Actually I have fallen love with all the clown words!!! BUT...it's still a big space with all the same value in it. So I may do further consideration as I finish up. 
There is something really fun watching a piece begin to almost "leap" off a page of paper. 
I've enlarged the clowns and got them sketched out on watercolor paper.
Today I taught a 3 hour card-making workshop...mostly to help out our park members get cards ready to sell at the Fine Arts show coming up in March. The gals and guys have been working and taking classes since November! 
I took this photo Sunday afternoon in Leesburg on the CROP walk. What a gorgeous day we were gifted with...76 and sunny. 
I have cropped this image slightly...but I am not sure...I may have cropped too much (I just laid a mat over it...I didn't actually cut the paper). I added a few more details on figures, added more dark behind the standing figure, changed the shadows a little bit under the wagon, added shadows under the figures, inferred another awning behind the trees and put some texture into the foreground.
I've been a Van Gogh fan forever......there are also those paintings that depict words – whose subject matter includes a piece of verbiage, whether written or printed. This is done in two ways. In one, the words are depicted literally, legibly, transcribed letter by letter. If the subject is handwriting, for example, the painter is almost recapitulating the action of the writer.
The other way is tonally. Here the words are no longer readable. The letters have retreated out of visibility. They've been reduced to areas of indecipherable grey. Paintings of newspapers often use both ways of depiction. The headlines are big and letter-by-letter legible. The smaller print of the stories becomes blocks of blur.
Van Gogh's Still Life with "Open Bible" is a picture that does text in both ways. Two books lie on a table, at a slant to one another. One is heavy and huge. It's a family bible, with brass clasps, open in the middle, and you can read at the head of the page where we are: Isaiah, 53. These pages hold a famous passage ....... "He was despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief..."
The other book is lighter reading. It's a small and well-thumbed paperback of a contemporary novel. The volume is closed, and we can read on its cover the author and the title fairly clearly. It's Emile Zola's Joie de Vivre. The man of sorrow. The joy of life. Some kind of drama is being staged between these two books – both between their very different physical presences and between their legible verbal content.
But now turn to the actual words of the Bible, and consider how they're painted. They're obviously not legible. You may know what the Isaiah says, but you certainly can't read it in this rendering. The text is depicted in the tonal manner. Columns of print are made into panels of blur. The paint breaks up into brush strokes here and there. You have a vague sense of chapter and verse.
It's very vague, though. This tonal version is beyond mere dark and light. This blur goes further than any loss of focus. There is no suggestion that a readable page only just eludes us – that with a little magnification, with slightly higher resolution, the viewer might become a reader. The body of the text has been transformed into rough, dense, opaque blocks of paint.
This Bible is open. We're confronted with its pages. But that only emphasises how there's no way through Van Gogh's paint to Isaiah's prophecy. His voice has been translated into thickly pasted pigment, into fat streaks and slabs, closely packed gestures going both up and across. The gap between what we see, and what's meant to be there, is wrenching.
Is the effect sceptical, telling us that the old message is beyond us, that its preaching is only dead matter? Or is it expressive, giving this passage a more than linguistic power, filling it with a physical force? The painted word is the word made flesh?
I have added 3 figures and moved the composition along off to connect to the right side of the painting. I want to see the 3 figures actually as "part" of the wagon shape. Connecting them. Now I need to think about the left side and create a little more interesting shapes there without over complicating the painting too much. I like the light in the center of the painting and want to continue to infer the light is coming from the right side...I'll throw some shadows under the figures too once I get them more to my liking. I am thinking more of a cruciform design now as this moves along. So I'll need some shape to connect to the bottom of the painting as well. I love this part of the painting process.
As soon as I finished this watercolor on heavy weight Yupo I realized it was the exact size of the old wooden serving tray that I was planning to freshen up with some sort of art work. Wouldn't you know I want to put Yupo on a tray! 
These are LOVE BEARS. The ladies of my church (Pilgrims United Church of Christ in Fruitland Park, FL) knit and crochet these little bears for children who have AIDS. They are knitted with LOVE. Although Valentines day is more associated with "romantic" love I couldn't help but share this little basket of generous and selfless love. For love has many many shades.Today is Valentine's Day, the day on which we celebrate love, especially romantic love. The holiday was named after an early Christian priest, St. Valentine, who was martyred on February 14 in 269 A.D.
The tradition of exchanging love notes on Valentine's Day originates from the martyr Valentine himself. The legend maintains that due to a shortage of enlistments, Emperor Claudius II forbade single men to get married in an effort to bolster his struggling army. Seeing this act as a grave injustice, Valentine performed clandestine wedding rituals in defiance of the emperor. Valentine was discovered, imprisoned, and sentenced to death by beheading. While awaiting his fate in his cell, it is believed that Valentine fell in love with the daughter of a prison guard, who would come and visit him. On the day of his death, Valentine left a note for the young woman professing his undying devotion signed "Love from your Valentine."
Gosh it feels good to be back...although it hasn't been all that long. I've been going through allergy testing. Never had so many needle pricks in my life and the blood draw got botched and I ended up with huge hematoma on my left arm! Sigh. Didn't feel much like painting for a day or two. Good news...NO allergies at all! 
You can tell I've been away from the studio for days. 
This is knock-your-socks-off watercolor by Deb Ward. Click here. 
This was my demo for the Yupo class on Tuesday. I taped off a piece of heavy weight yupo paper so I could try several different techniques on one half sheet. I washed off the birds completely once and started over. I want to play around a little more with the images and see if I can improve the hibiscus a little more. 
