I had a lovely day today at the Bellevue Daniel Smith where I gave two workshops on ink and watercolor field sketching. Both were full houses! I was delighted to share my work with everyone and enjoyed meeting new faces. I look forward to more collaborations with Daniel Smith- in fact this fall I will give a demo (Oct. 25th) and workshop (Nov 16), “Painting Mountains” with watercolor. While I was at the store, I picked up some new supplies to play with including gum arabic and some Golden mediums. The one I’m most excited about is Crackle Paste. My talented artist friend Jennifer Phillips uses this with her small oil paintings and I’m curious to explore the possibilities. This evening I prepared four 5″ x 7″ panels with the paste and hope they will be dry enough in the next day or two to paint on.

This evening I also did another mixed media piece. I tried using gum arabic diluted 1:1 with water and conté crayon with mixed results. The conté seemed to clump more than when I simply used water. I’ll have to try further diluting the gum arabic for my next painting. I’m enjoying the overall process- I like the simplified compositions and working the surface by pushing pigment around and creating layers.

By the way, did you hear about the Oregon lawn chair pilot? Yikes!