Friendly Flotsam: Work In Progress

I kept plugging away at my latest pastel painting all through the day.  The first thing to do was to finish the gouache underpainting, which took a while as I allowed each section to dry and I went back over a few spots.

Finished underpainting

Then I finally got to start working with pastels.  I like gouache well enough, but I really enjoy pastels - they just make me happy for some reasons.  They seem like magic, I guess.  As soon as I start using them, it just seems like I get an almost immediate sense of richness and fullness of color that takes a lot longer to realize with watercolor.

About 25% done with pastel application

As you can see, there is a bit of a difference.  I've still got a fair amount of uncovered gouache showing, but it will all get covered soon enough.  Right now I am a little worried that the water is a little too bright, but it will be easy enough to drop it a shade or two if I decide it is needed.

I am also still on the fence about the "logs" in the foreground.  They were both cut lumber and I may round them up and add a few limbs - basically make them look more like natural drift wood than discarded lumber.

Art and My Vacation

I went to Michigan and Wisconsin on a trip with my wife that took us completely around Lake Michigan and touched on 3 of the 5 great lakes.  I had planned on doing some art work along the way, but between the pace of the trip and the swarms of hungry, biting skeeters, I contented myself by taking reference photos.

First day back, I picked one of the reference photos that I really liked and started my usual preparations by cropping and griding the photo.  Here are the steps:

Raw photo - my dogs on the Michigan / Wisconsin border

Tightly cropped and moving from vertical to a horizontal orientation

Gridded 5x4 - translated to 4" grids with a roughly 22"x18" painting planned

My approach towards sketching and underpainting is to work in big masses while reserving finer details for later.  I gridded some Uart 600 sanded paper (it has a tan tone) and sketched in some rough outlines all with a pastel pencil.  Then I came back over it with opaque watercolors (also known as gouache), getting some base colors set that will act as a guide when I start to work with pastels.

Gouache underpainting in progress - about 65% done

One thing that I like about the underpainting is that it allows you to evaluate the composition very early and this one seems to be working even without many of the details being in place.  I should also mention that it is my intention to make this quite a bit lighter than the source image.  The darkest that I plan on going is around 7 or 8 on a 1-10 value scale.

I'll post more as this progresses toward completion or the landfill.

Vacation Time and A Quick Book Review

Before the sun is up tomorrow we'll be on the road and bound for Holland, Michigan.  My wife and I are spending a few weeks in Michigan and hope to enjoy the cooler climate and see the sites in and around the Great Lakes.

So the blog might be sparse for a few weeks while I am travelling.  But I am shooting a lot of photos, toting a back pack filled with watercolor color art supplies, and if I am lucky I will get a few plein air pieces done.

Last night I read the bulk of Betsy Dillard Stroud's Painting from the Inside Out.  When first I started reading it, I got a little worried that it was going to be something to make you channel your inner child, and while it touched on that theme for just a second, the book really proved to be an art project idea book.

Does "art project idea book" sound boring?  If so, I am sorry, because I found many of the projects to be really cool and exciting.  There is one project that relies on white gouache and another that used white tempera - I will be trying both of them out.  All in all, there were some really cool ideas in the book - I just gotta try the one that ends after you spray your painting with a water hose! 4 of 5 stars - this one has some really fun ideas to use, some of which you might incorporate and use often.

(Oh yeah, my cover says "19 projects..." as does the text on Amazon.)

Art Shows and Vacation

I discovered earlier in the week that right in the middle of my first vacation in years, that the art league that I joined this year is having the annual open show.  I really wanted to attend the opening and take part in the social event, so I am a bit bummed about the timing of things - but I am WAY happy to go on vacation.  I could have submitted art, but I am doing this mostly for the human networking.

I did find out about an upcoming Columbia Art League show called Hint Fiction which is basing the the theme on individual hyper-short stories from a book by the same name.  The stories are 25 words or less and all of them hint or suggest a much more complex story.

The cover of Hint Fiction by Robert Swartwood

The Columbia Art League has multiple copies of the book to check out and I've already read through it twice trying to find a piece to use as inspiration.  It is harder than it sounds - I keep gravitating towards stories that would carry a less-abstract illustration well, but a more abstract, emotive piece might be fun to do.

The exhibit has a due date of August 19th, so I have a little while to work on it.  I really do want to participate in a couple of shows this year and this seems like a fun way to get involved.  Anyhow, all of the foreshadowing has been set - hopefully some fun art will come out of this.

A View of the Huachuca Mountains

Last night I spent a few hours finishing up the pastel that I started the previous evening with a watercolor underpainting.

A View of the Huachuca Mountains, 11.5" x 8.25" in pastel on 140lb watercolor paper

The challenge was to capture the foreground plants in what feels like high contrast light while giving the mountains a sense of distance.  The blobby foreground plants did not entirely work, but they are not complete failures either.  I needed to leave a few more "holes" in them to allow the ground color to shine through.  I probably also needed a few distinquishable branches.

I had a good time creating it and, more importantly, my wife likes it.  If I were giving myself a grade, it would be a B.  I can do better, but I am pretty happy with just doing some art.

Pastel and Watercolor - Landscape in Progress

I like to spend time with my wife and last night I spent it chatting with her, watching the Nick Cannon hosted America's Got Talent, and trying to stay focused on a gouache painting of a desert landscape based on a monthly scumble photo hosted by Wet Canvas.

I laid down a grid, sketched in some rough lines, and then started slinging paint.  Sadly, I am not that good with watercolor.  I get by and can do smaller projects, but at 9x12, I am starting to get out of my element.  Watercolor some how dries too fast and too slow at the same time and, being the multi-tasking guy that I am, I have a hard time rolling with it.

Watercolor landscape until you hit the pastel sky

I broke the entire landscape down into 7 masses and painted them quickly with hints of shapes within the masses.  By the end of 90 minutes, I was a bit frustrated with how slow layering is, the need to allow time for drying, and generally working it like it was transparent watercolors.  But hey, I don't have to wait!

Rather than succumb to the tedium of layering washes of paint and drying paper with a hairdryer, I busted out a couple of Sennelier soft pastels and blasted colorful dust into the sky of the painting with the abandon of a desert breeze. So. MUCH. Better.  The gradient in the sky is deep, richer than Richy Rich, and creamy smooth.

Now I am working mixed media, and the sky is looking good.  This is a lot of fun!  I have missed using the awesome power of pastels.  The watercolors are super for loose, exciting sketching and I have good control with pastels, so I can dress-up the watercolors and hopefully end up with something almost nice to look at.

Artist Trading Card: Mountain Valley

I got home last night and played around with the gouache.  It seems like a good medium for working small, so I created a couple of ATCs:

Landscape: Mountain Valley

Underlit Study in Blue

I got my distant mountains a little darker than I should have, but I was fairly pleased with it otherwise.  It has been a long time since I have created an ATC and I posted this and another more ribald one on ATCsForALL - I am known as Topdecker over there.

The study in blue was supposed to end up as a gypsy fortune teller, but I scaled the head up way too large.  It was large enough to play around with underlighting and to render shadows that you rarely get to play with.  I finished it over the course of a Human Planet episode (great show, by the way).

One thing that I have discovered about gouache - I greatly prefer my paint to be soft - like straight out of the tube and juicy.  I realize that it is not realistic, but I believe that I will have to squeeze in softer paint a bit more often that I had intended.  It is just so much nicer to work with.

Oh, in case you don't know, ATCs are very small works of art, being 2.5" x 3.5" in size.  I rarely sell mine and prefer to trade them off or join a swap on ATCsForAll.  In fact, due to my recent activity, I have several trades pending and at least 3 more cards that I have to make.

Gouache Palettes and Paint Storage

My Dick Blick order arrived yesterday - on time and well packed.  The order was 15 tubes of gouache and a modest, sealable palette.

18 well palette opened - the lid serves as a large mixing area

Sealable palette with the lock (bottom) opened

Gouache paints stored in an inexpensive plastic box

And heck yeah, I played with them for a few hours because it is hard to say no to new toys.  I went back over some recent watercolor sketches and either corrected mistakes or made sizable changes.  The colors dry in a slightly unpredictable fashion (lights tend to go darker and darker colors tend to dry lighter), but otherwise I am very happy. I just need to figure out how to keep my thumb from sinking into paint wells and it would be close to perfection.

I will post some more thoughts about the paints over the coming days.  But just so you know, I did number the tubes to correspond to the wells on the palette.  I suppose that is anal retentive, but paints can get muddied and this will simply remove all doubt.

Books: Raw Colour with Pastels

I bought Raw Colour with Pastels by Mark Leach thinking that it would be an instructional text.

As it turns out, it isn't a how-to book at all.  It's better and provides a lot more.  Leach gives a lot of insight into his thoughts about color, composition, and the planning of paintings.  All the while his passion and love for color is evident.

The text is very heavy with images by the author.  When Mr. Leach hits a home run, he smashes them completely out of the park, creating those rare pieces of art that appeal both to artists and the average art fan.  There are plenty of works that are not home runs - but they all help you understand how much Leach experiments and how to explore color in a bold fashion.

This is one of my favorite books about creating art.  I was not half way through it when I decided that I wanted more of Mr. Leach's writings, but I discovered that he has passed away suddenly in 2008 at the age of 56.

Mark Leach in 2008

Someone in his family has been kind enough to upload an enormous amount of his art work to a Google web album.  If you like what you are seeing, take my word for it, the book is even better. His professional web site is still operational and contains, among other things, his manifesto.

Framing and Formalization

Today I framed a couple of my pastel works.  They've been setting out for over a month, but my wife still said "Wow" when she saw them.

Now she cannot see the scribbles on the borders, the messy color experiments, or the little notes tracking the colors I had used.  It has all been cleaned up with sharp, presentable edges, nicely matching mats, and the outer permanency of a wooden frame.  Wow indeed.

I got the frames from a Missouri framer who lives near Springfield and sells his wares on ebay.  I live in Missouri, so a short shipping distance and time was appealing.  And the prices were very good - well under $30 for the pair.  Once I had them, all I had to do was to use some double-sided tape to affix the art to the mat.  I might have helped if I had gotten a bit larger frame so I could have a bit more mat (especially on the ducks) and I will do better next time around.

Art Stuff I Love: The Shorty

I was reading up on how to do looser, more artistic paintings and someone commented saying that you really need to loosen up on the initial sketch.  A few days later and I still found that comment resonating with me and I started playing around with ways to jazz my sketches up.

I cannot say if this will work for you, but it worked for me: I started holding my sketching pencil like a paint brush and I got sketches that felt looser and more energetic to me.  Yeah, it took some practice and it took another pencil.

You see, a normal pencil just sort of rolls around in my hand when I use a brush grip.  I can cinch up on it, but my hand would be a lot happier with a thicker bodied pencil.  And that is when I found the graphite dispensing tool of perfection.  Behold - THE SHORTY!

The Worther Shorty is basically a hexagonal (i.e. zero roll) fat bodied lead holder made with German precision. The lead is 3.5mm thick 7b lead that is excellent for sketching.  As you work, it somehow basically self-sharpens through use.

Why would you want one?  The lead never breaks. The lead never needs sharpening.  The lead lasts a long, long time.  The pencil is roll resistant, light-weight, it has a thickness that I enjoy.  For me, putting a Shorty in my hand instantly reminds me to shift to a brush grip and this is the only pencil-style tool that I sketch with now.

If you are thinking about buying one and are in North America, I have seen The Shorty at ASW Express, Jerry's Artarama, and ebay has lots of barrel colors, some carrying pouches, and even a way to turn the Shorty into a ballpoint pen.  If you are interested in the pencil from a collecting perspective, Lead Holder has a nice entry on The Shorty - the metal ones look nice!



Renzo Piano, world renowed Italian architect, working with a Shorty



Paper rulers and portraiture

I am a mix of old school and new school.  I can and will use technology to advance my artistic endeavors.

When I start a portrait, I am old school about it.  When working from a photo, I will grid and draw reference points.  It tends to look like an outline - better than a tracing or projection, but still far from a finished drawing.

To assist me, I use image editing software called GIMP.  It is free and powerful enough to do just about anything I need done.  The first thing I like to do is to play around with the cropping tool and get my subject well composed.  Then I will use the color curves tool to adjust the brightness and color levels until I am pleased with the visible details.

Once I am happy with the composition of the image, I will toss on a grid.  (It is a RENDER item on the menus.)

This particular grid is 150x150 pixels and the resulting core grid is 4x4.  I decided that my blocks would be 2 square inches, so my work area would be 8"x8"  - a standard sheet of A4 watercolor paper would work just fine.

I started to draw the grid and quickly discovered that I did not have ruler with me.  I eventually searched for "paper ruler" on Google and found a number of sites that have printable rulers.  I printed mine from PrintARuler.com and put the grid on the page very lightly.  I have to say that a paper ruler does indeed work, but the lack of heft allows it to shift and move way too easily - but it worked wonderfully in a pinch.

After studying the image, I decided to rotate the image and started working on it upside down.  This is one of those artistic jedi-mind tricks that help you pay closer attention to shapes and values while helping you not get caught-up in the mental shorthand or iconistic static that we all have to deal with.

Here is the pencil sketch.  I added a lot of noise to it and really, really darkening some very faint lines so you can see what the sketch looks like:



I will probably open the eyes up a little more, adjust the hair a bit near the center of the head, and make a few other tweaks, but it is solid enough to lay down some gouache.  Problem is, the gouache won't be here until Monday, so I will return to this next week.

Gouache and Color Wheels

On Wet Canvas I contributed to a discussion about the Quiller Color Wheel.  Bruce MacEvoy's web site Hand Print was brought up by another contributor.  I'd been there before, but it had been a while and my interest and knowledge about art has gotten a bit better since my last trip to the site.

Mr. MacEvoy has a very nice color wheel indeed.  I just ordered a bunch of M.Graham and Schminke Horadam gouache earlier in the week and I decided to map it to MacEvoy's color wheel.  It is very useful because it maps the locations of pigments on the color wheel.  The large red circles mark the pigments used by my purchases:

As you can see, I got a pair of very near reds and a pair of blue-biased magenta's that are also too near one another.  The two near reds have different properties, with one being opaque and another being semi-opaque, but to be honest, I am not sure how I will take advantage of the difference.  All in all,  I didn't do too badly in terms of getting a broad range of colors that do not overlap too much, but if I had known how to do this earlier, I would not have had any overlap to mention.

Oh yeah, if you are curious about where I got the information about the pigments used, I definitely had to go to the manufacturer for the info.  The M. Graham technical site was nicely arranged as was the Schmincke site - I did not have much luck finding info for the single tube of Holbein that I bought, but in fairness they are based in Japan.

Gouache and Watercolor

As an artist, I favor pastels over other mediums, but I have to concede that pastels are poorly suited for plein aire work.  You have to have a good selection of colors on hand, so care has to be taken in putting together a palette.  You cannot blend colors very well, so your palette has to be larger than some other mediums.

If you consider a lengthy trip with limited space, they might simply be too cumbersome.  I have a family trip coming up and I want to be able to draw, sketch, and create in color - and I had to concede that I was going to have to use something other than pastels.  If it was a day trip, I would and could manage it - but this will be a few weeks and I just don't want to worry about the space used and expense of fragile pastels.

I do have a history with watercolor, but I did not want to have to worry about transparency, errors that are uncorrectable, working at the speed that paper dried, and several other things that help shift me over to pastels.  So I decided that I would get opaque watercolors - gouache - and use a limited palette and keep things small and portable.

And thus Dick Blick got another month and a half of my "fun money" and I got a new medium to play with.  I got an 18-well travel palette a total of 15 tubes of artist-grade gouache by M. Graham and a handful from Schmincke Horadam.  Dick Blick was having a sale, so I got pretty good mileage for my investment.

The plan currently is to get a well filled in the palette with each color of paint and to allow it to dry.  I will get a hard box or case for the tubes and bring it along, but hopefully will not really need it.  Having worked with watercolor, I have all the brushes, water containers, and other gizmo's that I will need.

Hopefully I will end up with more than pencil sketches from my trip.  I will get the gouache on Monday and will post my experiments.