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.

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.

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.

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.