watercolor – My Truant Pen

Last year, I decided three days before the start of the workshop that I wanted to be in Tucson, painting. My watercolors were not dry in the palette before I was on a plane to Arizona (and in point of fact I finally got the last of the gold-green explosion off getting ready for THIS year). But I’d fallen in love with Tanque Verde Ranch last year, and thoroughly enjoyed my first foray into urban sketching with Shari Blaukopf as part of the extremely well-run Madeline Island School of the Arts (MISE). So this November, as things started to darken, I figured that it would be the perfect time to spend a week with the only distraction from watercolors being the superb food dished out three times a day by the friendly and talented staff at the ranch.

In 2024, I’d been four weeks post-op from knee surgery, which somewhat reduced my hiking aspirations but not at all reduced my hiking longings. So this year I gave myself some extra time before and after to hit the iceless mountains of the Sonoran Desert. If I’m all praise for the actual workshop, I have nothing but calumny to pour on the heads of Payless Car Rentals – which kept me and dozens of others waiting for 3+ hours for the rental cars we’d reserved, or the Hilton resort I stayed at which sneeringly told me that if I wanted to charge the EV rental car which had been my only option I was welcome to spend several hours hanging out in the parking lot of town hall to do so… but I’d find no welcome in their facility.

I still managed to get in a good hike, but these shenanigans probably took 3 miles off my intended course with their time suck. I digress. I had a great hike, and managed to see THREE big horn sheep which was really cool and also they are extremely hard to pick out.

A rather pixelated photo of a hillside covered with saguaro cactus. You can just barely make out the shape of a big horn sheep on the hill. — It’s not AI, I just had the digital zoom cranked up all the way so you could see this bad boy.

My usual self is a lot of things to a lot of people: mother, wife, friend, daughter, employee, boss, mentor, board member, volunteer… the list is long. I love all these things and wouldn’t set them down. But the allure of going somewhere where no one knows me and I don’t have to live up to anyone’s expectations of me is strong. My mother has a hilarious schtick about her belief about going to college, and how she’d finally be the lay-dy (you should hear her say the words) she knew she was in her heart of hearts. I went in with the same idea. I’d be reserved. Quiet. A mysterious presence who spoke only with her brush and astonishingly beautiful selection of 37 colors (none of which was Prussian Blue, to the astonishment of all assembled). For once in my life I’d be quiet. Fade to the background. Unobtrusive.

As my mother discovered when she went to college and was still herself, I found myself not two days later (successfully) attempting to convey “Scheherazade” in charades with some of the world’s greatest color geniuses. Oh well.

Day 1: Into the fire

Little can strike terror into the heart of a bad drawer like wheels. Many of our bold number quailed when our first assignment was a covered wagon with an excess of spokes and shadows. There’s nothing like watching an expert wave a brush across a page and a brilliant, colorful, characterful painting just appears, and then tackling it yourself. This was a warmup effort – my shadows are particularly disappointing. But they can’t all be winners.

A covered wagon in bright sunlight — Please notice how there are a bajillion spokes

A watercolor of the covered wagon — There are more things wrong with this than are right with it. The shadow on the canvas is extra not great, and my foliage is a consistent weak point.

Day 2: Paints up!

A two page watercolor spread, with an agave plant and barrell cactus on the left page, and a desert scene on the right — Days 1 & 2: A spread of cacti and a desert scene

A blue agave plant with a wooden label in front of it — Sure it looks easy to draw, but how do you do that fold on the right side?

After I finished my wagon, I turned around and painted two of the cacti – one on either side of the walkway. I’d done some swatching ahead of time and had a brilliant idea for the color of the agave (which I was quite pleased with). Drawing the agave was haaaard. The barrel cactus might be one of my strongest paintings to that point. I keep finding myself looking at it. I didn’t fill all the space with paint (an error I’m particularly susceptible to), and left some glints to keep it interesting.

This was my second time painting nearly this exact desert scene (I’d tried last year too). Both of them were rather disappointing. I love love love mountains and want to paint them beautifully, but this scene didn’t convey the feeling I was going for.

Day 3: Tucson Botanical Gardens
You have no idea how exhausting painting can be. Also, it was _cold_ out there. There was ice that didn’t melt during the day, which is practically unprecedented in Tucson. I seriously questioned whether I shouldn’t just stay in the incredibly soft and cozy bed all day and maybe come out for a bit of a hike and call off the botanical garden. But I’m glad I didn’t.

A two page spread of watercolor and ink vignettes from the Botanical Gardens, including a fountain, some cacti, and a small set of pots. — 7 small paintings in one day

I was mostly pleased with this. The fountain was very difficult drawing for me. My ink drawings end up sort of cartoony like the fountain, and I think I need a new strategy. Or to embrace that as my style. I particularly like the cluster of pots in the top right – I was captivated by the real thing. The red cholla with the yellow blossoms on the teal background created a problem. Everyone likes it, but the value was all wrong for the rest of the vignettes. I tried to fix it with the lettering, but I’m not really sure I did.

A collection of pots with succulents and cacti in them. — I now want a shelf of these succulents and cacti in my house. I’m sure it would be just like this.

A picture of a terra cotta fountain with a woman behind painting — My fellow sketchers are in many of my reference photos

Day 4: The Old Homestead
The old homestead on the top of the hill had been the spot of some of my more successful paintings last year, so this year I decided to skip it and take another crack at the disappointing panorama. I’m not saying this is my best painting ever. But … it very well might be. I’m half-sad it’s in a sketch book and I really can’t frame it or display it. It’s not perfect (my foliage continues to bedevil me) but the mountains are right. And I really GOT the rocks for the first time.

A two page spread of a desert panorama done in watercolor — Now this one I’m very pleased with

A dusty trail in the Sonoran desert with clear blue skies, saguaro and creosote bushes. — I think the trail is the key to my problem: I needed to lead the viewer INTO the picture instead of having this horizon barrier between you and the desert.

Day 5: Farewell to Tanque Verde
After a week of the subdued hues of the desert, my eye kept being caught by the bright colors of the US and Arizona flags. I decided to practice my foliage (definitely a work in progress), attempt a human figure (this guy ended up somehow being a figure in many of the classes paintings – maybe because he took a contrarian viewpoint?), and use some bright colors. It’s not a great painting – the values are too close, the tree on the right is weird. But reps count.

A watercolor of a figure under a tree with a flag breaking through the frame — Those colors are still flying. I do really like the Arizona flag.

A picture of a man sitting below a tree, with a flagpole to his side. — I had to go back later and take another photo of the flags to get the colors right, but the second photo doesn’t have the figure

My last full painting of the class (I started a third one) is one that I don’t think I could have done at the beginning of the week. I’d admired this pot and its flowers all week (one of the fun things about a class like this is how much it sharpens your noticing muscles). I had finished my first painting and there was still time left, so I plopped down after lunch and did a super simple sketch and then just enjoyed non-desert colors. This is loose and fast and fun and I think you can feel that when you look at it. It shows a lot more fluency than I started the week with.

A beautiful pot on an iron stand full of greenery and flowers, against a warm beige wall — I mean, how can you be in a painting class and walk past this every day and not paint it?

A watercolor painting of a large blue flower pot overflowing with greenery and flowers against a beige wall — It’s not fussy. It was fast. And the shape and shadow are good. I’m especially proud of how … organic the edges of the painting are.

I would 100% recommend the teacher, class and location to anyone interested (if not the rental car company). I’m now ready to collapse into an exhausted heap (seriously how is painting that tiring). And tomorrow I’ve got a hike planned before I fly back to frigid New England on Sunday.

Just a quick reminder for folks that you can catch my shorter form work on Bluesky.

What if you could possess a color? Own it, understand it, live with it through the moods and vagaries of light and paper? It’s been about three and a half years I’ve been painting with watercolors. The very first time I tried, the book instructed me to mix the blues and yellows in proportion. I squeezed out from a tube blue and yellow in the approximate proportions. It took me the better part of two tubes before I gave up and called it good enough. It seemed like a pity to throw away the rest, but what could you do?

Yeah, for those who don’t know like me? You can “resurrect” watercolor indefinitely by adding um, water. And when they recommend you mix it, they’re talking about the released watery watercolor you would paint with. A tiny dab of watercolor in a palette can last you months and many paintings.

Good thing it was the cheap student watercolors.

When I loaded up my palette yesterday, with a number of new colors, the watercolors were not the cheap ones. I try to tell myself that the hobby is inexpensive by comparison to, say, golf. Or bass fishing. But the contents of my paintbox are truly a treasure. Loading a palette is a labor of love – equal parts tedious and delightful. My left hand got sore from the threaded tops of the tubes, stuck on by paint. There was the planning and the labeling and the decision making … can I live without Bordeaux? Which yellows will I want for the desert? But the best part of all is the swatching, where you dip a tip of your brush into the thick virgin paint and then release it with water onto the paper. Will it be creamy? Transparent? Will it granulate? Will the color of the paint and the color of the watered paint be the same or wildly different? Will the water reveal one pure color, or a prism of many? And most critically – did you guess right about the variety and value and hue in your ordering of the swatch?

In light, I love all colors. Perhaps green most, since it’s the garment of my beloved nature in the places I have lived. But in paint, my heart belongs to indigo. Students of history know how important indigo was to the commerce of the colonized Caribbean. Blue pigment was always a problem in the history of paints. There’s the fantastically expensive lapis lazuli pigments. There’s the ecology destroying but fugitive woad of the Picts. Blues are hard to find. And indigo is not just blue, it’s exceptional. The indigo paint is so creamy and consistent, versatile, kind, assertive, trustworthy. When I have indigo on my brush, I have no fear. If I were limited to one paint for the rest of my life, it would be indigo. I remember the first time I tried to use Cerulean blue. It’s a pretty blue – like a robin egg or a spring sky. But it came across my page chalky, inconsistent. I thought it must be a defective batch but no. Granulating is the technical term. A wash with it is like rolling the dice on paint coverage. Per instructions, I loaded Cerulean into my palette, but we will never be on dear terms, Cerulean and me.

A thousand faces of indigo. All indigo, all the time. If you’ve ever seen me paint a night sky, it was almost certainly indigo.

The last year or two I’ve been reading my way through the histories of pigments and paints. My palette covers a hundred thousand years. I have the yellow ochre that neolithic priests painted in flickering firelight on deep cavern walls in the airless belly of the earth. I have the Venetian Red that colored so many lions and trousers and buildings in medieval and renaissance paintings. I do NOT have mummy brown, alas, since we no longer find the best use of mummies to be loading them onto our paint brushes (or burning them as fuel for locomotives). But I also have a whole palette of the unspellable quinacridones: gold, coral, magenta, rose, red, violet. Those paints “break” in this astonishing way where the thick paint and the watered paint are entirely different colors. The poisonous arsenic has been removed from the greens, and replaced with the perylene and the pthalos. What color does not come in cadmium? All these minerals and chemicals and discoveries (the history of mauve is a real page-turner – Wikipedia doesn’t do it justice) come with their own characteristics and traits – the personalities of the paint. Some of my paints I hardly ever use (Potters Pink, Terra Verte) but love for their connection to the earth and artists before me.

I have put together a number of palettes in my short history of painting: for a particular book, for a particular season, as I learn which ones I love and those with whom I will maintain a polite distance. But this palette has an entirely different slant than my White Mountain or Northwest art. I need the yellows, the purples, the red earths, the subdued depth of the desert greens to capture Arizona.

I can hear the confusion now … Arizona? Do you not live in New England in January (which, btw, is mostly a hundred variations on blue and blacks palette wise). Well. Here’s how it is. I’m switching functions at work from one to another, and it was taking a while and I didn’t have all that much to do while we made the switch. And it was a quiet week on the ol’ calendar. And last weekend I started looking at watercolor retreats I might be able to do this winter/spring, since with graduation etc. we are not likely to travel as much as a family this year. And the best one that didn’t conflict with anything was … this week. I feel wildly impulsive and out of character! Who flies to Arizona at the last minute? Surely this is irresponsible of me. But yet, here I am.

I’ve never been to Arizona (well, I may have driven through when I was 13 but that really doesn’t count). I’ve never seen a saguaro. I’ve spent far too little time in the desert of any ilk. I do not object to 80 degree instead of 18 degree weather. But in two hours I’ll land in Phoenix and wend my way to Tucson, for this workshop. I brought my hiking shoes (and yes, extra water bottles) in the hopes of hitting Saguaro National Park on the way. I have no idea what to expect: I haven’t done something like this before.

But that’s really more than half the point. In these middle chapters of life, we face the choice on whether to invest and focus on continuing to grow and change and learn new things – or whether to hone our existing expertise and enjoy the mastery we have worked for our entire lives. Of course, it’s a nuanced choice: we all have to figure out how to use the new way to watch movies, and every skill we once had comes on the journey with us. I find myself hungry for curiosity, and enthralled by the worlds out there I never knew existed. Who knew that paints had such personality and history? A child of the magenta/cyan/yellow screens would never guess such a truth. What other wonders await out there, just asking for me to ask the right set of questions to unlock them? I’m itching to find out. And see a few new sights in the process.

Edited to add:
I wrote that on the plane. Then I got here, spent an annoying amount of time in the airport and drove down I10 to Tucson feeling depressed at the nature of the billboards (casinos and personal injury lawyers mostly). But Saguaro National Park made up for all of it. The watercolors start tomorrow!

Tag: watercolor

Tanque Verde with Shari Blaukopf: or MISE West magnificence

Make the color my own