notan, part one 9.10.2020

Earlier this year I bought a book titled Notan: The Dark-Light Principle of Design. Notan, a Japanese term, involves the concept of dark and light; black and white; positive and negative. It's a small book of 80 pages, but it's jam packed with great information. As a life-long student, I was pretty excited to discover …

progression of a painting 4.9.2020

Untitled, watercolor, 11x15 on Arches paper

berit in color 2.27.2020

This is the last of my pieces that were "in progress" at the beginning of 2020. And I've finished it! And all the others that were in progress! There are probably plenty of artists who have a group of unfinished works they're working on, but my small pile of works in progress were a constant …

watercolor charts 2.6.2020

A couple summers ago, I took a watercolor class where I learned that I could make a variety of colors by mixing only primary colors together: blue, yellow and red. All my long life, I've used pre-mixed colors in my paintings, and even though I mixed those premixed colors together to get other colors, it …

elly and buckley watercolor 1.30.2020

As part of my ongoing 2020 goal to finish all my WIP (work in process) paintings, I completed my oldest WIP! Yay me! I started this painting back in 2016. Before I had any watercolor instruction. The paper I used isn't even watercolor paper. And the paper's been taped to the board for so long …

self portrait with lavender hair 9.26.2019

Here's a process post about a recent self portrait. I started with a 14x17 inch piece of 98 pound Canson XL mix media paper. With a pencil, I drew a blind contour self portrait, then went over the pencil lines with a black china marker. Using oil pastel, I added color. And then I added …

elly, watercolored 8.15.2019

Here's a painting a finished last month. It's a watercolor portrait of my second child, daughter Elly Anne. I start with a photo that includes a lot of shadow, or light and dark, then print it out in b/w and color to 8.5x11. I use the b/w copy to trace the image and shadow areas …

art collab 4.5.2016

For the past several weeks, I've been working on a collaborative piece with my son, Peter Imsland Evans. Working with someone else on an artwork has been a long-held wish for me, so I was delighted that my son agreed to this project! It's drawn on medium-weight drawing paper, and media includes pencil, colored pencil, …