Two for Technique

A coworker who sees many of my sketches and paintings remarked upon how, more often than not, I'll refer to creating my art as 'playing'.  It's true, my default is "playing with paint" or "playing with composition", etc, rather than the more serious sounding "creating art" or even "drawing" or "painting". 

I'm ok with that.  To me, this is pure play.  I'm certainly not going to make a living at it (although everything here is for sale, contact me for prices!  LOL).  I sketch and paint and write for fun, for escape, for my own satisfaction.  In other words, I play.

You should try it.  Too many people have forgotten how.

Ok, these two were strictly to pla... practice with techniques that I'm not completely familiar with.  The first, "Tree and Rocks" (catchy, eh?) is where I practiced creating rock surfaces by scraping wet paint with the edge of a plastic card (in my case, an old library card).  For the tree foilage, I used the ol' sponge dipped in paint trick that we all learned in school.  It's not great art, but it was great practice.

This next one is "Snow Shadows", which is also a perfect description.  My wife gave me lots of good suggestions on how to make this work better, but I was concentrating on lifting the light spots out of the painted snow, to reveal the tree casting the shadows.  The technique is rather time consuming and I definitely need more practice, but that's why I play.

This is similart to what I did in Dappled.