This past week I’ve painted lots of sketches in all three of my journals. Some are super tiny, but others are more substantial. The en plein air ones always look hurried and unfinished (which they are):

I spend more time on the tutorials and the ones I paint using photos as a reference:

My favorite of the bunch is the stone building above. It’s from a photo my husband took, and I really like how the colors turned out.

A drawback to painting in a tiny journal is that it gets a little tiring working in a little space. There’s a point when I think it’s just practice and stop. So, this little painting, a step-by-step following Ralph Avery and in the book Watercolorists at Work, needed a final detailing, and I skipped it. Much of my journal painting happens with 9″x12″ pages, but this is about 3″x5″.

I’ve spent some time thinking about different ways to paint trees. Here are a few attempts, some pretty weak, but I like the birch trees.

I’ve discovered an intriguing book, Watercolorists at Work, by Susan E. Meyer and Norman Kent, published in 1972. There are 25 artists and a painting by each, broken into five steps. All begin with a sketch, but the process from there changes quite a bit. I’m finding it absorbing to follow along. My finished little painting of Tore Asplund’s moody street scene in France is pretty silly looking, but it was such fun.

This little Pentalic journal is 3.5″ x 5.4″.

I added detail to this log cabin sketch, but I may have overdone it.