Watercolor by Joseph Chiang: Snowy Central Park 2&3

It took me like 3 times longer to complete the #2 than the #3, and I think I overworked a lot on the second one. I tried to be more economical and efficient on the 3rd one, but the painting seems to be lack of detail.
I still like my first one much more, I tried to get that feeling of Chinese painting back to the 2nd and 3rd, but I think I failed on both. Somehow I feel it’s because of the amount of Indigo I use…for the first one I use Indigo on almost all the mix of colors, and I believe that’s partly the reason it has strong atmosphere in it. I get rid of Indigo and use ultramarine and burnt siena; I even added some alizarin crimson to the sky… and the result was a disaster…the sky wasn’t deep enough and the mixture of ultra marine and burnt siena just make the hole painting too dull…

Snowy Central Park

When I was at junior high shool, teacher always taught us not to add brown to blue…But in this painting, virtually every inch has a cirtain amount of blue and brown in it.I find it that the color now looks more like ink in traditional Chinese painting…I like the result… The color isn’t vivid and bright, it provides viewers with a quiet, calm look…

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10 minute watercolor – seascape

The paper is wet and the table is tilt before I laid the first stroke.

10 minutes watercolor – Foliage and Branches

I spent some time to include caption, hope it will help.

10 minutes watercolor – Dancing Branches

Recently I have been depressed by the pressure of applying for NIW, a status that will make me stay in the USA. So it’s kind of hard for me to concentrate enough to paint. I have to go through a process of meditation so my mind can focus – it’s normaly a long hot shower to refresh my mind. Then I can paint while all the mental engery is concentrated on my hands and the Qi is transffered to the brush tip. Otherwise my branches won’t dance.

Sounds like science fiction…

[tags]youtube, watercolor, lesson, painting, floiage, branches, wash, art[/tags]

Globat sucks…

My old webhost Globat pissed me off, it got so slow that my blog takes up to a minutes to load; so I decided to change hosting company and it takes one week for Globat to transfer my old domain name Josephwatercolor.com. I ended up to have to come up with this new name FloatingPaint.com. Now they both point to my new web host Bluehost and run smoothly. I never experience such joy of speed in using blog with Globat, even with a static blog software like Movabletype is painfully slow.
Now this blog is undergoing a transformation, so I have to update all the picture insertion; I apologize for the missing pictures in the blog entries.

10 minutes watercolor

I have thought about doing this for quite a while…
It’s quite challenging to paint a watercolor within 10 minutes even though it’s only a postcard size.
I have to figure out the composition in mind first, then put the right colors on the pallete. The initial wash can’t be too wet otherwise I wouldn’t be able to paint anything on top of it. I have to also control the time of mixing colors and changing the right size of brushes accordingly, let alone holding a camera, keep an eye on the camera screen so the video won’t be out of focus while painting.
It’s fun to do though. I did a total of three today; the first one is a completely mess as the video is constantly out of focus.
I like the fact that I can see my own getures and become more conscious about the decsisons I made while painting, which I tend to ignore normally.

[tags]youtube, watercolor, lesson, painting, floiage, branches, wash, art[/tags]

New Watercolor by Joseph Chiang – The Way It Grows

Focusing on branches is my main goal for this painting…
I tried to keep the strokes loose and at the same very well in place…
so that they aren’t too busy nor floating in mid air.

New Watercolor by Joseph Chiang – Sunset Sea

I felt that like watching a drama, there is a “peak” period for watercolor, you need to realize when you have reached the peak, otherwise, the more strokes you add, the painting would just keep deteriorating.

In this case, the cloud’s edges are too sharp, which is the result of wet on wet, plenty of unecessary strokes on top of wet colors….those are not the initial effect I aimed to achieve…

New Watercolor by Joseph Chiang – Wave and Rock

The wave effect was an accident –

a happy accident…

it’s hard to recreate such type of effect..
you do it over and over
but you would never get the same result
a lot of time, you find youself catering to the end result
of what you were trying to create…
you then have to work around it instead of
work against it….
It’s how we treat nature as well…
you take what is created
and live accordingly…
there is no room for negociation
It’s all about being intuitive.
[tags]art, watercolor, painting, artist, journal[/tags]