This is the cleanup category. I’ll comment below the scan just to be inconsistent.

I painted this one out of a book, with the step by step. I like it because it reminds me of Columbus, OH. Columbus has all these wonderful metroparks in which I have spent about a third of my life. The winters there are mild, and the painting reminds me of November there. The great outdoors of the suburban cities of the USA is one thing I chiefly miss.

Not particularly noteworthy except to say it isn’t as bad as the worst of them and that I painted it while listening to John MacArthur defend credo-baptizm before a bunch of presbos.

Another one out of a book. I think I actually improved on the book. Later, I tried to repeat it and was unable. Felicitous the colors, eh? I sometimes paint with not enough colors out and trying to use up things: this one was not that way. Felicitous the sky. (Subsequently taken up in the internationally famous Triage Poetry winter issue ;)

I dreamed this. No kidding: the vague city, the orange sky, the yellow ochre in the lights. I added the lemon yellow but I dreamed that prussian blue. And I think the painting actually comes close to the dream: of course you know what things dreams are, and what made of, and how perhaps they change in the memory. But this one is no imitation–that I can tell. Lock, stock and barrel mine or at least given to me in visions of the night.

So I did a second take, with darker skies and on a smaller bit of paper. I added the cloud and now it looks like the city is dreaming, which is a pleasant consideration.

I wish I had known exactly how to add further still at an unearthly height, a luminary clock against the sky because it does seem to proclaim the time is neither wrong nor right. I have been one acquainted with the night.

Not that I’m above imitating even after the gods have visited me personally. One has a creative dream about twice in thirty-six years, it seems. The mountains above were not intended. The snow in the foreishground is not ok. Still, it is cold and urban and what could be better?

A bit less variation in color. It is on a card the size of a business card. More abstract the city, starker the winter, better the whole.

The End.

I wish I could get closer to what I’m after with trees. I probably just need to devote myself. Don’t see myself devoting to anything but my present job though. This first was drawn, then practiced on smaller pieces, then painted on this original drawing taken from something I googled.

One of the four practice pieces was this next. It reminds me of spring, which in my mind is always the dirtiest season of the year.

This is quite recent. Wish the bank weren’t botched, but the sky is good! I have a really hard time with pines.

Rain. Isn’t that green quite wet looking? And I was pleased with the relationship the mountains and the clouds set up. I don’t have violet or purple in the Brazilian set of paints which is what I started out with. I don’t remember exactly, but I reckon the mountain is the crimson and prussian blue of the clouds. That kind of thing helps.

This next was one of the earliest. I added around the trees–I mean I painted the trees first, not last–and pulled it off. I think part of my success in those days was that I listened to recorded books and so took my time. Ought to return to that when I go back to painting in great bouts.

And a more recent development with the same sort of invasion of yellow in mind. The purple there is Chinese.

See what you can do with watercolors? You can set up the background. I, however, seldom set up things as I did in this one.

This last is very recent. Nice twilightishness, eh? I’m very pleased with the trees, something about winter to the way they stand there aside from their leaflessness. It reminds me of the long journeys we would take from Minneapolis to Columbus; it was late afternoon usually when we got to Indiana; this reminds me of that a bit, except they don’t really have mountains in Indiana. I removed paint from the mountains to make them sheerer. I wish I had added a star or two to the darker parts of the sky. Maybe I still will.

Here is more of my artless drawing: the Ghashly House.

It has it’s own charm, doesn’t it? It also has Lemon Yellow, the color I am lowest on.

I think what makes this next artless work is the white at the top. The whole thing is rather plain and rather devoid of effort, but it pleases me with its sense of winter hanging over everything.

And speaking of artless, this next one is a good example of what watercolors can do for the atmosphere. Nothing but a row of houses. The road somehow turned into a body of water, the lamp came out ok, but it was without true justification till the Azarin Crimson streaked the sky–rather obviously on the left–and charged the whole atmosphere.

The process for this next was that I did these cottages five times, each time drawing them a little better. Limited colors can be good, especially if you get the right ones together. Here, if I remember correctly, Burnt Umber and the Azarin Crimson.

When I get individual colors, and not a pack of tubes, I have to get Marigold or Magnolia or something like that. A good red, not one that makes you wonder like Azarin Crimson.

The nice thing about watercolors is that you can come back and charge the atmosphere, or leave, as in this case, cobbles in the waters that work. This one is simple, just that I tried wet on dry by waiting for the first stages to finish. It is an early work, but I’m still fond of it. I think I googled some place in Wales.

And one doesn’t always imitate. One gets tired, and it is rather fiddly. What about one’s own inner vision?

It hasn’t happened to me for years, but when I was a kid I used to have these dreams or nightmares of disproportion. In my own private language I called them Stompera, a sort of nightmare of disproportion involving an English noun with a Spanish ending otherwise known as Spanglish. I would dream of heavy leaden flowers on slender stalks, that sort of thing. I would wake up and it would be with me still, and at one point I thought it was because I would fall asleep with my arms under my pillow and cut off my circulation. I quit sleeping that way and have ever since been cautious. Anyway, this first one, with the light troubling that grey sky reminds me of that: not the flower/windmills or whatever they are.

Next, the city sort of crouching near a body of water, with some kind of subliminal, gigantic eagle to the right of it and a view that goes beyond the atmosphere above, caused by sprinkling salt on a still wet coat of prussian blue.

Is it a mad moon or is it the sun? What with the stars (removing the wet paint with a dry brush does that) one thinks of a moon. It also helps that the hut seems slightly (or not so slightly) misaligned, and that shadow is decidedly off. Weirdly, it all comes together–at least to me it does.

This next was such a fluke, and yet it is one of the paintings I’m most proud of–you may have seen it before. The face was an accident, the blots of burnt sienna that invade the prussian blue dabblings, the anemone or whatever it is at the bottom the idle fiddling with a puddle. Then I saw it and boldly added the fish. The white was added to the wet blue and . . . behaved marvelously.

The psychotic Christmas tree. I have turned my attention now to providing seasonal interior decoration.

Google Iceland and you’ll get a lot of things worth painting. I have many, many Iceland failures in my swollen failure folder. But here are some successes. This little church is one. You can see my structures are artlessly drawn–one does not use rulers and one draws with a rather bold, irrevocable line rather than in tentative reiterated attempts. It gives the building a quality I like, like the good illustrations some children’s stories sometimes have. I guess I just have this natural talent for being artless.

Then there is the skyline of Reykjavik. I first did it small (sixth of a page, as with the church). . .

then it worked out large (whole page). . .

then I decided I was done with drawing it first and would get another angle. It came out flat, till I swiped it with this large, chinese brush that smells of cornsilk, and lo! There was rain and the colors took on drama somehow (I can honestly say that most of the good stuff I do is an accident).

And this last is not Iceland. I think it was the USA, but I tried not to make the houses look too American (no aesthetic appeal). Then it had nothing, till I removed paint and set the old cornsilk brush on it.

Cobalt blue on that one. Not a favorite but you can see it works there. I like the brightness of Phthalo blue, and I like the darkness of Prussian blue, and I have no other blues. Eventually, I want to at least include indigo.

I suppose it started with Icelandic mountains. These were sunset. I drew them in pencil before attempting this. One of the great things to do is not use a whole lot of colors.

I led up to this next gradually. Lots of attempts like waves, with increasing success like the incoming tide. Probably my final word on mountains. Wonderful how the color of the sky bled down into the mountains and not the other way around.

Along the way to these mountains, I had a lot of things my teacher objected to. She is not of the opinions that mountains should all be even, like so many heaps of pointy earth. I never asked her, though I did think it, whether or not she had ever considered what mountains created by dwarves digging in the vicinity would be expected to look like.

Little hut in the mountains, one of the few full page successes in this realm.

These mini chaps turn out well rather more frequently than not. Maybe it is the paper: it is business card type paper. Maybe it is that I have to be fiddly since they’re small. You’re probably seeing them at their actual size.

Yes, I’m rather pleased with the sky in the blue one. A bit tumultuous, eh?

And here is one that succeeds perhaps because of the lavender sky. You learn that the combination of colors you use can make or break the whole thing. It is very recent, the latest in my skill.

Few of the things I’m pleased with have come out on whole sheets of paper. I like to part them into halves, quarters or thirds. This also led to a lot of failures till I started using the smaller brushes.

I did a lot of skylines—more later—but this one of Helsinki ended up with a pretty good shade of orange. You’ll see lots of classical looking buildings in the skyline of Helsinki if you google the images.

This next is a bit more Colombian. We have days when the mist and the unrelenting growing of the vegetation all seem to combine. There is something ominous about plants that grow year round. There is a little house in this painting (in case you’re going too fast) against which all nature manages to seem to be conspiring.

Not sure how I got these next windows as well as I did. The sense of emptiness you get is perhaps my careless habit of letting things just run. Watercolors do, you know.

Here is what I mostly did though: cold northern landscapes with mountains. In watercolors you use the white reserve of the paper as part of the color scheme. It often works to have just a little bit showing.

The next is one of the many I did of Reykjavik. You’re supposed to draw, though it isn’t always necessary. But I’m not fiddly, I’m not patient and I just did this one without drawing. It came out pretty cold. It reminds me of Minnesota more than Reykjavik. The ridges in the ice of the lake are made by removing paint.

I did a lot of mountains. These next phthalo blue ones fading into the clouds I like because the idea of mountains touching or piercing the skies and leading out of this world is the main point of any decent mountains, it seems to me. These on some kind of frozen lake in the north seen from behind the rushes with curious blue parts to them make me think of Alde’s winter wanderings.

Alde? Falcon Lord. My great debut fantasy novel.

I graduated from the kindergarten of watercoloring a few months back. I’ll put up some stuff with insightful remarks over the next few days–persons have asked.

I didn’t study drawing, I didn’t study perspective, I didn’t do much more than play around and learn some basic things. I don’t use expensive paper: the paper is 43 lbs, white mostly, but now I have a cream pad. I’m going back to white when I finish this pad, but it has a lot left and I don’t paint at all regularly anymore. I also use something a bit stronger sometimes: bits of card etc. So the paper is usually wrinkled. It isn’t what you put finished product on, but then nothing of mine is really ready for that. I use Brazilian watercolors or Chinese—really cheap, the Chinese. I’ve used more expensive watercolors but I can’t tell the difference, maybe you need the right paper. As to the brushes, whatever comes along with the $5 set of Chinese watercolors I use, mostly.

Here are two early successes, from the very first weeks. It’s part of the joy of watercolors that you don’t really need much.

The sun was done by absorbing the yellow out of the painting: one of the more important techniques of watercolor is removing paint. Watercolors, by the way, are good for doing rain. Odd how the green has that sense of the sea, isn’t it?

This next one is the paper folded in half at the horizon to get the reflection. Felicitous. Then you just add the birds and the thing at the bottom to give it a bit more of the right-side-up sense. It was after this one I decided I needed to be able to do some palm trees. But I never got something good that combined what I did here and the palm trees. A lot of watercoloring, at least for me, has been that way.