Weathered Boards

From 2005, a watercolor.

This is one of the pieces I had in a gallery show. It's a watercolor on 140# paper, done from a reference photo I took of the wooden boards from the boardwalk in North Beach, Maryland. I need to scan it in to get a better picture of it, this isn't an accurate telling of the colors, but it's a hassle taking it out of the frame and unmatting it.

Here is a detail of one section of the painting. First I painted a fairly loose underpainting of burnt sienna and ultramarine suggesting vague shapes of the boards. Then I used a masquepen to lay down thin lines of masking fluid where I wanted the lightest bits of wood grain. I spent a good deal of time using my smallest brushes (size 000) painting small lines of fairly undilute color along these lines of making fluid and running along the other stripes of color. As much as possible I wanted the colors to blend optically, rather than actually mixing together on the paper or palette. I really need to take this outside and take a picture of it in the sunlight. This photo doesn't show the real range of "pure" colors, there are reds, violets, even pinks laying next together blending together to create the illusion of old wood.

Figure Drawing

Well, last night I went back to the local figure drawing group after a 2-year hiatus. Actually it's been more like three years since I went regularly!

After I was 20 minutes into it last night, I swore that I would start coming every week again. I'd forgotten just how totally wonderful it is to immerse myself in drawing, plus my life drawing skills need a boost in a major way! The good thing is that it doesn't take many 3-hour sessions before I start seeing real improvement.

It's a great group of people there too. Everyone has a common desire to draw, and it's very non-judgmental: no one is there critiquing your work saying, "Jesus that sucks!" In the very beginning, that's what was keeping me from going. I thought that within minutes of attending, I'd be unmasked as a poseur and be driven out with jeers.

Not so. :)


Ok, I admit that my skills are rusty, but I am going to be brave here and post three of the sketches from last night.

20-minute pose

The problem with the 20-minute pose is that I usually am just starting to hit my stride when the call comes that we have only 5 minutes left.

Then I panic.

All in all, though I am not too displeased with this effort, but her back looks weird because that is the section I was just starting when the call came that we were almost out of time.

I hadn't had a chance to blend the graphite and pick out the highlights with my eraser, so it's just a dark streak.

*sigh*

30 minute pose

Oh my GOD did have trouble with this!

I got so caught up in the fact that I could not get a likeness in her face, and I just could not let it go!

I finally had to cover the face with a tissue so I could start with the rest of the body, but I didn't have time to do anything more than mark out the basic shapes.

So frustrating!

I need more practice with faces. I have to look at them not as faces, but as abstract shapes made by the patterns of shadows and patches of light. That's hard because we are hard-wired to see faces. It's a basic survival instinct. This is why we see faces popping out of water spots or in the warp and weft of carpets and fabrics.

I was even conscious of what I was doing wrong last night, like seeing "eyes" and "ears" instead of abstract shapes, but I could not stop what I was doing! ARGH!

1 hour pose

This is much better, though I started getting heavy-handed with the shadows.

Also I didn't tone the paper for a darker background. A darker background often makes the figure "pop" and it gives the whole picture more dimension, because of the contrast in values, but I'm just getting back into the groove with this, trying to focus on shapes, seeing the negative space and attempting a basic likeness.

I know I can do it; I've had some sketches from past sessions where there was a very good likeness in the face. I think that being inactive with the life drawing over the past three years has caused something like an atrophy in the ability to draw what I actually see and not what the mind tells me I'm seeing.

Practice, practice, practice!

Come join me & the rest of the Fightin' Bookworms at the CBI Clubhouse!

I'm now a member of the CBI Clubhouse Children's Writing Community.  Come have a look at what the Fightin' Bookworms are up to at the very cool site.   Here's the address: http://cbiclubhouse.com

Negative Painting

This month's Kick it up a Notch in the Watercolor Studio forum on Wetcanvas, is a painting challenge on Negative Painting: "Let's think about negativity in a positive way!"

Negative painting is a technique in which you develop the painting by focusing on the negative areas of a composition. At its most basic, this means looking at the area outside the lines of the objects in your composition and drawing them. For instance, if you have a reference photo of a white picket fence, you'd paint the areas in between and around the parts of the fence.


Now take this picture for example:




I would start by applying a loose wash of color over the entire painting, some green for the color of the lily pads, perhaps. Then, I'd paint the larger abstract shapes between the leaves with darker colors, sepia, indigo, some burnt umber, and build up the painting that way, but always painting around the shapes of the leaves, never painting the leaves themselves.

See some of the underwater stems on the bottom right-hand part of the picture? Again, you'd bring them out by painting the shapes of the darker colors around them. From a quick glance, I see some triangles made by the intersection of those underwater stems.

For further reading, this page offers an excellent explanation and step-by-step demonstration of how negative painting works.

I am on the hunt for a good reference photo now. I do like the photo of the lily pads, but I'm going to keep looking. I like the Reference Image Library at Wetcanvas. That alone is a great reason to join the site. I have also found some good pictures at Morguefile.com

Of course, I also have a ton of pictures I've taken over the years and this project offers a great opportunity for me to hunt them all down and sort through them. Right now if they're not in albums, most of them are in a filing cabinet, though I know that there are loose photos floating around the house. The trick is finding them all. :)

I'd like to do this as a work in progress (WIP) blog post here once I get all squared away with the right reference photo. Yes, even if it's not a terribly successful attempt. We all can learn something from our failures.

Happy Painting!

A Walk to the Beach

Here is a watercolor I did a few years ago. I wasn't really satisfied with the end result, so I'd like to do it again. This is based on a few reference photos I took on one on my many trips to Cape Cod. I think this was near Race Point.

I'd like to change the sky somewhat. I still like that gradual fading to the horizon, and I'm not sure I'd like clouds. Maybe I'll make it a darker blue at the top of the page. Overall, I like the fence and their shadows cast on the sand, but I'd change that one glaring shadow; it's too dark, too blocky-looking. It distracts the eye more than it leads into the picture.

I'm not thrilled with the foliage on the top of the dune in the left of the picture. I think the angle needs to be changed, so that it's higher at the left edge of the paper so that the line is a diagonal that slants down toward the path, even though it's not 100% faithful to the photo. I think that the composition would look better that way. Also I think that the footprints have to change. They don't really look right to my eye now. I've never really spent much time re-doing paintings. I've sort of treated it as a hit-or-miss thing: if it looked good to me (or to others), then great, if not, then into the Bad Art folder. I never really tried starting over from scratch with paintings, but I'd like to do that now. I mean, there's a reason we pick certain pictures over others to paint, right? Just because the first attempt wasn't spectacular, it doesn't mean that that's the only shot at it we get. So one of my ideas for improving my ability is to go back to the Bad Art folder and starting over from the beginning until I produce something that I think works. It's kind of daunting and humbling to look at the "crap" and try to make something out of it, but it's exciting too!

Sketches for the book

Here is one of the sketches from the journal I am devoting to ideas for this children's book. It's mostly watercolor, with a little pen and ink for accent.

In the story, our heroine - a girl, of course, both of my daughters insisted on it - is attracted to a striking, almost hypnotic mushroom until she sees a tiny bite taken from the edge. She notices the dead little mouse body next to it and realizes that it is a very poisonous plant.

The mushroom is based on a real-life experience I had when picking mushrooms in Estonia. It was fall, and seriously, the entire village went out together to gather all the mushrooms for winter. I was walking with one of my host family's kids and the gym teacher from the school. We passed this little clearing in the middle of an evergreen thicket. In the center of the clearing was the most amazing mushroom I'd ever seen. It was a deep red, almost crimson, with white spots on it; it was also very shiny. It glistened. It had sprouted up in the clearing and nothing grew near it. All the other plants seemed to shrink away from it. Even the pine needles avoided it, and they lay in thick piles everywhere else.

I must have gasped or something and pointed at it. I know I moved a little bit closer to it, when Rannik, the gym teacher, grabbed my arm and said, "No! No touch! Is very big danger. Is die... death!" Then he pointed to a tiny little brown body lying not far from it. It looked like some sort of field mouse or a vole.

That story is just too good to let go.

I have a lot of great stores from my travels, many of which I have worked as short story ideas. Sometime I'll tell another Estonia story involving Rannik the gym teacher and how he nearly gave my parents a heart attack. :)

Old Shed

Old Shed is a pen and ink over watercolor on Winsor Newton 140# hot pressed 12 x 9 inch watercolor paper. I had never created and pen and ink + watercolor painting before, so this will be exciting! For that matter I had never done much inkwork before tackling this.

Here's the reference photo:

I like to use references photos as more of a general guideline that the strict gospel truth. I could lie and say that it's because of artistic license,
but it's partly lazy draftsmanship. I do my best to put down as accurate a drawing as possible, but I can be impatient and usually just want to get right
down to painting!

With a picture like this and the lovely perspective of the planks and other straight lines, I have to take some care that I get the vanishing points
correct. If the underlying structure is flawed, no amount of paint on top can fix it.

Stage 1: Underlying watercolor wash

For the first step I decided to lay down a watercolor underpainting over the pencil sketch, very loosely.

I laid in strips of a few colors where I thought I wanted the darkest values and left the lightest areas completely white. I knew I wanted the window to be
fairly dark, so I used a mixture of indigo (MaimeriBlu) and neutral tint (Winsor Newton).

I kept the paper moist, but not too wet; I didn't want a lot of "blooming," but I also did not want the hard edges I'd get if I painted onto dry paper.

Stage 2: First layer of penwork

I like to tackle a piece in sections, rather than laying down one uniform layer across the whole piece at a time. Then once I've hit all the sections, I like to step back and look at the whole piece and see what needs tweaking. I work this way in watercolors, oils, pastels, and even on my graphite/charcoal figure drawings.

I usually start in the top left corner because I am right-handed and even though I use a leaning bridge, sometimes my hand comes into contact with the paper.

I use Pigma Micron pens from Sakura, and lay down lines mostly in parallel, though there is some cross-hatching as well.

Detail:

Here you can see some of the smaller lines from the nib of the Pigma Micron 005 (0.20mm), my favorite.

I have four pens in sizes ranging from 0.20 mm (005) to 0.50 mm (08), but I use mostly the smallest one. I can tell already that I may need to buy this size in bulk!

I love small watercolor brushes and fine nibs on pens. My ex used to joke that I'd paint some of my watercolors with a single eyelash.

Stage 3: More Ink

Ok here, I noticed a few spots where I got too heavy on the ink or where I should have left more space between the inked lines. I think I can go back and add white gouache, but sparingly.

I won't do any of that until I'm done inking.

Detail:

Here I'm trying to build up a feeling of three dimensions, but with as little ink as possible. Ideally, I'll get that without caking on layer after layer of paint, ink, charcoal, whichever medium I'm using.

In some ways I'm a minimalist: I like to achieve the effect I'm after in a few layers as possible.

Stage 4: Middle left section

As you can see, I've added more detail here.

It's pretty slow-going, but totally enjoyable. I did most of this in the living room on the coffee table while I half-watched movies and television. Other times I like to paint in my studio with music on.

Detail:

Ok, I may need to break out the gouache at some point.

I decided to eliminate a part of the picture that didn't make sense right away (the broken shutter), but when I started the first few inked lines I'd already marked a few of the hard edges.

I can work around some of these lines, but I may dab on a bit of white gouache (used because it's opaque unlike traditional watercolors) to cover what I can't reasonably work with.


Also, I'm coming back to the window every so often to deepen the crosshatching.

When I did the underpainting, I used a fairly dark value on the window, but as always, it dried lighter, so I decided to deepen it with ink.

Stage 5: the bottom section

Now for the first layer of ink on the last remaining section.

At this point I stop pretty frequently and look at the piece as a whole. Often I'll put it on a shelf of my bookcase and stand back and really judge it as a whole.

Detail:

Here I thought about what to do with the bottom left of the window section.

I decided that if at all possible I did not want to use gouache, so I thought I might be able to fix it by crosshatching shadows onto that general area.

I wanted to keep gouache as an absolute last resort.

Stage 6: Almost there!

I tried finagling the area by the window with ink and was pleased with the result.

It looks like a shadowed area under the window sill with the added darker sections of bare wood under peeled paint.

Detail:

A closer view.

Done!

The finished piece, a little crooked in the photo, but done.

I had a lot of fun doing this.

It's a great reminder to me that branching out with a new medium is as rewarding an experience as it is a scary one.