a small hole in a white piece of paper and held it over pic#1 you would see, not metal, but a little circle of green, and brown, and blue.
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