Becca And Daniel

Too much swatching, time for some artwork.  I wasn't feeling up to going the full watercolour today so decided to do my first bit of inktense figure drawing of the year.

In my quest to continue pushing boundaries, I decided to go for a double model phase for the first time.  These are Becca and Daniel, two models I've not drawn before.  I chose this pose specifically because of the interesting shapes on view and because I can only see the tops of their heads.

I'm back to my usual style with the inktense pencils: rough pencil outline, rub it out until almost invisible,  inktense pencil shading, wet the pencil starting with important lines/contours/creases.

The best two things about this one are both lessons that I really need to remember.  One is that I'm pretty good at drawing the tops of heads in figure drawing and that if quality of art ever becomes more important to me than pushing boundaries, I should be looking for poses where I can see the tops of heads.  The second is that leaf green results in quite exotic, tanned looking skintones.  Don't ask me to explain that one.

But overall, this one wasn't a success.  I made an error in putting quite a hard dark edge between Becca's right shoulder and arm.  It should have been a faint contour but it's too dark and has given her a strange shaped back.  I tried to reduce the impact of this error by making other edges in that area that should be darker than the offending edge even darker than they already were.  It's not made things any better.  And the top of Daniel's right thigh is stretched up too high and too far to the right.  And I've not left any invisible edges in this one, which is a heinous sin.

So this one's not going in the shop window.  Newcomers to this site should be warned that the quality of my artwork tends to make a slow start each year.

The Big Swatch

After settling on a palette with three reds, three blues and three yellows (counting raw sienna as a yellow), I was keen to produce a new set of triplet swatches.  This is something I did last year, looking at the eight possible combinations from two reds, two blues and two yellows.  Checking out the secondary colours that I could get from them and the neutral colours that I could get from mixing all three.  This time, though, there were 3*3*3=27 swatches needed and I decided to also include viridian in each swatch, looking to see how it mixed with the red.

I took a look in Ken Bromley's internet art shop for watercolour journals.  Something with slightly over 27 pages would be a convenient way of carrying my swatches around.  I didn't find a suitable journal but I did find an interesting set of postcards made of watercolour paper.  There were 30 in the tin, so three spares in addition to the 27 I  needed and the6 came in a cool looking tin to carry them around in.

So I've been busy this afternoon, taking my time over those 27 swatch cards.  They all have paint on one side and the names of the colours on the other side where there are lines to fill in addresses.  There's more space on that side of the card where I may end up making notes or listing the paintings that use that combination.

I messed up the colour names on one card and used one to swatch all twelve colours separately so have one card spare.  I think I'll use this tomorrow, redoing one of the cards that came out looking a bit too messy.

I've never seen other artists doing swatches like this: the furthest they ever seem to go is to do grids of all the pairs of colours in their palette.  But what good is this in helping choose what three primaries to use in a painting?  Surely my triple swatches are the best planning tool?

Colour Bugs

Now that the squad is selected, it's time to follow up that trial of the reds with a full scale workout for the new set of colours.  Rather than have four shapes for the four red candidates, I now have nine bug- like shapes, one for each of the primaries in my palette.

I still wanted to mask out the shapes so that my main focus could be on colour mixing rather than filling out shapes, so I started by drawing out nine bug- like shapes, varying their size, shape and orientation.  I then negatively masked them out with masking fluid and added some spots and lines to them using masking fluid in a mapping pen.

And then I coloured it. all in.  There's a hierarchy to the colours in there with reds above yellows above blues and with warmer colours on the left and cool on the right, resulting in a red/orange feel in top left graduating to blue/green in bottom right.  After the masking fluid came off, I added antennae in viridian.

I was careful to measure this one out so that it could be framed and put up for sale.  I really like it.  It was very relaxing to paint, not needing any mid-painting decision making.  I need to start thinking about more ideas for rainbow paintings like this featuring all nine primaries.

The 2021 Palette Collection

And here it is, the 2021 12-pan palette.    The squad has finally been announced.  The loser in yesterday's trail of the reds was permanent rose.  It was a great colour but didn't seem to do much that quinacridone magenta didn't also do.  Having two very different warm reds in rose dore and Winsor red gives me more variety in the palette.  It's very hard to find an all singing, all dancing warm red.

So starting top left and going down the left and then down the right, the squad, which is entirely made up of Winsor & Newton colours, is:

- Viridian.  Transparent and single pigment and is a colour that would be very difficult to replicate using primaries.  It's the only green that I can ever see myself buying.

- Prussian blue.  My first choice cool blue.  At one point Winsor blue (green shade), known as pthalo blue to other paint manufacturers, might also have made it into the squad but I've heard stories about how  the tube version develops a nasty film on it when poured into pans.

- Cerulean blue.  Another cool blue, semi opaque.  But it's an amazing granulator, so is in there as a special effects expert.

- French ultramarine.  Surely everybody's first choice warm blue?

- Burnt umber.  First of my earth colours and a long standing favourite.

- Burnt sienna.  During 2020, this colour ousted burnt umber as my favourite earth colour.  It’s such a great mixer it's like having an extra ten colours in the palette.

- Transparent yellow.  My first choice cool yellow.

- Raw sienna.  Another earth colour that doubles up as another cool yellow.

- Indian yellow.  My first choice warm yellow.   Dual pigment but that's not caused me any mud problems to date.

- Rose dore.  One of my two warm reds.  Not perfect by any means, being dual pigment (the permanent rose pigment plus a yellow!) and difficult to get to an intense, non-watery level but it does add something different.

- Winsor red.  My other warm red.  Also not perfect, being only semi-transparent and (at the opposite extreme to rose dore) needs a lot of watering down if it's not to embarrass other colours on the painting with its intensity.  Might be called pyrrol red by other manufacturers.

- Quinacridone magenta.  The king of cool reds.  If it ever disappeared from shop shelves, permanent rose or permanent alizarin crimson would make capable deputies.

The most notable absence from the squad is Payne's grey.  I'll still keep a tube of it around and will use it from time to time but in a palette dominated by transparent (Winsor red and cerulean blue being the only two exceptions), it was looking out of place.

The final palette has a nice symmetry to it.  Three reds, three blues, three yellows and three earths.  Plus viridian making 13 but that's because raw sienna is double counted as a yellow and an earth colour.

I like the look of this set.  It feels like I'm finding where I belong.

Trial Of The Reds

It's that time of year when my mind turns to selecting a squad of colours to occupy my palette.  Well, one of my palettes.  I have a palette of 24 Winsor & Newton half pans and a palette of 12 full pans of Winsor & Newton tube paint.  This is all about those 12 full pans and, in particular, the reds that will be in those pans.  Full details of the squad will follow in a later post.

At this point I've already decided that there will be three reds in the palette.  One will be quinacridone magenta (obviously) and the other two will be chosen from Winsor red, permanent rose and rose dore.  And the only way to choose will be via trials.

So I decided to do swatches of all four reds and to look at how they mixed with my three favourite blues, my three favourite yellows and the only green in my palette.  To impose a bit of structure on things, I used masking tape to divide up a sheet of watercolour paper into areas to perform the trials.  So there are four corners on the sheet.  The cool reds are on the left: quinacridone magenta at the top and permanent rose at the bottom.  The warm reds are on the right: Winsor red at the top and rose dore at the bottom.  Within each corner there's a beetle.  From left to right along the top are the three blues: French ultramarine, cerulean and Prussian.  From left to right along the bottom are the three yellows: transparent, raw sienna and Indian.  The heads of the beetles are viridian.

I found this to be a really interesting exercise.  I think I've decided which of the reds won't make it to the final squad but I'm going to sleep on it.  Do let me know if you have your own opinions on this!

And what I've ended up with is almost a work of art in itself.  Because it goes right up to the edges of the paper, it's not really suitable for framing but it's given me some ideas for a future painting with nine beetles using three blues, three yellows, viridian and my final choice of three reds.  And a lot of masking tape or masking fluid.  Maybe even some masking fluid spatters.

Robert Downey Junior

My second and final portrait of the day.  It's another in the Avengers collection and it's Robert Downey Junior who played Iron Man.

As Iron Man, he deserved to be drawn in reds and yellows.  I deviated a bit from this with orange and with the magenta coloured Tonbow marker that I got for free a while back.  It looked OK in that colour scheme at the beginning, with the magenta playing the role of black and maybe I should have stopped earlier but I went for more blacks and greys in an attempt to get a better likeness.  The facial hair wasn't standing out enough to get anything like a likeness so needed to be blackened out, although there's still a bit of magenta there in places.  At the end I put yellow over the top of all the white highlights as there was nowhere near enough yellow in the portrait compared to his Iron Man armour.

The final portrait is the worst of the three in the collection so far in terms of likeness.  There's also no Tony Stark personality coming through.  The best thing about this one is how the yellow highlights make RDJ look almost metallic.  But this still feels, if anything, more like Drax, the Bond villain in Moonraker.  

He's not quite right, so isn’t going up for sale as an individual work but will definitely end up as part of an Avengers collection if I ever complete one.

Mark Ruffalo

After Chadwick Boseman came out so well just after after Christmas, I thought I'd build a team and use him as the first in a series of MCU Avengers portraits.

It's going to be a series of portraits of out-of-costume actors but with colour schemes based on their superhero alter egos.  So Chadwick Boseman with his black and grey portrait already fits this remit.  Next up is Mark Ruffalo who plays the hulk, so will have a lot of green in his portrait.

My original plan was make this quite monotone with the two shades of green marker that I have but that wasn't really working out, making Mark look like he was already hulked out.  So I added some blacks and greys to tone him down a bit.  I even added normal flesh colours to the white highlights.

Overall, he still looks mid to early transformation but could equally be interpreted as still normal but with some impressionistic green tones.  I'm reasonably happy with this.  In fact, if you watch the first Avengers film, I think you'll find that Joss Whedon did something similar, often showing Mark under green spotlights.

The likeness isn’t really there but there's some personality (usual story for me).  I also seem to have made him a bit too heroic and good looking, something that his original two comic book artists Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko also did, so I'm in good company.

Mark's up for sale at the moment but may eventually end up as part of an Avengers collection.

New Year, New Look

I've had a play around and come up with a new look to the website for 2021.  Any good?

The Regeneration Of Lord Ernie

I got some silverbrush black velvet brushes for Christmas and have been itching to try them out, so braved the cold today and did some painting in the garden.  Let's get the bad news out of the way first though.  All the bristles fell out of my 3/4 inch oval brush the first time I wet it.  Gutting.  Amazon have sent a refund for the three brush set that it came in but insisted on me sending back the useless bald brush, a handful of hairs and two brushes that were perfectly fine.  I had a very long call with someone in an Indian call centre who I found difficult to understand and who not only tried to provide me with a discount on future purchases rather than a refund but also tried to negotiate me downwards by quibbling over how much the individual brush was worth on its own.  It was an unpleasant experience.  For art gear you're far better off shopping at Ken Bromley or Jackson's (links provided in the right sidebar) or local art shops than Amazon.

Back to the painting.  My original plan was to go for something abstract and minimalistic.  Maybe four or five colours.  Put them on randomly, tip the paper around and see what happens.  Don't attempt to turn it into something representational.  Apart from maybe having a fence post sticking up in the far right and some barbed wire running off it.

None of this happened.   What I ended up with was just a chance to get used to watercolour again and to get all my usual start of year errors out of my system.  So I was impatient, not allowing paint to dry.  I kept adding more colours on top, and dabbing colours away creating quite a muddy foreground hill.  And I tried to make things too representational rather than leaving it to to the viewer to decide what was going on.

There were a lot of colours used today.  Cerulean blue, French ultramarine, Winsor violet, burnt sienna, permanent rose, permanent alizarin crimson, sap green, olive green.  I did find out that I preferred olive green to sap green while I was doing this, not that I plan on having any greens other than the transparent and single pigment viridian in my palette in the long term.  There may have been a little bit of Winsor orange, Winsor red, quinacridone magenta and lemon yellow at some point too.  The lemon yellow made some interesting pastelly colours when I dropped it into the foreground hill - the sort of colour I'd get from mixing using white.  But lemon yellow is opaque, so not a long term colour for me - cadmium yellow Is my preferred opaque yellow.  At one point I tried glazing over the whole foreground hill with Indian yellow in an attempt to warm it up and unify it.  But the paint below it was still a bit wet, so this just. muddied it.  And I applied some sepia towards the end to try to get some rocky textures in the foreground hill.  It's just made it even more muddy though.

What's good about this one?  The sky, where I've dropped in some green (a Johannes Vloothuis idea).  There's some good salt effects in places.  And, although it's not evident in the final painting, blotting out sepia using kitchen paper created some good granulation effects.  Oh, and at one point I had some good fog along the bottom of those background trees.  Too much good stuff going on that I just couldn't leave.  Grrrrr.

And what's bad is that foreground hill.  There are lots of interesting colours but there's a muddiness to it and none of the zing that people have grown to expect from my colours.

Overall, this was a case of getting some cobwebs out of the system.  I originally thought it wasn't great but it's grown on me since then, so it's now up for sale.

I couldn’t think of a good name for this one, so I looked through the names of Algernon Blackwood short stories and found one that was set in the mountains.

Landscape Painting Essentials, Johannes Vloothuis: Book Review

I've had my eye on this book for a while, so ordered it as soon as I'd opened all my presents and the Christmas Amazon furlough was over.  It's a 144 page paperback.

If the first you've ever seen of this book is the cover, then you'll know it's about landscapes.  Maybe you expect to look at the contents and see chapters on trees, water, rocks, buildings, etc.  Or maybe chapters on each season of the year.  Sorry.  That's not what this book does.  If you want to know about painting water, check out the Ron Hazell book, otherwise you're looking at Terry Harrison for trees and rocks or something on urban sketching for buildings.

<Brief aside here: if anyone writes something on painting trees in watercolour that's at the same level as the Ron Hazell book is for water, then they're onto a winner.>

Anyway, this isn't that sort of landscape book.  It's more about composition.  I read and reviewed Frank Webb's book on dynamic composition in the summer.  It had chapters on things like line, colour, space, size and value with a big emphasis on how these things needed to be consistent but not too consistent.  Lots the same but some different.  Like the Boltzmann distribution in statistical mechanics.  But this book isn’t like Frank's either.

This one has more in common with the Ian Roberts book on composition but it's landscape focused (whereas Ian likes still lifes a bit too much for my tastes) and just a bit more readable, focused and applicable.  This book covers things like what the eye sees, abstract shapes, colours, simplification, avoiding clones, avoiding boring lines, making architecture more interesting, cropping photos, how to create a path into a painting.  There's a lot of information in there for such a short book.

Instructionally, the book is more about making the point through examples than about long paragraphs of text.  There are lots of examples of Johannes' paintings that illustrate his points.  Not in a monotonous, repetitive way either, but in lots of different ways.  There are also a lot of places where he draws arrows over paintings or draws a simplified version of the painting next to it to help make his point.  In other words he gets it all across in an easily understandable way. 

The worst bits about the book are the "demonstrations" at the end of each chapter.  The inverted commas are there for a reason: these a not descriptions of how Johannes put paintings together but a series of instructions on how you can copy him and anybody that's been following my reviews will know that these step by step instructions get my hackles up.  But it's even worse than that.  These instructions might as well be in a different book as, although there's something in them that reflects the lessons from that chapter, Johannes doesn't make any attempt to emphasise this aspect of the demos.  The word simplify, for example, only appears twice in the demo at the end of the chapter on simplification, and then only really in passing.  It's as if Johannes has been given some really bad advice on needing to include step by step instructions in what's actually a book aimed at serious, experienced artists.  A 117-page version of this book without those seven demonstrations would be no less valuable but might look a bit thin.

The cover of the book mentions "lessons in acrylic, oil, pastel and watercolour".  This put me off the book for a while but, after reading it, I don’t think I'm losing out by only using one of those four media.  Some of the demonstrations will use acrylic, oil or pastel but, as I've already mentioned, there was no value to me even in the watercolour the demos.  So no big deal.  And apart from that, the only place I can remember something of no use to me was in half a page towards the end that talked about how you could convey depth by choosing how thick to lay on the oils.  Apart from that, everything seemed to apply to watercolour.

This seems like quite a unique book to me, very different to any landscape or composition book that I've seen anywhere else and its uniqueness makes indispensable and easily worth five palettes.  I think it actually makes a dream team when combined with the Frank Webb book on Dynamic Composition: two books on composition that approach it from two different directions, one general and one landscape.

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