Welcome to Watercolorwilly.com

Bill is a person of varied interests who started out as an electrical engineer and traveled to several other countries to appreciate the variety of landscapes and human cultures. This need began as he grew up in Iowa and was intrigued by local oil paint artists.  He kept playing with various art media since.  While living in Colorado in the 1980s, he was encouraged to attend a watercolor workshop by artist Bill Alexander who was inspired by the beauty of Colorado.  Living in Arizona since 1987, Bill was much inspired again when he had a chance to attend a watercolor workshop by Zoltan Szabo.

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Meanwhile, Bill also was introduced to the world of off-road driving in Colorado by a fellow camper. That interest continued even after moving to Arizona and changing careers to financial advisor.  His spare time continued with taking interested clients out on trips to the desert and mountains.  Another event shaped his interests, as he began to create paintings and photos for his mother who lay in a nursing home in Iowa, when he also spent time at home with a broken hip suffered during an off-road trip with a client.  Out of the boredom of sitting at home, he mail-ordered a new digital camera, and discovered software that allowed stitching several photos together into a panorama.  Suddenly he was hobbling around the house creating 360-degree panoramas for his mother to receive in the mail each week, followed by more panoramas of outdoor Arizona, which she never visited.

After some time he approached storing well over 50,000 photos and began searching for a product to archive photos.  In that search his interest changed as he discovered software that would create photo shows on DVDs. And his interests changed again, as more clients and friends became interested in riding with Bill, when another person appeared on one of those desert roads.  That off-roader had a goal to map out and drive every four-wheel drive road within a day’s drive of the Phoenix area.  Bill eagerly joined in the weekly routine of planning and taking these drives. As a result, Bill took 200 to 500 photos on each trip and created motion picture DVD shows, mostly using still shots and stitched panoramic pictures, and then added narration and music. To date he has created about 150 shows, 15 to 30 minutes long, of those back country off-road drives he has taken since that hip fracture. Now Bill has nearly 1,000,000 photos for reference when painting another watercolor.

And over those years, several friends became regular recipients of copies of these shows.  Bill began to realize that the majority of Phoenix residents are not aware of what beauty is out in the desert not far from their homes, perhaps because they were just too busy with normal life.  Most recently another fellow 4WD enthusiast urged him to share this work online and this web site is the result.

The name "Watercolor Willy" started back in about 1978 when Bill began joining friends on camping and 4WD trips in Colorado.  At that time everyone had CB radios and, of course, needed a "handle". Because Bill spent a lot of time creating watercolor paintings of views from the campsite while the others sat around exchanging stories, someone eventually suggested "Watercolor Willy" as his handle.  The name stuck and continues today.

If you have comments or questions about this site or the process he uses for creating these shows, feel free to email him: bill@watercolorwilly.com

Join me on Backroad Geezer Photographers trips, currently on each 4th Wednesday.

Enjoy this display of my creations in my gallery which includes watercolor, pastel, pencil, pen & ink, charcoal, gouache, oil, acrylic.  Many of these are reference for my paintings.