mary-lou

How do you like them apples?

Published: October 15th 2019, 4:11:19 pm

I posted my crows paintings on my art instagram and people *really* liked them. Way more than I expected, and I was already pretty proud of them. I really like this style/process/whatever so I'm going to experiment with it more.

I wasn't up to anything super challenging today so I tried apples. Simple but still fall related. I started with just watercolor and then adding pen on top. I wasn't super happy with it. Then I tried some light  pen drawing with paint on top of it and still wasn't super pleased.

The upper right one was the closest to what I'd been imagining but I didn't really like how the black was taking the color down. I started thinking that maybe the black pen would only work with subjects that were supposed to be black. I didn't have a red version of the same pen, but I tried doing most of drawing with an old crayola marker and it came out pretty well.

I still wasn't really excited about any of them until I cropped the photo for this post. I'm not sure how that changed anything. Maybe it's just that I was no longer comparing the painting to my reference. But suddenly I was like "Oh, those last two on the right are pretty great." The marker one is less spooky but I love how it blended out.

And I actually like the muted colors on the other one, now. It's maybe not something that would end up on a fruit ad, but it goes really well with the crows. I could see a whole illustration in this style really working.

I guess this means I have a style now? (for however long I can keep being interested in it.) That's pretty exciting!