April 10, 2015 – Margaret McCarthy Hunt Art

finishing up Atlanta sketches. As usual we hit the restaurants.

Earls on Flat Shoals Road in East Atlanta Village was the perfect spot for an outside lunch on a gorgeous spring day.

Hamburgers were cooked to order and delicious. Sweet potatoes fried were perfect and the Dijon cranberry dipping sauce was some kind of heaven. Tasted like it had a bit of horseradish sauce it it too. Yumm. The tea was just the way I like it. Lots of ice too.

I drew the sketch with a Kuretake brush pen loaded with Carbon Platinum black. Love that pen. Think refillable Pentel brush pen. Heaven right. I colored it with the Caran d’ache watercolor crayons. The bases are washes of watercolor using the caran d’ache crayons. Layers of color were scribbled on the base watercolors with any color that I thought would look good. After I was done painting i reapplied lots of ink including cross hatching.

The pale blue background was made by using a water brush on the flat end of the crayon. Fun stuff!!

I already filled up ️my Sennelier accordion book. No bleed thru so far. The paper is lovely heavy stuff. Will be posting as soon as I do an accordion book tutorial and color the Sennelier.

Thanks for looking!!

sometimes I wonder why everything I seem to paint is full of problems that I have to solve. How is it that I screw up over and over. Maybe it’s the universe hinting I should go back to painting with acrylics!? I dunno.

I painted three ladies or manikin heads with fancy hats. Church Lady is the third one. I meant to post this one on Easter Sunday but got busy and didn’t quite get around to it. You notice that quote?! Life begins at the end of your comfort zone. That’s me and watercolor. Something is going to invariably mess up.

I painted her face THREE times. Can you believe that?! I truly did. I had a lovely face and was doing the letterig on the side and my pen caught on the string and slung blips of brown ink all over her face and a bit on her hat. Groan. That’s all I could do.

Here she is right before instarted the lettering. Worst thing is I hated the lettering when I had finished it. So I messed her up for nothing.

I painted over the ink splats with white gouache and never could get her face right. So I decided to cut out a new face. I did. I cut out three or four. One even ended up painted. It never laid down right so I peeled it off. Oh what a mess.

Finally I painted the remains of her original face out with Daniel Smith watercolor ground. The surface was ripped and lumpy. I thought hopeless.

I redrew her face with my Noodler flex non and De Artrementis brown document ink. I painted her face for the third time. Finally I pronounced her done. I lettered her with a brush and the brown ink. I also painted out the quote with yellow gouache. I thought church ladies was a lot more fun than that quote which ended up I the border. Oh I highlighted the hat and the eyes with white gel pen.

Oh. I made a few more accordion books. That make seven. Stay tuned for a how to on the accordion books.

Love that new Kuratake refillable pen in the picture . Now loaded with platinum carbon black ink. Super pen. Busy drawing my way thru my new S&B Zeta. Still need to paint them.

Thanks for looking.