Judith Freeman Clark, paintings

Reference photo for "Traveling towards Delft." In the spring of 2016, I went to Amsterdam and while I was there took a lot of photos with my iPhone. Not the highest quality, but still useful as painting references. One group of pictures is especially bad, as I took them while going from Amsterdam to Delft via train -- and it was an overcast day. However, I've found that it's possible to work from even marginal reference photos. This photo is the one I selected to use for this painting.   Step #1 To begin, I drew a faint horizontal line to divide the sky from the landscape. I placed it lower than the middle of the paper because I wanted to emphasize the sky (Step #1). I also blocked in several building shapes, and the church steeple on the right. Next, I dampened the paper in the upper section, and laid in some loose washes of Cobalt Blue mixed with a little Burnt Sienna. I made sure to leave plenty of white for the clouds. When it was dry, I went back...

When I started this painting, using a wet-into-wet technique, I assumed that the focal point would be the flowers... but as the process unfolded, it became clear that the star of the show is the blue glass vase. Painting glass in watercolor can be a challenge because of the need to preserve highlights. To begin, I dampened the paper (I chose a piece of 300-lb. Kilimanjaro Bright White for this painting). I dropped color into the center area for the foliage, using Winsor & Newton Green Gold, Holbein Shadow Green, and Daniel Smith Undersea Green. As I added color, I used a negative painting technique, going around the shapes of the white daisies. After this step dried, I added washes of bluish-gray (a combination of Shadow Green and Daniel Smith Cobalt Blue), further outlining the shape of the daisies. Before beginning work on the vase, I experimented on scrap paper with pigments. I wanted to make the glass vivid, so that it would stand out despite the proliferation of flower...

Massed flowers offer a challenge to those of us who prefer to paint realistically. I've been experimenting with the "wet-in-wet" technique, and have enjoyed both the process and the outcome in two recent paintings. In the first, "Ivory Vase," I began by dampening the background area, and painted around the vase shape with washes of Winsor & Newton Burnt Sienna and Ultramarine Blue, with a few drops of Daniel Smith Cobalt Blue. I used this blue, also, on the lower portion of the vase. When the first background wash dried, I built up the depth in some background areas with subsequent washes of Burnt Sienna and Ultramarine Blue (which make a really nice gray), allowing each layer of wash to dry completely before continuing. I used this same combination to model the rounded shape of the vase. For the blossoms, I dampened the area where the flowers and leaves would be and dropped in splotches of color, using Winsor & Newton Permanent Rose and Permanent Mag...

Sometimes when I review older watercolor sketches, I decide that they'd be improved by some "tweaking."   To help take my mind off an (unseasonable!) April 6 snowstorm, I pulled out of my stash of small paintings this one, of a clump of crocus. It had a somewhat flat, bland quality and I thought adding some deeper tones in the background might help, as well as adding more nuanced color to the blossoms. As a way to bring the latter forward, I dampened some areas on a few of the petals. Then, I dropped in Quinacridone Magenta, and a few spots of Opera pink and let the colors blend by themselves. After adding more color to the petals I deepened the contrast by using more Dioxazine Violet in the central portions of each blossom. After dampening parts of the lower right of the paper, I dropped in a mixture of Sepia and Burnt Umber. While these colors blended, I used a dry-brush technique with Undersea Green and Green Gold in the middle background to...

Step #1 Finishing "Mardi Gras Iris," which I’d shown in my previous post, meant identifying the colors I used when starting the painting several months ago. I'd neglected to keep color notes, so I had to do some paint swatches to be sure I'd get them right. I wanted to stay with mostly transparent, and staining or semi-staining colors.  Holbein's "Opera" -- an almost neon-bright pink that is fairly easy to identify -- was the main color I used in the center iris blossom. Pigments used in manufacturing Opera make it a 'fugitive' color (unstable, and not very permanent), so I wouldn't normally use it in focal-point areas of a painting. But in this painting, I was experimenting with a more vivid palette and wanted to determine how Opera interacts with other pigments. I do know other watercolor artists use this color to good advantage, especially in detail areas. Background runs and blooms After a little experimenting with color swatch...