Watercolor of Colored Glass

Glass Menagerie by Lorraine Watry ©2013

I started this painting as a demonstration for a class I was teaching this summer on painting glass in watercolor. I don't usually paint still-lifes but the reflections and detail in the glasses were exciting. I began by setting up and rearranging all the glass pieces that I collected for the class. Then I tried setting them up with different backgrounds both inside and outside to provide different lighting. I ended up choosing this scene because I liked the contrast that the wooden bird statues played against the blue bird and all the other glass. It also felt like there was a story.
     The next step was to block out all the highlights with masking fluid. It is better to save more whites in the beginning because you can always paint some of them out later. Then I started with the upper right corner and just started painting the shapes in the white glass bowl. Having strong contrasts and looking for all the little abstract shapes when painting glass is important.
     One of the changes I made from my photograph was to paint the little glass pieces around the blue bird red instead of the blue that they are in the photograph. I did this for two reasons. The first was that the red helped the blue bird stand out more and the second reason was to spread the red around the painting a little more.
     After finishing a painting, especially a busy one like this, it is important to look at it for a while to make sure there are no areas that need adjusting. I looked at my painting from across the room and in different light, I also looked at in reverse in a mirror and saw a few areas that I wanted to adjust. After making the adjustments, I removed the masking that had saved the white of the paper and painted in the areas that needed color. The rest of the masked areas were cleaned up by painting some of the surrounding color to make them look less cut out or I scrubbed some of their edges to soften them to look like highlights on the glasses, ex. as seen on the green goblet in the upper right hand corner.
     

Tips on Entering Juried Watercolor Shows

"Could be a future band painting" ©2011

I know it is now October, and I am really behind in posting to my blog. I am still trying to catch up from a very busy summer and start of marching band season for my son. I am the new bookkeeper for the band and now to the end of October a lot of my time will be given over to this duty. As a proud band parent I have to brag that they took 2nd place in a competition last night, moving up from 4th in preliminaries!
    Back to art, though. I was looking around at other blogs and saw this link about entering juried art shows. I think Deb Ward does a good job of describing the process of the entry from the show organizers stand point. http://debwardart.blogspot.com/2011/09/entering-art-shows.html
Something I would add to this is, when choosing your pieces to enter, try to see them from a jurors perspective. For most juried shows there are a lot of entries and the juror only has a few minutes to look at each entry. Make sure your values are strong and you have a good composition. Also, when photographing your artwork, only take a photo of the art, never send an image with frames, matts, or any kind of background in the image. You don't want anything distracting from your star - your painting!