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.

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 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.