Sitting still

From our last trek up Mount Baldy.



The weekend before, I bunged up my ankle (the bad one), and decided that perhaps hiking on uneven, loose rocks so soon wouldn't be such a good idea. J went for his hike, and I hung out at the visitor center at Mount Baldy, where they have a bit of an exhibit trail with historic dwellings...



And a campfire pit (no fire, though).



The weather was a little chilly that weekend; tough to twirl my brush to get the bristles to be nice and pointy, to get in nice clean thin lines. J and I decided that I'll need to get fingerless gloves, so I can keep my hands warm, and still paint as the weather cools more and more.

This watercolor is the first in my watercolor moleskine notebook. You know how things are, when the blank page stares at you, daring you to make that first mark? Better make it a good one. So, the same applies to a nice, new, clean sketchbook. You want that first page to be something really good. So you never start in on it, because you want to wait until something so great inspires you to paint wonderful things worthy of that new notebook.

I finally got tired of trying to do watercolor paintings on the regular sketchbook. I'd tried pre-treating a page each with water and alcohol (rubbing, not the Heineken variety). You might notice in the painting of Jan's kitchen, that there are white blotches. The ivory color actually lifted off, and the page texture got all scratchy - ick! So, I'm not going to force that issue anymore; I'll sketch in the sketchbook and paint in the paintbook. And besides, the watercolor paper really takes the paint the way you want it to. Why keep fighting it?