Sunday 29 August 2021

Hartlip Church In The Sun

It's the 29th of August already!  The local church has another tea and cake afternoon on 12th September and I promised them I'd have another church painting for them to auction off.  As it's to be auctioned off, I thought I'd better paint it from a conventional angle and using a conventional colour scheme.  So the angle is very similar to that of the oil pastel painting that was auctioned off last time, albeit in portrait format this time, without the village sign in the shot.  The colour scheme is cerulean blue, Indian yellow and rose dore (the key of orange cool), which worked well for the church before.  The blue granulates well and the yellow brings the sun with it.  I should probably experiment at some point with quinacridone magenta as the red: this would be a triadic scheme (at least in my sense of the word, only very approximately in Stephen Quiller's).

After putting a pencil outline down, I went over the church outlines (including some individual bricks) with a rollerball.  This didn’t work out well yesterday with the figure drawing but I find it works for churches.  Then I masked out the flagpole, the vane and some highlights and spattered a little bit of masking fluid on the church.

Next came the sky.  This is mainly cerulean blue with a little bit of rose dore for some greys and reds.  I did try a little bit of yellow in there but it didn't work, so I removed it while I could.  The cerulean in the sky graduated as well as I've ever seen it, so this was a great start.

Then onto painting the church.  This was done in several glazes.  The first was the darkest neutral I could manage, which I used to mark out shadows.  Then some watery Indian yellow on the sunniest parts.  And after that it was all neutrals.  First a neutral neutral over all the grey bits (including those in shadow), then a reddy neutral over the roofs on the left.  I tried to variegated the neutrals, making them redder in some places and bluer in others.  Then I added a second coat of neutrals and scraped out some tile lines on the roofs with an old credit card and sprinkled some salt all over the church.

Next, the greenery.  I should probably have started with the tree in the left but instead I started with the hedgerow at thee bottom.  I started with bands of yellow, blue and red, trying to get them to blend into each other.  They did in some places but in others they needed a bit of encouragement from tipping the paper around and even using a brush to mix them on the paper.  Then I added some textures using a credit card - both thin grassy marks and mysterious scraped marks.  Once this was all dry, I dabbed on some  cadmium red, cadmium yellow and titanium white using the Terry Harrison tree/foliage brush.  They came out really well, especially the white, which I'd dabbed at the top of the grassy marks to make cow parsley.

Only after this did I put in the tree on the left.  For a while I've been using the Terry Harrison Merlin brush but today (as I say) I used the tree/foliage brush and it made a huge difference.  I started by dabbing in the most extreme branches with the three individual primaries, then as I moved towards the middle of the tree, I started using mixtures of the primaries instead.  And, because I'd done this tree after the hedgerow, I needed to add some more yellow at the bottom to blend into the hedgerow.  Touch wood, you can't see the join.

Then finally, I looked at the painting and decided to do a little tinkering:
- I created some extra gaps in the leaves on the tree by dotting in a little bit of titanium white (good)
- I added some neutral coloured birds in the sky (good) but tried to variegate them by dropping in a bit of cerulean blue and rose dore (bad)
- after not liking what the salt had done to the shadow on the roof I went over the shadows on the church again with another neutral glaze.on the roof, I applied this glaze as a series of parallel strokes (as opposed to a wash) to reinforce the pattern of the tiles.  I liked the effect so much that I added another glaze of parallel strokes to the sunlit bits of the roofs
- I added a bit of colour to the flagpole and the vane (they needed it)
- I added a signature in titanium white (using a white gel pen would have been better)

And then I stopped.

I'm happy with this one: there are so many good things about it.  The way the church has "caught the sun", the colours on the the on the left, the textures and cow parsley in the hedgerow and the granulation in the sky.  The roofs aren't brilliant but they're not the centre of interest so it's ok for them to be as loosely painted as they are.

This one was auctioned off at a church tea and cakes afternoon, with all proceeds going to the church.  It was bought by a couple of church committee members and they're gifting it to a couple who are getting married in this church in a week or two's time, which I think is a fantastic gesture.

Saturday 28 August 2021

Ann And Rebecca On The Shiraz

With England poised to score an innings victory over India at Headingley, it was never going to be anything but the inktense pencils today.  I'm too messy with the watercolours and oil pastels to be allowed to use them indoors in front of the telly.  Oh, I could have gone for markers I guess.  But  didn't.  Oh well.

I wanted to keep pushing myself, so I tried out some new ideas on this one.  I also gave myself the challenge of a double.  The new idea I tried was to mark out everything in rollerball to start with.  With a table and chairs in there, this also nailed down my perspective early on.  I also tried out some cross hatch shading on the tables and chairs as I wanted these to be in a different style to the models.

To try to keep everything fitting together, I made sure to reuse the colours on the wine, wine label and nail varnish in the flesh tones.  I also tried to distinguish the two models by using more red in the one on the left and more green in the one on the right.  For the wooden table and chairs., I started with earth6 tones but the added in the occasional extra colour when I was putting in the flesh tones.

I wasn't that happy with what I ended up with, so I did one last bit of tinkering, adding in a complementary background in tangerine and sun yellow.

It's still not great, though, is it?  Rollerball lines are too defining (leaving me missing edges or ambiguities) and too monotonous with all the lines the same width.  The cross hatching hasn't really worked - it would have been far better to just use dark tones.  Still, if you don't have experiments that fail, you'll never learn anything.  So I'm done with starting with rollerball on works like this (although I don't rule it out for urban landscapes).  I'm not sure whether the figures are too dark or too light.  This looks like a watercolour without a value plan: I think I need to keep my figure drawings simple.  If I want a chair, then only one figure.  If I want two figures, then no furniture.

One for the bin.

Thursday 26 August 2021

High Cup Nick

This is High Cup Nick, a huge chasm up in the Pennines.  I've been meaning to paint it for years after seeing the source photo in the pages of the Metro.  I'm actually glad I waited so long because I think this is better suited to oil pastels than to my watercolours.  In fact, I can see a taxonomy developing where landscapes with lots of green get the oil pastel treatment but those with little green get the watercolours.

One of the reasons I'm happier using the oil pastels on this is is the swooshing marks I can get heading down the hills on both sides towards the stream at the bottom.  OK, I could do swooshing marks on watercolour but somehow they feel more believable in this medium.  It also helps that I can use lots of colours on both sides.  On the left there are generally (but not exclusively) darker greens, browns and reds whereas on the right there are lighter greens, yellows and white.  And I can play around with the colours.  If things are looking too dark, I can dab on more white or yellow and blend it in.  In watercolour, this sort of thing qualifies as tinkering and gets me into trouble.

For the rocks on the right, watercolours would have worked well but the oil pastels work too.  I put on all sorts of colours, sometimes in vertical strokes and sometimes in dabs and then scraped paint away with a scalpel to reveal paint underneath and addd texture.

The best thing about this one is the sunshine both on the hill on to the right and in places in the background.  Not convinced otherwise though.  This one's not going in the shop window.

Tuesday 24 August 2021

Castles Made Of Sand

This is my second attempt at a painting with a complementary colour scheme.  The two colours are Winsor orange and French ultramarine.  In Quiller speak, I was assuming these were a yellow-orange and a blue-violet but given the greenish tinge to the neutrals here, one of them must be slightly more yellow or blue than that respectively.  Anyway, I deliberately searched Google for photos of cliffside houses and found a photo in The Guardian by Graham Turner that I based the painting on.  It was of a house at Easton Bavents, which is in Suffolk, near Southwold.  Adnams country.

I actually planned my colours and values properly today.  The idea was to show off the pure orange in the roof, next to neutral colours in the house (not next to the pure blue).  I stuck pretty well to the plan, only deviating from it where I made the beach darker than expected.  In terms of colour proportions, I think the orange is dominating the blue enough to keep people happy.

After putting down a rough drawing and masking out some white window frames and some weird things hanging down from the eaves, I started on the sky.  I applied the techniques from the Bridget Woods book and they definitely worked today.  I sloped the sky shapes in the opposite direction to the cliff top for variety.  Where there were really bright orange streaks in the sky, I blotted these out with kitchen roll to make clouds.

Then it was on to the rest of the painting.  The house and trees need no further comment.  The cliffs and beach both started with random underpaintings before being glazed over two or three times.  On the cliffs, I used two neutrals in each section, first along the top with an orangey neutral and then along the bottom in a greeny blue one.  By the time I added the last glaze, some granulation was starting to appear, which was good.  Towards the left of the cliff, I put in some vertical strokes as the cliff was close enough to the viewer to see more detail.  I also added some blue at the end to try to create some shadows on the cliff side.

The beach was more difficult to paint.  Again, I used a number of glazes, trying to make the beach darker at the bottom of the cliffs and looking for the odd bright orangey streak in places but had trouble getting the texture right.  I tried painting in some rocks and doing some dry on dry Bridget Woods marks but was never really happy.  In the end, I got a bit of texture by throwing on some salt.

I thought for a while about adding a dog walker on the beach but decided not to for value reasons.  If there had been a big light valued cliff area, I would have painted a dark valued silhouette in front of it, but there wasn’t, so I didn't.

I rate this painting as a success and it's going up for sale.  These two colours look great together, like the Burton and Taylor of watercolour.  The colours in the cliffs are amazing and the sky looks like it's been painted by a professional from 200 years ago.  The unnatural straight lines and orange roof of the cliff are quite jarring against the nature all around and you're left with a feeling that the house doesn’t belong there.  Jimi Hendrix is still doing a great job of supplying painting names.

Sunday 22 August 2021

Fog Over Queendown Warren

Just the one oil pastel piece today.  When I was out exploring Queendown Warren the other week, I took a photo of this stile as it looked like a good painting subject.  One where I could go to town a bit with the watercolours, using a lot of impressionistic colours in the wooden posts.  Well, it ended up as an oil pastel painting instead.

There's a lot in this medium that I've not really mastered yet.  Skies aren't that great yet, although I feel like I'm making some progress.  The background greenery wasn't too bad for a while (this was before I turned this into a foggy painting).  The wood in the stile, though, is the big problem in this one.  I don't think it's because I didn't draw this all in pencil first.  I think it's because it's all too small and detailed.  I did the right thing in negatively painting it all first by putting in the grassy shapes in the gaps but I've not got enough colour variation in there.  And I think this is because I'm working at such a small scale, having to be really careful adding colour and then having to use tools rather than fingers to smear them all together.  This painting has convinced me that my next Senelier pastel pad needs to be the one with the 9.5 by 12.5 inch pages - so far I've been using 7 by 9.5.

The fog is something I only decided to add near the end.  Where I'd tried to lighten background hill on the left, it was looking foggy.  And because this looked so good, I thought I'd put some fog in the foreground too.  Just so that it starts a little further away up the hill but so you can see the tops of the trees.  I guess it adds a horizontal band to go with the big diagonal line, so that has to be good from a compositional point of view.

I had some fun adding evergreens by putting on bands of green and stroking them upwards with my finger.  In reality, the great majority of trees that can be seen from here are deciduous.

The best bit about this painting is the nettles on the left, with leaves and stems in lots of different colours including a sun catching yellow and some more leaves scraped off with a scalpel.  The barbed wire that I scraped off is good too.

But it's not one for the shop window: that stile spoils it for me.

Saturday 21 August 2021

Color Choices, Stephen Quiller - Book Review

You knew it was coming and here it is - the Stephen a Quiller book review.  This is a book that's been on my list for a while and I've now finally read it.  It's a 144 page paperback with nice glossy pages.

We start with what everybody always takes about.  15 pages introducing the Quiller colour wheel.  There's a pull out when in the book.  I've left it stuck in there but other people have managed to pull it out, judging by how many people review this book on Amazon and say that it's missing from their copy.  Anyway, it's an interesting colour wheel.  It has red, yellow and blue equally spaced out, with green, orange and violet equally spaced between them but his colours don't always match my definitions.  What I call red, Stephen calls red/orange, what I call orange, Stephen calls yellow/orange, there are colours that I'd call green that like between Stephen's yellow and yelllow/green.  You get the picture.  Anyway, Stephen has put this wheel together after loads of experimentation with colours, making sure that colours that completely cancel each other out are directly opposite each other on the wheel.  It's a wheel to be taken seriously.  Because this book was first published in 1989, there are a lot of colours that I use that don't appear on his wheel but I can always surf around for answers or take educated guesses.  It was a relief to see all my earthy colours on the wheel though.

We then get onto the real core of the book where, for 70 pages, Stephen talks about monochromatic, complementary, analogous, split complementary and triadic colour schemes.  I was aware of all these types of colour scheme but Stephen goes into lots of details on them and about how, even after choosing the scheme, the artist can still set the mood by choosing which colour should dominate, the range of values and the range of intensities.  I found it interesting that in a monochromatic scheme, he was telling us to also use the direct complement of the main colour so that we could have the main colour in a range of intensities from pure to grey.  He illustrates this on a colour wheel, with the two colours marked directly opposite each other on the circumference and the range of allowed colours marked along a line from the main colour to the grey at the centre of the circle, so along a radius.  With a complementary scheme, however, you can use colours all along the diameter.  Makes sense, yes?

After this, the book goes off the boil.  We have 30 pages of stuff about how to lay the paint down where I'm never sure what medium he's talking about.  There's a lot of talk, for example about laying down paint either transparently or opaquely, which confused me as, as far as I'm concerned, watercolours are either opaque or transparent.  But there was also some interesting stuff in there about choosing the colour to set the mood rather than to match the subject and  making notes (in the form of studies) to remember the mood via colours rather than to remember shapes.  And something about coming up with ideas for paintings more from the inside than from the source material.

And then we get to 20 wasted pages talking about artists that it may be worth taking a look at.  He talks about 27 artists and their styles (with an emphasis on colour) but only illustrates this with six works.  I might have paid this section more attention had it featured artwork from all 27 artists.

I see this book as putting forward a different style of painting rather than being a colour theory reference.  It's about choosing colours to reflect the mood, choosing what sort of colour scheme to use with those colours, how to divide responsibilities among those colours to really reflect the mood, etc. And to do this properly, colours need to be selected properly using the Quiller colour wheel.  In fact, halfway through this book, I found myself coming up with the positions of all my box of colours on the Quiller wheel, in the form of angles from 0 to 360 degrees.  I then put this all into Excel and got Excel to identify my most exact complements and best triadic and split complementary schemes.  And putting stuff on a spreadsheet really hammers home the lessons.

Combining this book with Hazel Soan's watercolour rainbow, I now have colour database spreadsheet that look like this:

To go the full Quiller, though, would mean two big changes.  First, I'd need a lot more colours in my palette.  If you're the sort of person that would rather carry around 48 colours than 12, and choose your colours based on them being closest to clock numbers then this style could be for you.  Second, I'd have to throw away a lot of good habits picked up from Hazel Soan's Watercolour Rainbow.  I'd have to start using more opaque colours (because, for example, cadmium yellow is bang on 12 o'clock and cadmium red bang on 9 o'clock and would probably end up going back to the old days of (i) mixing mud and, (ii) having dull looking paintings where the light can't get through to reflect off the white paper.

So, while a lot of this stuff is genius, it feels slightly flawed genius.  And this is a book about a new technique rather than a fundamental theory book.  That's why it falls short of galactico status and only gets (a still amazing) four palettes.

🎨🎨🎨🎨

Friday 20 August 2021

Clare Bridge In Complementary Colours

Anybody else that has read it will know straight away after looking at this that I'm reading Color Choices by Stephen Quiller.  There's a full review coming up soon but I'm already trying out some ideas from the book.

First of all I'm trying this complementary colour scheme.  It's a painting that (apart from the final touches of titanium white) was created using only two colours: Winsor violet and olive green.  The thing about these two colours, apart from how I don't use them very often, is that they're opposite each other on the Quiller colour wheel.  This is supposed to make them great for two colour paintings because they mix to produce great neutrals.  A bit of each in the right proportion should make a genuine neutral colour.  A bit more of the violet in the mix will make a violety "semineutral".  I would say that a bit more of the olive in the mix would make a greeny semineutral but I think the olive green is almost there already: the violet is a pure colour on the circumference of the colour wheel but the olive green is halfway between the circumference and the centre where the semis live.

Anyway, the idea was to use the two colours in pure form and mixed into neutral and semineutral combinations and to have a variety of different values.  The biggest value contrasts and most unmixed colours need to be near the centre of interest and one of the two colours should dominate the other.

That's a lot to ask.  The only pure colours there are the purple under the arches and in the reflections, so that's not terrible but not great either and a bit planless.  When I first stopped to review the painting, I found that what I was trying to make a green-dominated painting was more like 50% green, 50% violet.  It wouldn't have been possible to bring the green back to a majority position (because the violet was so much darker) so I made the painting more violet dominated by glazing more violet over my green background trees.  That improved things.  But, as well as this, values had been generally forgotten, so I had to do another rescue job at the very end, adding white highlights using titanium white straight from the tube.  They made the painting more presentable.

Overall, this was definitely an interesting experiment and I'm looking forward to trying this out with a couple more complementary pairs, although I do need to plan the paintings properly.  Really, I should be dividing the paper up into six (say) and doing a set of vignettes with the same complementary pair but using them in different ways, but we'll see.

I think this one is good enough to go up for sale.

Wednesday 18 August 2021

Still Raining, Still Dreaming

Having learned my lessons, here's my second attempt of the day.  There are only three colours in the whole painting.  Payne's grey and light red are still there but they're now joined by Indian yellow as I wanted a little bit of sun in there to contrast with the dreariness of the grey.  So this is in the key of orange cool.

This time I put on the paint using a palette knife rather than a a credit card. It was easier this way to access the blobs of paint that I'd squeezed into a porcelain palette.  The paint still settled into the grooves but I applied a lot less of it and didn't mix it as I was applying it.  When I squirted on water, the paint ran down the page a lot better, although I think I may still have used slightly too much paint.  A little extra directional squirting was applied in places where I thought it was needed.  Later on, while I was busy with sky and trees, I sprinkled some salt on the foreground just at the right time for the special effects to come through.

Then came the sky.  I pulled up a little bit of paint from the foreground and spread it over a wet sky using a brush that was still dirty from a little bit of foreground tinkering.  That already looked good but I also dabbed in a little bit of all my three foreground colours.

And then the trees.  I just took a thinner brush and wherever there were spots along the horizon where the paint hadn't run and was still thick, I dragged it up into the sky to draw trees.  So the trees were all in different colours, depending on the colour of the paint where they touched the horizon.  The main downside of this pot luck methodology was that I ended up with three equally spaced trees which was a compositional error that I should have seen coming.

While the trees were drying, I added some grasses between them by dragging the existing paint upwards using one of those specialist Terry Harrison brushes.

Then back to the trees.  The first paint layers were fading but still wet, so I touched in some extra paint in places, generally in the same colour.  This actually gave the trees a more three-dimensional appearance.  The tree on the left had spread out sideways as well as fading, so I made it much wider before dabbing in the extra paint.  I added extra paint to this tree a couple more times.

And the end result looks good to me.  There's so much to like about it: the tree on the left, the fog in the sky and around the trees and grasses, the grasses, the little bit of Indian yellow still showing, the salt effects, the longer dribbles of paint at the bottom.  Oh, and this one is named after a Hendrix track: Jimi is officially up there with Algernon Blackwood as a source of painting names.

This was sold at the 2022 Upchurch Art Exhibition.  It was a couple of weeks later when someone I know in the village came over to chat to me at a Sunday Church Tea and revealed that he'd bought the painting.

The Wind Cries Mary

I was short of ideas today, so watched a few Jean Lurssen videos on YouTube for inspiration.  I was impressed by one "exercise" she did (for exercise, read something that I'd be proud to call a painting) where she loaded up the edge of a credit card with paint straight from the tube, scraped it across the paper, squirted on some water to let it run down the paper, then added sky and trees and called it a day.  I thought I'd have a go.

The main three colours I used were Payne's grey, light red and raw sienna, making this, at least in theory, a painting in the key of green warm.  Cadmium red, cobalt blue and transparent yellow also made appearances later, along with acrylic inks.  Payne's grey doesn't appear often these days but Jean gets great results with it and light red needs to be used up at some point (it has no future on my palette).  So with the idea behind this painting being to use paint straight from the tube, it was the ideal chance to give both of them an outing.

In the video, I believe Jean used hot pressed paper, which is really smooth and tends to be used by realistic botanical artists.  Not my sort of thing, not my sort of paper.  With my cold pressed, rougher, paper, I found that the paint I spread on was finding nice comfy spots at the bottom of troughs and was resistant to being spread over the paper.  This is probably why I ended up putting on far more paint than I should have done.  The other mistake I made was to mix up some of the paint as I was applying it, tempted in by the lovely greens that I could mix.

Anyway, when I sprayed on the water, these two mistakes became apparent, the first one in how far down the paper the paint ran before turning into watery dribbles and the second in how all the colour turned to mud.  There were lessons there.

Anyway, I added a sky using my three main primaries, starting by letting some of the foreground paint dribble up into the sky area.  I added lots of Payne's grey and a bit of light red.  The trees were added at some point with acrylic inks (Earth red, indigo and sepia).

And then I tinkered.  I tried to clear the mud in the foreground by pushing the paint around with a big brush against the bristles.  I tried adding more colour, including cobalt blue and cadmium red.  And I added on lots of alcohol inks, with a touch of granulation medium.  Nothing really worked so, in desperation, I flicked on all sorts of alcohol inks (even including waterfall green).  I didn't discriminate between foreground and sky; everything went everywhere.  At one point some cauliflowers appeared in the sky behind the tree on the right - I painted over them with Payne's grey to get some background hills or trees.

I've ended up with something that's not a perfect painting but one that does convey the way that the wind cuts through you out on the moors in the autumn.  There's all sorts of stuff being blown around but you don't care what it is: you just want to get home.  It's a painting that generates an emotional response in me and hopefully in others.  It's up for sale.  I couldn't find an Algernon Blackwood story to name it after (The South Wind didn't really cut it) so I went for a Hendrix track.

Monday 16 August 2021

The Gusti Leder Yannick Stationery Case

First a bit of news.  As well as putting detailed posts up here, I share my artwork in other places.  One of those places is Instagram where the big news is that I picked up my 100th follower this weekend.  Most of those followers seem to be actuaries, so maybe I'm on a master list somewhere of actuaries to follow on Instagram?  Who knows?   And I see now that my followers have jumped to 104.  Does having over 100 followers mean you start popping up randomly on people's feeds more often?  Again, who knows?

Anyway, on to the main point of this post.  I've spent some birthday credits on this piece of gear.  My inktense pencils had started to rattle around a bit in their tin.  Not side to side (never a problem) but up and down as a result of getting shorter with use.  The tin also has a nasty habit of popping open at random times and I worry that one day I'll forget to clutch the tin tightly enough and all the pencils will fall on the floor and smash to pieces.  A third reason for change is that I'd rather keep all the extra gear like water brushes and a pencil sharpener with the inktense pencils than separately.

So I've been looking around for something to keep the pencils in.  I wanted something with elastic straps to hold the pencils individually and I wanted room for all my extra gear.  Most of the pencil wallets/boxes/cases out there seem to be for people with much bigger collections than my set of 24: this case was the only one I could find on Amazon that satisfied all my requirements.  I'd recommend going via the manufacturer rather than Amazon, though, to get cheaper prices and a wider range of colours.

So, on to the case.  It's made from buffalo leather and has two pages inside it that fold outwards.  Here's what it looks like filled:

So, inside the case I have:
- the 24 inktense pencils
- three water brushes - the fourth has had to be consigned to my spares drawer
- a rollerball pen
- a clutch pencil
- sandpaper for sharpening the clutch pencil - maybe I should upgrade to a clutch with an inbuilt sharpener at some point
- a normal pencil sharpener for the inktense pencils
- a new set of swatches, small enough to fit in the case
- a putty eraser and I must say I'm feeling proud at my idea of storing it inside the cut off ends of two plastic pipettes.

This should definitely do the trick.

Saturday 14 August 2021

Aubrey, Getting A Tan

The second and final inktense painting of the day is a third appearance for Aubrey.  My plan with this one was to use a lot less colour and have a lot more white highlights, so there's a bit more colour on this one than intended.  I also cropped my source material so that I didn't need to draw head, hands or feet.  Taking it easy on this one.

I started with the four colour combination of bark, willow, leaf green and mustard.  I probably should have used more bark in the shadows.  The other colours are all quite light, giving this painting a slightly washed out feeling.  I threw in some shiraz, because (just like with the bright blue in the last painting) I like to have one extra colour in there as contrast if I'm using an analogous colour scheme.  Sherbert lemon and poppy red were used in the mat/towel, with a little bit of the yellow appearing in some shadows and on the body as reflected light.

This is a better drawing than the last one but has a more boring colour scheme.  And the towel isn't great.  But this is good enough to go in the shop window without embarrassing me.

One weird thing about this painting is that if I screw up my eyes it changes to a woman on her back.  The arm and top torso turn into legs, the shins turn into upper arms and her cheeks into very strangely shaped breasts.  If you're looking at this painting and seeing a woman on her back, please look again.  There's a much better painting in there of a woman on her front.

Mika M

Got to keep those plates spinning.  Today I was painting with the inktense pencils.  This is a new model for me, Mika M.

For colours, I started with indigo in the darkest places, then graduated into violet, then fuchsia, then poppy red.  I also put in tangerine orange in some of the lightest (but not the very lightest) areas.  And I added some bright blue in a few places, because I wanted a bit of blue in some places to break up all the reds.

I used a lot of pencil today.  I was in the mood to lay down a lot of colour, even though I know my best inktense paintings are the ones where I've used the colour most sparingly.  Here's what I ended up with before wetting:


I followed my usual wetting rules.  Details first with the smallest brush.  Edges and creases before expanses of flesh.  Try to follow the shape of the body with the strokes.  And where there are adjacent colours, start the stroke in the lightest colour and continue it into darker colours.

And that was it really.  The colours are great on this one.  It's easy to forget for a minute that these are impressionistic colours and not realistic ones.  But something went wrong with the shape of her right shoulder and I only noticed this after putting down the pencil colours.  I tried to correct it before wetting but all this did was to make the shoulder look darker and muddier than the rest of the body.  The hands aren’t great either but the shoulder is the main reason this one goes down as a fail.

Thursday 12 August 2021

Malayavanta Hill, In Oil Pastel

Oil pastel paintings are (for me, for now) faster than watercolours, so are the ideal choice when I want to create a second work in a single day.  Because I need to start practising landscapes with the pastels, I thought I'd have a go at painting the same scene that I'd just done in watercolour.

As usual, there's not much to say about how I did this one.  I drew a pencil outline, rubbed in the sky with pastels on their sides, blended it all with my finger.  Filled in the rest with dabs in multiple colours, trying to put dabs in places where there weren't already dabs.  Went for darker colours in shadowy areas.  Blended the colours with my finger.  Where I didn’t like the resulting colours, I added corrective colours on top and blended them in.  And I finished with some scraping where I wanted textures, highlights or whatever.

All the usual techniques really.  I guess the only thing worth mentioning is that I did also drop some crazy impressionistic colours into the rocks.  And where my rock colours accidentally went into the sky, I put white over the top and blended it in.

Comparing this to my earlier watercolour, the rocks definitely have more bulk to them - they're three dimensional.  Does this mean I'm already better at pastels than at watercolours?  Does that say something about my watercolour ability?  Or about my potential with oil pastels?  This one is the first oil pastel painting to go up for sale - the one sold at the church auction doesn't count.

Malayavanta Hill, Near Hampi

I'm still on the watercolours and, yet again, I’ve gone for some precariously balanced rocks.  These seem to be my thing in 2021.  They're great, though, for practicing the use of light and shadow to create three dimensional forms and for being brave with the use of impressionistic colours.  This is a collection of rocks on Malayavana Hill, near Hampi in India.

For colours, the first two I chose were Indian yellow and rose dore because I wanted some orange in the sky.  I picked cerulean as my blue not for its granulating properties but just because it mixed to the sort of grey and green (with my red and yellow respectively) that I was looking for.  So this is in the key of orange cool.  I also wanted to use some burnt sienna and burnt umber (two colours that have been underused this year) to get a bit of earthiness into the rocks.

After putting down some masking fluid and spattering some of it on the rocks, I painted in the sky using all three primaries and including some diagonal stripes for energy.  Then I painted in the background triangle on the right, using my earth colours as well as the primaries.  I kept this bit of the painting simple and tried to use light values, not entirely successfully

Then it was on to the rocks and the foreground.  The idea was that the sitting figure would be in the same colour as the rocks, and ideally ambiguous (is it a figure or is it rocks?).    So I painted in everything using all five colours but mainly the red, the yellow and the burnt sienna, with the blue and burnt umber tending to appear in the shadows.  I variegated things a bit, tried to keep them interesting.  But when I was done, I realised the mistake I'd made.  Orange sky and orange rocks?  Really?  So I glazed over the figure, the rocks and the foreground with a thin, watery glaze that was mainly blue but with a bit of burnt sienna.  This resulted in a better contrast against the sky.  I also dropped in all three primaries in interesting places and burnt umber and cerulean blue in the shadowy bits. And I threw on some salt but it wasn't behaving today.

So I ended up with this painting.  I like the sky and the colours in the rocks and foreground are amazing but the rocks themselves look a bit flat and two dimensional.  Still, I'll put this one up for sale.  I've come a long way in three years - there was a time when I'd have been celebrating this one like a World Cup win.

Wednesday 11 August 2021

My Left Foot

After painting The Graduate, I wanted to keep experimenting with the oil pastels.  I've still not really worked out what I'll normally be painting with them.  The colours are great for landscapes, and one landscape has been sold, but I also think I'm going to enjoy figure drawing and portraits as they seem to fit more with the whole tactile feel of the medium.

Anyway, subject choice was a bit limited today as the iPad battery was running low - the Photos app is almost as bad as YouTube for battery munching.  So I looked around for what there was available for me to paint and ended up deciding on my left foot.

I drew an outline using contour drawing techniques, concentrating as much on the negative shapes around the toes as much as the toes themselves and the negative shapes around the toenails as much as the toenails themselves.

And then I coloured the foot in with impressionistic colours.  I did this by dabbing spots on in one colour, then dabbing in other colours, trying to find the gaps between previous dabs.  Then I rubbed the colours together using my fingers, or rubber things on sticks wherever my fingers were too big.  Where the first attempt wasn't quite right, I put more colours over the top.  I finished by scraping out some detail with the corner of a bent piece of plastic that wasn't a credit card but was supposed to be kept in a credit card in a wallet - free membership of some club or something.  And because I'd left loads of finger prints around the outside, I added a green background.

There's obviously no point putting this one up for sale but I quite like it.  The colours make it look gangrenous but that's not a big deal.  What's more important is that there's a good three-dimensional feel to the foot.

I need to start thinking about what size oil pastel paintings I want to be producing going forward.  So far they've all been 6 inches by 9.5.  When I get to the end of my current pad (I think I've used eight pages and have four to go), do I stick with the same size or move on to 9.5 inches by 12?  Which size paper am I best suited to?

The Graduate

It's been eleven days since my last piece of work but with the sun out and some chores out of the way, the gazebo's back up in the garden and I'm painting again.

I thought I'd start with this scene from The Graduate  which has been sitting in my ideas pile for a long time.  It was just asking to be given the Western treatment, with a silhouetted leg in the foreground given the space treatment.

Colours today were Prussian blue, Winsor red and Indian yellow, so this is in the key of orange cool.  I picked out these three colours because (i) they are all staining, and (ii) they mix together to a good black.  More on those features of the colours later.  Titanium white also made an appearance later on.

After drawing some pencil outlines and spattering masking fluid over the leg and some of the background shadows, I put down most of the background in a purple mixed from the blue and red, and added some brassy fittings using all three primaries.  I wanted to get these marks down early on, before any pencil marks were painted over, as they felt key to the painting.  And indeed, the painting already looked great after putting down these marks.  I wasn't sure at this stage whether I was going to leave the rest of the background white or to glaze some pale variegated wash over the top of it (and having used staining colours in the first coat, glazing was an option).

Next was the leg.  I wet the whole area first, then dropped in some reds and yellows that spread a bit.  I put these generally along the top of the leg - even though the leg is abstract it's good to make the top lighter than the bottom to make it look three-dimensional).  Then I mixed all three primaries into a black (remember this was why these primaries were chosen).  I dabbed  black in all the empty spots, including those between the reds and yellows.  The plan was to run this black into Benjamin's trousers but my wetting of the leg meant I couldn’t get a black that was dark enough, so the trousers ended up being darkened later.  I was going to add some salt to the leg but forgot.

Out on the right, the black in the leg was leaking into the background below it.  With staining colours on the menu today, this needed sorting quickly, so I dabbed the leaks with a kitchen towel.  They didn’t entirely disappear but they looked good and gave me an idea.  I mixed up a watery blueish neutral colour from the three primaries and glazed it all over the background, a section at a time, dabbing quickly at it with a paper towel.  Not the variegated background I'd been thinking about but it still looked good and justified my choice of having staining colours that I could glaze over.

And then onto Benjamin.  I started in chiaroscuro style by putting the darkest darks into the face, hair, jacket and trousers.  I think I ended up adding three coats of darks, just to make sure they were dark enough.  Then I added some colours to the face, shirt, hand and jacket.  I was careful to leave some highlights on the face.  I changed the colour of the shirt from blue to green to contrast against the red/orange jacket.  I tried to variegate the colour of the jacket, making it warmer and redder on the left and cooler on the right with some blue added to the mix.

Finally there were two finishing touches.  I added some shadows at the back - as well as the big shadow you can see the shadows under the slats of the Louvre doors.  And I added some highlights with three coats of titanium white - these are not just on Benjamin and the brass fittings but also along the top of the leg where I wanted to separate the leg from the trousers after ending up with two different blacks.

I think I've ended up with a decent painting here and I'm putting it up for sale.  I still think background is absolutely key to this one.  Lots of lines of different thicknesses at different angles tick the compositional boxes.  There's something in the shape of Benjamin's shoulders that tells a story.  The abstract spacey leg suggests fantasy and imagination.  And the way that all the colour is mainly concentrated into Benjamin's shirt and jacket with just a little bit in the leg also makes things interesting.  Compositionally, this is a winner.  And let's not forget the chiaroscuro technique that went into Benjamin - that worked too.

Friday 6 August 2021

The Big Book Of Realistic Drawing Secrets, Carrie Stuart Parks & Rick Parks - Book Review

Another birthday book.  This is a 224 page paperback.  It's a book that's aimed at people wanting to draw with graphite pencils.  It feels more advanced than the Betty Edwards or Bert Dodson books, very much a next step on from those books.

The first half of the book is about pencil drawing generally and, while it repeats a lot from Edwards and Dodson, definitely builds on them by showing some demonstrations and espousing the use of specialist equipment like electric erasers and proportional dividers.

The second half of the book is more interesting, moving into portraits with lots of really good tips on the face, the head and facial features.  It goes into a lot of detail.  I'd seen this book in a shop somewhere at some point and it was the second half that compelled me to add it to my wish list.  My graphite pencil drawings are few and far between but this second half has loads of stuff in there that use in creating portraits in watercolour, markers, inktense pencils or oil pastels.  The stuff on eyes I found particularly interesting - I do like to do portraits just of eyes.

There was a little bit of repetition in some places and some odd references in others that made me think this book might be made up of three or four smaller books smashed together, with the editor attempting to remove duplications and to blend the edges in an attempt to turn it into a single book.  I had no problem with this - someone without my trained eye might not be able to recognise a cut 'n' shut.

This book scores a comfy three stars for me.  It's a book worthy of a place in my collection, while not being worthy of the accolade of being "great".  There's no inspirational artwork in there but maybe I'm being a bit unfair given that it's just about pencil drawing.  On the other hand, it's definitely a reference book to turn to if I'm going to be drawing portraits.

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