Watercolor Landscape painting – Sea Arch (Santa Cruz Island)

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Sea Arch (Santa Cruz Island) 12×8 watercolor on paper (Available here) (sold)

Island Hopping to Inspiration

A few summers ago, my husband and I took a day trip on a boat all around three of the five islands that make up Channel Islands National Park.  We went with Island Packers – out of Ventura, California – and it was a memorable, magical, awe inspiring day. The ocean, islands, sea life and nature all conspired to marinate us with wonder and amazement at this beautiful place we live in. (If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you may recall this post were I blabbed about how that single adventure bumped me off-task for the next few weeks in the studio.)  

Painting glazes of watercolor pigments to make rocks and water and reflections

Paint Your Memories

I went back out to the Channel Islands National Park again in the Fall, and hiked for a day on Santa Cruz Island.  I snapped over a thousand photos.  That island – the largest of them off the shores of Ventura and Santa Barbara Counties – is a nature preserve of flowers, birds and fauna that doesn’t exist anywhere else on the planet. This little Sea Arch watercolor is the first island painting sprouted from remembering and documenting my experiences of that beautiful place.
My studio assistant is not impressed

Put a mermaid in that lagoon!

Add a Mermaid?

My grandchildren saw this island watercolor in process, and asked if I was painting the Mermaid Lagoon from Peter Pan. When the painting was finished, they noticed that I “forgot to paint the mermaids”, so we made one and let her go swimming for a little while.
Santa Cruz Island Hike –  Channel Islands National Park

Channeling Inspiration from New Experiences

What adventures have lead you down a new path with your artwork? Have you attended a museum show that pushed you to try new things? Do you return from traveling, craving your art supplies, so you can pour everything you just experienced into your work? Leave stories in the comments, with a link to your blog or website so we can see what transpired.

Thanks for stopping by, and I’ll see you in the next post!

Belinda

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island watercolor framed and ready to hang
Sea Arch, framed and ready for a wall somewhere 🙂

Art Quote

If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories — science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.
~ Ray Bradbury (1920-2012)

Need some help moving beyond subject titles (EX: calling a painting of a red barn The Red Barn)? Here is a system for you….

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5 thoughts on “Watercolor Landscape painting – Sea Arch (Santa Cruz Island)”

  1. @marian, thanks for the compliments. If you decide to go out on Island Packers, let me know and maybe I can join you. You can spend the day, or camp overnight. I like the day trip. 🙂

  2. Love Santa Cruz Island, your painting, your granddaughter’s mermaid lagoon AND the Ray Bradbury quote!!

    Thanks…

    So the Island Packers day trip is worthwhile?? I’ve been toying with going Gallup… (The annual trip with David and gang is off — at least for this year.) If I get up my courage, I’ll spend the night… We’ll see.

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