Long Overdue Update

So it's been a long time since I have updated because of my hectic nursing program. I haven't had a lot of time for anything other than school. First I am posting the picture I finished for my cousin Chico back in September:

It turned out just like how I wanted for the most part but I couldn't blend the blue "sky" with the white background as well as I would have wanted.

Also I have been practicing with the Japanese ink again. The next experiment was plum trees.

My first tree:

A close up of the flowers:

My second tree:

And a closeup:

I just love the look of the ink. It is so difficult to use but it's worth it. The flowers were the hardest. They turned out ok but they don't look like the ones in the book. Oh well, I just have to keep at it! I hope to be doing much more with this style, stay tuned!

Bamboo branches

So I broke out my Japanese ink set again since I was itching to paint something.  I was once again reminded of how hard it is to use this ink.   It's extremely hard to get the right amount of ink on the brush and to do certain strokes.  It took me somewhere around two hours of practicing brush strokes just to make this picture actually look like bamboo and I still didn't get the leaves right.  Anyway I still like how this turned out overall and I'm excited to do more.  

As I mentioned in a previous post, I had to grind my own ink from a stick and mix it with water.  Then I load the ink on a small paintbrush to achieve this style of painting.

fish fish and more fish

I broke out the ink set tonight and it wound up really liking it. To paint with this set you actually have to grind the ink yourself from an ink stick to produce the liquid.  It's actually quite fun and I had a picture of me grinding the ink but accidentally deleted the picture....Anyway the first lesson was to paint  a fish and below is what I produced.  It turns out using this ink is a lot harder to use than watercolor (although it seems they would be similar).  It's much harder to control the concentration of ink and water on the brush.  

This was my best fish (above) but I had to practice a lot of strokes with the ink before I got something I liked.  You can see my multiple attempts below:

I really liked doing the fish so much that I thought I'd try to paint a Koi fish which is also popular in Japanese art.  I first used the ink to make the body and I added color with my watercolors.  The ink actually dries sort of light so I went back over the ink just a little with black colored pencil.  I tried not to use the pencil too heavy though because I still wanted the "ink" effect.  

Isn't it cute!!