Cathy Jean

Back to the inktense pencils and figure drawing. All these different artistic styles and media are like spinning plates and if I don't keep coming back to practice, all my skills and experience will disappear.  And with there being an England game on at 5, I didn't want to go the full watercolour and feel rushed.

Subject matter today is Cathy Jean, a blues singer, so not an artistic model today.  It's based on the cover of her In The Remains album, an album that I haven't got and that is out of print but whose availability I'm continuing to monitor.

I started with iris blue and bright blue.  The album cover gave me a cold feeling rather than warm, so blues felt like the right way to go.  There wasn't enough difference between these so I added indigo in the darkest bits.  CJ's hair started as sun yellow, with a bit of baked earth for variety.  The pencil marks and the water on top were both curled in scribbly marks rather than just marked up and down.  Jewellery and the brightest bits on the shoes were also inked in sun yellow.  Iris blue and bright blue were used for the wall on the left and baked earth for the floor.

I wasn't satisfied with the outcome.  The yellow was too stark against the blues, resulting in a lack of harmony.  So I added some orange to both the adornments and the hair to tone them both down.  At the same time, I added occlusion shadows in violet.  And then added some leaf green to the flesh in places, remembering how this makes the skintones look more exotic.  Finally, I added some edges in violet where I thought they were needed.

I think the final result is pretty good.  I like the green skintones, the texture of the hair and what little I've drawn of the head.  The hands are also OK for once, and there's a bit of missing edge in the small of her back.  Her right leg is the weakest bit of the painting.

She's not going in the shop,window with a leg like that,

Valdeinfierno In Purple And Orange

That last painting, The Thin Ice, felt like a flop to me but got lots of likes on Facebook and on DeviantArt.  The only good thing it had going for it (at least in my eyes) was the complementary contract of purple against orange.  So all week I've been planning to build on that with this painting.  It's the second time I've based a painting on a photo taken in Valdeinfierno but this time, it's only loosely based on the photo.  I started with a scene from the photo but my plan was to use very different colours.

I started with a value and colour plan for the first time in years.  The colour plan was to have trees in blue and violet against a yellow and orange background, with the stream being a neutral colour and the rocks green to neutral.  I used so many colours in this one that I can't claim it to be in a single colour key.  Maybe a mix of orange cool in the background and purple warm on the trees?  If people can write music that switches between keys, why can't I do the same with a painting?

After masking out some trees, the first step was to paint in the orange/yellow background.  I used Winsor orange, a Indian yellow, Winsor yellow, transparent yellow, Winsor red, rose dore and a little permanent rose.  No holding back there.  There were also some white spots from masking fluid as patters and some cadmium red, cadmium yellow and sepia spatters.  All of these spatters were eventually covered up by reworking though.

Then I did the rocks and the stream.  The rocks took several attempts.  They're mainly French ultramarine, Winsor orange and permanent rose, although I added some Prussian blue towards the end, which gave a nice green sheen in places.  The stream started as a neutral made of permanent rose, French ultramarine and Winsor orange but veering more towards green.  I added some more Winsor orange in places to reflect the (orange) sky and some more French ultramarine below the rocks.  You can see how I've been quite smart and made it more green at the top to contrast against the orange bank and more orange/brown at the bottom to contrast against the blueish bank.  And the closest bit of foreground, I made more blue, less orangey.

Then I rubbed off the masking fluid and started on the trees.  My original plan was to do these in a variegated mix of French ultramarine, Winsor violet and permanent rose.  But then I also added in some Winsor orange for an extra bit of orange /purple contrast (partly inspired by how good the orange looked against the blue masking fluid after painting over the masking fluid earlier).  I must have done three coats on each tree in an attempt to get them darker but was eventually satisfied.  Some scraping with a credit card added a bit of texture and a bit of Prussian blue at the end made the left sides of the two big trunks and some of the background trunks more shadowy.

I was left with a bit of a problem, though, in that the background trees were standing out too harshly against the orange underpainting, so I had to put on some more layers.  I started by making the orange more variegated by adding Winsor red and rose dore at the bottom and blending them upwards into the orange.  That wasn't enough, so I added some purple foliage behind the big tree on the left, some blue and purple shadows under the tree in top left and some blue and purple shadows all along the far bank, under the trees.  At the same time as this, I added the Prussian blue shadows to the trees and rocks that I've already mentioned, and some Prussian blue shadow in the bottom left which has resulted in some interesting greens.

And that still left a second problem at the top of the painting.  Why did the trees just stop?  I ended up adding dabs of blue and purple along the top to look like a dark leafy canopy.  And then I was done.  It felt like I'd done enough fiddling around already and at wasn't going to risk more.

I rate the final painting a success, even if it doesn't look like the painting I planned.  There's texture, variegation and orange in the big trunks than I was planning but they look all the better for it.  And the electric orange background that I was expecting to cover most of the painting is restricted to just a capital gamma shaped band (horizontal line about 1/3rd of the way down and vertical band 1/3rd 9f the way in from the left.  But that gamma lay works.  If I'd planned it I'd be called a genius, and quite rightly too.  My only disappointment (and it's a small one) is that the rocks in the middle are quite biting shapes, unlike t(e ones in the photo that were flat topped.  Then again, I don't want those rocks to steal the show.  The stars of this painting are the purples and the oranges.

It was sold within a couple of days.  Quite a collection building up there.

The Thin Ice

After the disaster that was The Brimham Rocks, I wasn't happy.  I wanted to chase the frustrations out of my system by bashing out a second painting, more quickly and with little thought but just painting for the sake of it.

For subject matter, I went for my usual lazy choice of a sunset sky between two hills.  But, just to be different, I thought I'd have a lake at bathe bottom with some reflections.  Colour-wise I wanted to change all three primaries, so went for French ultramarine, Indian yellow and Winsor red, the key of orange cool. Some opaques made an appearance at the end: titanium white, cadmium red and sepia.

After the sky and hills went down, I threw on some salt, because this was about having fun rather than creating a masterpiece.  Then I added the page, putting in hilly and sky reflection colours.  But I'd messed up on values again: the whole painting was looking too dark.  So I dabbed out the colours in the water and was shocked to end up with something icy looking, complementing the snowy salt patterns on the sky.  That was good.

A painting like this needs buildings or people in it to create interest and define scale, so I added the buildings on the right using opaque colours, then put in some trees.  The trees, though, were too similarly valued to the hills behind them.

I tried adding snow to the tops of the hills but it didn't look right, so I dabbed it out and repainted the hilltops.  It took a few attempts as the remains of the white were making the colours milky.

This was unlikely to ever end up in the shop window and it's in the reject pile.  The best thing about it is how the orange in the sky and the purple in the hills zing against each other.

The Brimham Rocks

Today's subject is The Brimham Rocks, a rock formation somewhere near Harrogate in North Yorkshire.  My rocky paintings have been pretty good this year and I thought I'd build on that by continuing to paint colourful rocks but also making the surrounding heather more colourful.

The main three primaries were cerulean blue, quinacridone magenta and transparent yellow, so this is in the key of green cool.  Viridian and burnt sienna are the extra herbs that make things more interesting in places - burnt umber isn't getting much of a look in these days.  Prussian blue and Winsor red were used to mix up some darks for shadowy crevices and the Prussian blue was also used in the distant background and some of the green and purple heather.

The sky was first to go on.  I started with cerulean blue, then dropped in burnt sienna, viridian and a little quinacridone magenta.  I was careful to make the sky light enough around the top rock to make that rock pop out.  I'm really enjoying my skies this year.

Next was the distant background.  I had many attempts but never really got the colour right.  And it's too big for such a monotone area.

Then came the rocks and the shadows.  I'm very happy with the colours in the rocks, which I allowed to mix on the paper rather than mixing in the palette.  The shadows aren’t great though.  In some places thy went on first, in other places last, but they're too dark everywhere and too hard edged.

Finally, the heather went on.  I has some fun with this, playing it loose, dabbing on random splotches in three bands of green, purple and orange.  In all three cases, two primaries were dabbed on separately and allowed to mix on the paper.  At this stage I spotted a problem: the values of the rocks and heather were too similar, so something needed to be done to contrast them.  I started by throwing on some salt to change the texture of the heather.  It started to make patterns while the paint was still wet, so I thought I'd try dabbing that paint off with a paper towel before it dried.  And I ended up with what a I have to say are some interesting results!

Overall, I think this goes down as a flop.  The ugly shadow in the bottom left, the hard edged shadows generally, the boring distant background, the lack of value contrasts.  This one's not going up for sale.

And I need to start doing paintings properly by starting with a value sketch.

Richard Feynman

I had another read of my Charles Reid book last night (Painting By Design) and saw a couple of his videos  on YouTube this morning, so thought it was time for my annual reminder that I can’t paint portraits.

Today's subject is the late Richard Feynman, a famous physicist whose main lasting legacy is the Feynman  Diagram, a number of which appear on the left hand side of the background here.  They look like the sort of diagrams you might normally draw at the start of a mathematical physics problem but are actually devilish mathematical terms in pictorial form.  Like me, Feynman saw maths in terms of pictures.  The source photo that I used suggests that he also likes to explain things with his hands, just like me.  I feel a great kinship with Professor Feynman.

In fact, the original idea was to make the hands the focal point of the painting with sharp edges and with the face being a bit more washed out and soft edged.  I think I've achieved this in part but not completely.  Anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself.  Let's go back to the beginning.

I started by drawing a rough pencil outline, attempting in vain to get some sort of likeness.  Then I added some masking fluid in three ways:

- writing mathematical formulae on the board using masking fluid and a mapping pen.  The Feynman diagrams I found online; everything else was in the photo

- putting a spattering of spots on the background.  At this stage I wasn't clear whether the background would be a blackboard or a spacey background.

- protecting Feynman's edges.  In particular the hands and front of the face but pretty well everywhere apart from the hair, which I was keen to blend into the background.

Then I painted the background in Indian yellow, Winsor red and Prussian blue, so in the key of orange cool.  I chose these three colours because my swatching exercises suggested these made a good black.  But because I struggled to get a decent black on the day (let alone enough of it to cover the whole background) I settled for something with a bit of variegation, with red dominating at the top, blue at the bottom and yellow around the hands.  The idea was that the yellow around the hands suggested magic and the red at the top was heat coming from his brain.  I think it worked.

Then, after it had dried, I removed the masking fluid and got to work on the rest of the painting.  I worked on the flesh, hair and shirt at the same time, switching between them when I needed to wait for paint to dry.

For flesh tones, I used mainly Winsor red, raw sienna and cerulean blue, so this is in the key of green warm.  Charles Reid uses cadmium red, cadmium yellow (or raw sienna) and cerulean but my combination suits me.  I also used a little bit of viridian in places.  Within the first coat, I made the top of the head more yellow, the middle more red and the bottom more blue or green.  And I added a bit of red to the end of the nose.  I used the same colours for the hands.  I added some shadowy bits to the hands in blue and green.  And then I mixed up some darker colour from the three primaries and added shadowy areas.

The hair is made from the same three colours as the background as I wanted to blend it in rather than having a definite edge.  I wanted some variety in the hair, so after a neutral first coat, subsequent coats consisted of lots of spots of each of the prime colours separately.  Using spots like this meant I got a good soft edge between the hair and the face and the front of the hair and the background.  At the back of the head, I used water to let the hair bleed into the background.  In places I needed to sweep the water all the way to the edge of the painting to avoid hard edges.

And then there's the shirt.  It used the same three primaries as the flesh, but with relatively more emphasis on the blue.  I used a bit more red in the forearms in an attempt to bring them forwards - something that I don't think worked.  And I added lots of shadowy marks in an attempt to make it all look more three dimensional.

Oh, and I added some spatters onto the background in cadmium red and cadmium yellow at the end.

No salt was used in the production of this painting.

In the end I don't think this is too bad.  The likeness isn't perfect but is better than I was expecting.  The head is maybe a bit big relative to the hands and the left upper arm isn't right.  But I like the right shoulder and the shades in the face (especially the shadowy eyes and anywhere that the blue shows up).  But the best bit about it is the interaction between the figure and the background (yellow magic around the hands, red around the brain heat, the soft edge at the top of the head suggesting his brain is drifting off somewhere else and the way the figure links the Feynman diagrams on the left to the traditional mathematical formulation on the right).  In fact Feynman's brain, rather than his hands, is probably the star of the show.

I wasn't sure before but I think I've talked myself into putting this one up for sale.

Moose On The Phoenix Trail

Reading that George Blacklock book during the week I started to think about how artists like Dali, Mageitte and Blacklock himself have common theme shapes that they like to keep coming back to.  I've been thinking this week about what sort of shape I could simplify and start incorporating into a series of abstracts.  I had quite a few ideas.  There's the iconic shot from Once Upon A Time In The West that I've already painted.  Maybe there are other Western shots I could use.  Or there's the world of music.  A nice Jimi Hendrix pose.  Or the cover of Aladdin Sane by David Bowie.  The word iconic keeps coming bit mind.

In the end I went for this moose (photo credit: Cathy Stone):

So what  attracted me to this moose?  Well...

- It's an interesting shape

- It has a childlike simplicity to it, like one of those prehistoric men sculpted out on the side of chalky hills

- I like how most of it is a single line, with just the small unconnected triangle for contrast

- I like how the edge of the plinth looks like it could be an exaggerated round bottom

- It's easy to draw freehand

- It has the potential to be iconic

The moose itself is a sculpture on top of a telegraph pole somewhere in Buckinghamshire next to the Phoenix Trail, a national cycle path.  There are other sculpted mooses in different poses that I may turn to at some point in the future but this feels like one to keep using again and again.

Anyway, on to the painting.  I started by spattering on masking fluid.  Once this was dry, I wet the paper and put on a fairly random underpainting using Prussian blue, quinacridone magenta and transparent yellow - the classic triadic left colour key.  I tried to put in some complementary contrasts with red adjacent to green, yellow to violet and blue to orange.  But of course, these tended to blur together into neutrals rather than standing next door to each other and not mixing.  Duh!

As the underpainting dried, I sprinkled on salt.  I was really careful with this today, adding salt just as the paint was losing its shine.  And, because the paint was drying at different rates, I was adding the salt to different places at different times rather than throwing it all on at once.  The result is that the salt has worked all over the painting.  After a long wait, I rubbed off all the masking fluid to reveal the starry background.  Interestingly, there was hardly any salt to rub off - maybe that's another indicator that I was using the salt properly. 

Next I spattered on some opaques: cadmium red, cadmium yellow and cerulean blue.  Maybe the cerulean was a mistake - it's not come through as brightly as the red and the yellow.

And then finally I painted on the moose.  I tried drawing on a rough pencil outline but this was too hard to see, so I painted it freehand instead, in titanium white.  It was four or five coats of white that I applied in the end.  In one of the earlier coats, I dropped in the three opaque primaries in different places but this didn't really work - white's not a great mixer.  But after the last couple of white coats, there's a tiny hint of blue or pink to the line which I quite like.

And what I've ended up with is a decent painting.  The underpainting, the salt, the spattering and the moose all seem to complement each other.  And there's a happy accident in there in how the salt marks on the face look like eyes.  Although I'm left with a slight feeling of guilt about this all being too easy.  Anyway, the moose is up for sale.

Book Review Rating Policy

I saw the other day that I'd reached fifty pages linked to the subject of book reviews and thought it was about time that I said something about how I rate books using the palette system.  So here goes.

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A book scores one palette if it's a book I regret buying (or, equivalently regret putting on my wishlist).  It's a bad score.  I give these books one or two stars as Amazon ratings.

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Two palettes is kind of bleh.  This is awarded to books that I can't really say I regret buying but that, if I were to have all my books stolen, wouldn't replace.  They look good on the shelf and I'll occasionally take another look through them but, when I do, I find that they're not really teaching me anything new.  But I still like having them on that shelf.  They score two or three stars on Amazon, more likely three.

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Three palettes is a decent score.  These are books that were definitely worth buying.  I wouldn't say they're amazing but art books are expensive and they have to be pretty decent to be worth the money.  Three or four stars on Amazon, probably four.

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Four palettes mean that we're talking about really good books.  Books that have taught me a lot and continue to do so.  Books packed with ideas and with inspiring artwork.  You need to buy these books!  I normally give them five stars on Amazon.

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And then there’s five palettes.  These are the galacticos. Absolute jaw dropping books.  You don't realise what I mean by this until you've read one of them.  Most of them are bibles to read again and again but there are also books like Drawing On The Right Side Of The Brain and Hazel Soan's Watercolour Rainbow that you only need to read once to change your life.  Obviously these score five stars on Amazon.

As I was putting this post together, I came to realise that many of my historic book reviews have over-inflated ratings.  Sometimes ratings are over inflated because the books were gifts and I didn't want to upset friends and family.  Others are over inflated because they're expensive-feeling hardbacks.  And some are over inflated because the first thing I want to do with every four palette book is to award it five palettes.

So I've revisited my historic reviews and reduced the ratings in many cases.  This was a painful process, demoting so many books from their earlier ratings.  But I think my ratings are more consistent now.

Looking back over time, for every four books reviewed I give roughly one book five palettes, one four, one three and one one or two.  Quite a flat looking distribution, which I think is a good thing.

Colour And Abstraction, George Blacklock - Book Review

This book was going cheap on Amazon the other day and it was on my wishlist, so I exercised my market timing muscles and bought it.  It's a 128 page paperback.

And I have to say I didn't like this book.  What didn't I like?  Well,...

- All the featured artwork is  George's own.  He has his own style and after a while you get sick of him running off the same old stuff, with its kidney bean shapes all over the place.  He does refer us to other artists' work but tells us to google them - this book could have been so much better if it was twice as thick and included all those other artists' paintings.

- The language was a bit, ahem, woolly and pretentious in too many places.  I just didn't know what he was talking about a lot of the time.

- The title's misleading.  Colour's not that big a theme in the book.  It's about abstract art and, in particular, George's abstract art.

- I really didn't learn much from this book.  I have one page of notes compared to the 4-6 pages I'd have expected from a book this size

- I wasn’t inspired by looking at George’s art

But did I learn anything?  Maybe one little thing.  And it's to be me.  Do the sort of abstract art that comes from deep inside me.  Keep experimenting but also keep coming back to my own style.  If there are patterns or symbols that I like (like the leopard skin or the black dress in I See A Red Door And I Want It Painted Black), keep coming back to them and incorporating them into more paintings (like Magritte and maybe Dali).  Be like George but don’t paint like George.

This isn't one I can recommend.  It's getting one palette.  And I'm going back to take another look at that Rolina Van Vliet book that I gave two palettes to a while back.  I may well appreciate that one a lot more after reading this one. Maybe I'll raise its rating if it gives me good ideas for sun paintings within my next griddy abstract work.  Anyway, it's one palette for George.

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