Tag: sunlight

Pumpkins in the Sun watercolor painting

Published on by kmgunnart1 Comment

I started a new art challenge today – and am actually blogging this painting the same day! Woohoo! It’s a start. This is a seven day challenge, with the theme being Halloween and/or Samhain (Celtic harvest festival). I have my reference photos picked out and cropped, with a smaller theme of pumpkins, and decided to start with a watercolor painting featuring half a dozen pumpkins in bright afternoon sunlight, laying on the brown ground. As an additional inspiration, I had my headphones on and was playing The Nightmare Before Christmas once I had the six squash sketched in place and began to apply the watercolor paint.

mockup of watercolor painting Pumpkins in the Sun by Katrina Gunn

How the watercolor paint flowed

I’ve mentioned before how sometimes it feels like the painting is just flowing out onto the paper or canvas, and this pumpkin painting certainly flowed out as I listened to the movie-musical. The weather has been rather dry here in Florida, so I didn’t need to wait long for the layers to dry, and I was done with the paint stage in about three hours – which is quite good considering I had to really layer the shadows. With watercolor, the trick is getting shadows dark enough, and often requires multiple layers.

watercolor painting Pumpkins in the Sun
Pumpkins in the Sun, 12 by 9 inch watercolor on paper, available $100 USD

How to purchase this watercolor painting

As the caption states, the original is 12 by 9 inches watercolor paper, and it is sealed with wax medium to protect it from humidity (and spills). You can purchase it through PayPal via Daily Paintworks here. Art prints both smaller and larger are available through my Pixels page here, and apparel and accessories are at my RedBubble page here. My sister insisted that I have a RedBubble account, and my mother seconded that.

Note: other posts from this series are Pumpkin Close-Up and Jack-o-Lantern.

Sunrise at the Beach watercolor painting

Published on by kmgunnart2 Comments

After six flamingo paintings, I guess I got restless and on a whim I painted this lovely little beachscape, which is my term for a landscape that features a beach (rather obvious). It also has elements of a seascape and a cloudscape, but the sand and some shore grass tip it firmly into the beachscape classification in my opinion. It’s the sunrise part that makes the clouds so interesting to me.

The original is on paper that was sold as ten inches by ten inches, but a careful measure shows one dimension to be about an eighth of an inch short. This was the first time I had noticed this deficiency on the block (glued pad of pre-stretched watercolor paper that buckles much less than taping a sheet down myself) even though I have already done a previous painting (will post that soon!). While I can fix that on the scan, the original is not quite square. I am not at all versed in the intricacies of framing art, so I don’t know if that will have an effect.

Sunrise at the Beach watercolor landscape
Sunrise at the Beach, 10 x 10 inch watercolor, original available $100 USD plus shipping

Overall, I think this is my best landscape so far. Then again, this is only my fourth landscape I’ve done this year, so not a whole lot of competition there! I am asking $100 for the original, and do ship. Prints are available at my Pixels page, and apparel and accessories are at my RedBubble page for those who like to wear their art.

I do still have a pile of paintings and pastel works to post, so stay tuned!