Small Watercolor Paintings of 2016

My paintings seem to fall into two categories... the larger finished works (with their own postings on this blog) and smaller sketches that I group together for postings such as this.  So here is another group made throughout 2016, but mostly during the summer.  I enjoyed the ability to do many of these on vacation days while sitting outside.  The subject materials were drawn from my memories of growing up in Cardiff, Wales.  These are all made using a 5x8 inch Canson Montval paper sketchbook using Cotman pan-based watercolors over graphite pencil drawings.

As a child I would often visit a small grocery store with my mom on Mill Road in Ely. I found a picture showing the original old cottage, circa 1900, that became the store.

St. Fagans Castle was a frequent destination for day trips.  The Elizabethan manor house is a special feature of the property.  And I remember the beautiful grounds that extends down to the National History Museum with its many attractions.  Keeping with the historical theme, I created this painting with characters walking the gardens as they may have appeared around 1620.

The Cardiff docks were once the busiest in the world.  I chose to paint a composite view of the docks from several images to illustrate the rich history of the port.  This shows the Terra Nova sailing with the Captain Robert Scott expedition to the Antarctic on June 15, 1910.  The ill-fated trip sailed from Cardiff because of the need to take on coal.

Even closer closer to home, this was the old railway station (now dismantled) in Ely, close to the Ely Bridge.  I barely remember the station, but strongly remember crossing the railway tracks via a nearby pedestrian bridge.

Despite the heavy losses of domestic ships, there were many ships unloading supplies and troops at the Cardiff docks during the Second World War.  Following on from my painting of Joe Desch, I thought it was appropriate to show the other side of the supply line as ships traveled to Britain from around the world, but especially from the US and Canada.  Here ships are unloading even as a blitz is underway.

A more tranquil scene of the same docks, further back in time - around the 1880's.  With big sailing ships lined up for loading of coal from the valleys.

A frequent destination for me and my brothers while shopping in Cardiff City center, was the Bud Morgan aeroplane shop in the Castle Arcade.  We assembled many of the model kits available from this small store.  I cannot think of the arcades in Cardiff without remembering the anticipation of shopping there.

Perhaps the most pleasant "town square" in Cardiff that I can remember is the Hayes.  Although it has changed many times, I sketched it as it appeared before my time (around 1905) - but containing the elements I remember.  James Howells on the left, the library and St. Johns church in the distance and the statue of John Bachelor.

Although I remember visiting only one time, I was impressed with the age and significance of the neolithic tomb (cromlech) at Tinkinswood, not too far from my high school. 

A view of the bridge crossing the Ely River looking West down Cowbridge Road towards the intersection of Mill Road and Riverside Terrace.  My grandparents and parents home can be seen as part of the terrace of houses on the extreme left.  This would have been the view around 1900 - with a narrow version of the bridge suited for the slower pace of horse-drawn vehicles.

Watercolor Painting: Neil Armstrong, 2016

I have finally finished my series of three "Ohio Aviator" portraits, with the last in the series showing Neil Armstrong.  It has been my great hope and desire to finish these three paintings because they document the amazing contributions the State of Ohio has made in aviation through the lives of these great pioneers.  In sequence, the first portrait shows the Wright Brothers with their Flyer III aircraft, the second is John Glenn with the Friendship 7 Mercury capsule and this is Neil Armstrong with the Eagle Lunar Module from Apollo 11.

As with the others in the series, this is a combination of a portrait and a landscape.  The image is an attempt to document the critical moments just prior to the first manned landing on the surface of the moon.  Neil was the commander of the Apollo 11 mission.  He was flying the Lunar Module (called the Eagle) along with LM pilot Buzz Aldrin.  In the Command Module (called Columbia), astronaut Mike Collins remained in lunar orbit during the landing.  So I must first state that Neil was absolutely a part of an amazing team that made the landing possible.  There were countless other members of this team back on Earth in Mission Control and all the various other NASA centers and contractors that supported the mission and ultimately lead to the success of Apollo.  So I am calling out Neil in the painting because I wanted to document the legacy associated with Ohio.

Across all three paintings I use the curvature of either the Earth or the Moon's surface to spotlight the fact that these aviators revealed new horizons and changed our perspective of the world or universe.  In the case of Neil - and his first steps on to the lunar surface - this was to take us to other worlds.  But the painting also shows another "arc" that connects the three paintings in the series.  As one of the items taken to the surface of the moon and returned to Earth, Neil carried in the Eagle LM, a wooden fragment and fabric strip taken from the original Wright Flyer aircraft.  So in a way, the Wright Brothers first flight continued all the way to the moon and back.  Consequently another link between all three pictures is that the State of Ohio is visible as part of the backdrop. 

The painting is based on photographs taken during the actual Apollo 11 mission (see https://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/a11.html).  At one point I used actual lunar maps to help create the lunar surface to show the Sea of Tranquility, but the sharp black-and-gray contrast was not particularly pleasing, so I ended up doing my "own thing" with a largely fictional lunar surface.  But the approximate placement of the Eagle, Columbia and Earth are relatively correct - although the Earth should be higher in the sky, a different face would show of the Earth, Columbia would be further to the right (and too distant to see), and the Eagle would be rotated so the windows would be face down.  Artistic license was at work here!  I tried to accurately represent the colors of Eagle and used reference photo's from the mission along with my own pictures of the LM at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. It is my impression that each of the constructed LM's had some minor variations in external color and structural features - so I hope this rendition captures as much of what Eagle looked like.

On the left side of the "sky" is the constellation Cygnus (the Swan) to call out the importance birds played in helping the Wright Brothers understand the importance of aerodynamic flight control.  On the right is the constellation Aquila (the Eagle) to continue the bird theme - since the Lunar Module was called Eagle.

The painting was made on Arches 20 x 30 inch artboard with a cold press finish.  Tracing paper was used to create the underlying graphite outlines.  PowerPoint was used to help arrange the various reference photo's.  The tracings were made by pencil using an inverse copy of the slides, and then transferred onto the artboard.  No masking fluid was used and very little gouache was used for highlights (e.g. clouds).  The lunar surface was created using two colors (Payne's gray and Davy's gray) which produced a wonderful granulation.  The craters were simply created by scrubbing out the highlights and darkening the shadows with the same combination of gray.

These are the Winsor & Newton/Cotman watercolors used (a combination of pan and tubes):

• French ultramarine
• Permanent rose
• Vandyke brown
• Payne's gray
• Davy's Gray
• Raw sienna
• Burnt sienna
• Cobalt blue
• Cerulean blue
• Cadmium yellow hue
• Cadmium orange
• Yellow ochre
• Cadmium red deep hue
• Emerald
• Lamp black
• Zinc white (gouache)

Finally, here are views of the painting in progress...

Watercolor Painting: University of Dayton Science Center (Sherman Hall; 2007) 2016

I created this quick watercolor sketch as as a gift on the first page of a journal for a colleague at the University of Dayton.  Hopefully it can inspire him to create his own sketches.  This shows the Science Center (in particular the wing of the building called Sherman Hall) in which my home academic department (Biology) is located.

The details: 5x8 inch, Moleskine watercolor album with cold press paper and Winsor & Newton, Cotman pans.  The painting is made using several photo's taken in December 2007.

Watercolor Painting: Remembering the 1966 Aberfan Disaster

In creating paintings of my homeland, Wales, it struck me how much of the history of the country and its people is so closely tied to the coal mining industry.  For example, the growth in the size and prosperity of Cardiff could be clearly linked to the surge in coal exports through its port.  That coal came from the mines located just North of Cardiff in towns like Merthyr Tydfil and the nearby village of Aberfan.

Despite the jobs and prosperity, the coal brought a terrible price in human suffering.  On the 21st of October, 1966, one of the slag heaps (created from all the waste generated during the extraction process) just above the town of Aberfan gave way and the debris slid down into the town.  28 adults and 116 children were killed.  The children were located in the Pantglas junior school in the path of the debris avalanche.

So 2016 marks the 50th anniversary of Aberfan.  I was only two years old at the time - but I do remember the terrible impact on the community, not far from my home.  I remember my dad taking me on a trip through the valleys one day, and he showed me the location.

To help me remember and to pause to consider what is lost, I tried to capture the disaster in a small watercolor painting.  Instead of my typical precision using photographs, this was actually a painting that was very spontaneous and drawn from my memories of seeing the pictures that have found their way onto the Internet.  So forgive the fact that details are blurry and probably very inaccurate.  But this is what popped into my head.  Ironically, this was painted in just a few minutes as I took an opportunity to sit outside on an unusually warm spring day in Dayton, Ohio.  Such a contrast - from a spring day full of life and sunshine to remember a much darker day in the fall of 1966.  But remember we must.

More information can be found at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aberfan_disaster and http://www.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/politics/aberfan/home.htm

Watercolor Painting: Tribute to Ronald White Jr., 2016

This simple portrait was created from a small passport-sized photograph of Ronald White Jr. (Dayton, Ohio), who was tragically killed in 2010 through gun violence (see http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/dayton/obituary.aspx?pid=144597741).  I wanted to thank Ronald White Sr. for the opportunity to honor his son's life and allow me to expand my painting skills by making this tribute.

The painting was made on Canson Montval board with three Winsor & Newton colors:

• French ultramarine
• Permanent rose
• Burnt sienna

Small Watercolor Paintings of 2015

The largest paintings I made during 2015 were described in separate postings.  But here are some small scale paintings and sketches from the same year...

This small painting (5 x 8 inches) is drawn from the life of my grandfather (on my Mothers side), Edward Woolven.  As a young man he worked as a driver of steam wagons operating out of a quarry near our home... in Wenvoe, Wales.  As a child I was impressed with the steam wagons, traction engines and railroad steam engines that he would show us at fairs held in Cardiff.  This watercolor painting was made from a photograph shown in the book "Ely Voices" by Nigel Billingham and Stephen Jones, that contained contributions from my grandfather as he described Ely from the early 1900's.

To experiment with some watercolor pencils, I created the following copy of JMW Turner's "Dunstanborough Castle, Northumberland".  This is was my first use of watercolor pencils. (5 x 8 inches).

These two small paintings (5 x 8 inches) were made using travel magazine photographs (and in-person inspirations) from a visit to Washington DC.

This was a really tiny painting (3 x 3 inches) made during a trip to Nashville.  It shows the replica of the Parthenon in Nashville's Centennial Park.

 

A few other miscellaneous paintings (~3 x ~3  inches).


Materials: Sketch books containing Canson Montval paper or Arches cold press; Winsor & Newton or Cotman tubes/pan-based watercolors; Faber-Castell Albrecht Durer watercolor pencils and Sakura Pigma Micron pens.