New Roads, New Beginnings

Here’s to new beginnings.. They are in a sense, an end to something if you ever stopped to notice that. To start something new, always requires effort and is often times a reinventing of oneself. I will not say drastically, but with time, it has the potential for the drastic changes that we might hope for. Never happens overnight in my opinion. We need to keep at it. Take my art for example. I have always loved colors, even as a child. That box of student watercolors made my usually non responsive soul quite vibrant as the colors within. It was one of the few things that resonated with me... Colors.

So, when I picked up my paintbrush some two years back to keep me company when the world quieted during covid, the colors bought me the same memories, the same joy, but…. I could not paint a thing, well not in the ways that I saw everyone on the very many social platforms could. The excess or lack of water in my brush, the hold of it, the stroke, the color transparency, the well.. everything :) It was and is a continuing struggle. I do understand that we are all in different stages of our journeys whatever they maybe, but the start and its messy uphill climb with more falls than climb, is the most painful of things to do or stick with >__<

But I do appreciate failures. I believe in them and their value very much. My first sketch a few years back and the sketches I do today would not have been possible without all those sketches I considered a failure. My sketchbooks are truly terrible if I may say so myself :) They are a mess of colors and wrangled lines. But the mess is giving shape these days to a vague understanding of the things I could not grasp once. As mentioned, still a very long way to go, but it is a new beginning and an end to something every day, albeit not so consciously. Somethings, you just know one day all of a sudden, like how to hold your brush for that stroke and you wonder how you ever held it any other way. A head scratcher for sure.

This photo I took on the way out of Artists Drive Scenic Loop, Death Valley National Park is one of my favorite shots on my Fujifilm X100F. I can write love poems to that camera :) which was a gift from Shankar. Did not know anything about shutter speed or aperture or exposure back then. Not that I know much now, but I do contextually understand what it means to capturing a good image on camera. Shankar definitely did not know what he was doing when he got that camera for me, but it truly set me down a path which even I was not aware of back then.

It was still early in the day, so there weren’t many people around which allowed us to park the car safely by the side of the pavement and take this wonderful shot. A beautiful day, a beautiful path.

Death Valley National Park, Shot on Fujifilm X100F - F5.6, ISO200, SS1/205

I felt this was good subject to start something like our blog with and was an easy enough subject to do a watercolor painting on. I will try to walk through the process I follow here. I start off with a sketch as I feel it gives me an idea on the elements - what I want to include and not, and at times can also serve as a quick value study. If time allows, I also do a value study using a single color. Indigo, Payne’s Grey are all good colors for this purpose I have found. You can use any colors you like, but suggest to pick a color that can give varying values. I have used ultramarine blue in this attempt. This practice can give you a deeper understanding of how the final image might look like, particularly if you are trying to capture light and shadows in your painting.

If you look at the original photo, you can see the light comes in from the left and leaves shadows in the mountains and on the stones and other elements. The value studies will allow you to double check the direction of the light and also how your placement of the dark values compares. It is not meant for a perfect assessment, more so for an understanding. It helps towards the final painting.

I did the final painting the day after the above sketches and value studies. Doing everything in a single day is overkill in every way. I end up becoming impatient and kill everything >_<

Now that I have touched upon impatience, if there is one thing that kills my sketches or watercolor painting or whatever else in my opinion, it is that. I was and even now never good at managing patience, but I have found both watercolor and photography to be a force to reckon with against my impatient nature. I won’t say I have always been this way, but somewhere along the way, trying to do everything quicker, faster, better, I also became this terribly impatient person. Counterintuitive to become quicker, faster, better as I have come to realize, but a tough habit to rewire. Trying just like everything else :) to reverse the habit.

Where was I, yes, be patient. Photos, Paintings, Sketches.. ahem, even myself.. all need varying degrees of patience for them to turn out the way you want them to turn out. Impatience pretty much kills everything. I used to be this person who wanted to see the end results before I even picked the brush only to realize well, it’s not that easy. It was like if there was a watercolor divine entity, like Master Oogway in Kung Fu Panda and he was trying to tell me to eat one dumpling at a time instead of gobbling it all up! One brushstroke at a time.. while it is not easy, it does make for a better end result at that skill level one is in. Where we are in a particular journey is something only we know, and if I really wanted to compare, I like to look back at my own work, not at others. I’ve noticed that there has always been progress as long I dabbled in it. Always.

This was a fairly straightforward palette, with cerulean blue for the skies, payne’s grey for the mountains with a touch of magenta and Raw and Burnt Sienna used for the desert and sand portions. Wet in wet techniques for the cloud, mountains and sand, and dry brush work for the textures. Painted on a 9 X 12 in Arches Cold Press.