Tuesday 26 October 2021

Katya

Ok, it's been a while but I'm back painting again today.  I suspect that it's going to be too cold to paint outside until the Spring, so there won't be any oil pastels or watercolours until then and that I'll instead be cozy indoors using the markers and inktense pencils.  Anyway, today it was the inktense pencils.  Give a big hand to today's model Katya.  It's her first time so make her feel welcome.

As usual, I started with a pencil drawing.  Recently I've been trying to copy the photos by dividing the paper up into squares but today's was freehand and I think it looks OK.  Then came the colours.  Today it was deep indigo, then violet, then bright blue, then shiraz and finally leaf green, which is becoming a real favourite, adding exotic flesh tones while contrasting against the red.

After I activated all the ink with water, I realised that the bottom of Katya's bottom leg was wrong.  I think I'd treated a big shadow area on the leg as if it were a big shadow on the table.  So I added some more ink there and it's gone on maybe a bit too thick.

I also couldn't keep my hands off the huge empty area on the paper, so I added Katya's name just to be a bit different.  While it emphasises that the model here is a real human being and makes you wonder what she's thinking, I don't think it really works.  I'd have been better off leaving it empty.

Overall, not too bad for the first painting in a while.  But not good enough to go up for sale, being spoilt by the caption and the bottom leg.  A shame because this was a fantastic pose by Katya.

Friday 22 October 2021

Landscape Artist Of The Year 2022

I've entered Landscape Artist Of The Year again.

For my main landscape submission, I chose Hartlip Church In The Snow (https://artisticactuary.blogspot.com/2021/09/hartlip-church-in-snow.html).

I was allowed to submit a second landscape and a third painting that doesn't need to be a landscape.  From memory, I think I went for Glean a'Chroin (https://artisticactuary.blogspot.com/2021/05/glean-achroin.html) and I Am The Eye InThe Sky (https://artisticactuary.blogspot.com/2020/10/i-am-eye-in-sky.html).

So three very different paintings.  I could have picked three similar paintings (and I suspect the judges like that) but that wouldn't reflect my diverse style.

Just as in previous years, I provided a link to this blog, so if you're one of the judges reading this, hello!  Feel free to click on the links in this post to find out more about the paintings I submitted.

In other news, I'm aware that I've not posted anything here for a couple of weeks.  Don't worry: more artwork will follow soon.  It's just that I'm currently having to spend a lot of time teaching myself machine learning networks and programming in Python.  Call it the day job.

Saturday 9 October 2021

Number Two


Remember Hartlip Church In The Snow from a month or so ago?  I gave it to Barbara next door as an 80th birthday present.  Well, her daughter pulled me to one side at the party and told me that the painting was now up on the wall, on one side of a bigger painting, and that she thought it would be good to have another painting on the other side, maybe of their house…?  So I've picked up a commission.

There was one constraint though.  This painting of the house needed to be in portrait format.  That ruled out any painting of the whole house.  So I homed in on the front door and took some photos laying down on the drive to get some three point perspective going on.  But then I realised the bit sticking out the front of the house looked just like the porch of the church.  Which gave me an idea.  Why not make these two paintings really go together by using the same set of colours and (let's really go for it) make it a snow painting?

So the colours, as for the church painting were cerulean blue, rose dore, raw sienna and Indian yellow: a mix of warm green and cool orange colour keys.  Winsor red also came in later on but, being another warm red like rose dore, leaves the keys unchanged.  And obviously, there's titanium white there too.

So, after putting down a pencil drawing, I masked out all the white door frames, window frames and trimmings.  I also masked out some white snowy bits on upward facing surfaces and put down a load of spatters for falling snow.

Then came the sky and some underpainting.  The underpainting included the big shadow on the house, the shadow of a car on the drive and some initial shadows and Indian yellow highlights on the plants in the garden.  The house I covered fairly randomly in all sorts of yellows, reds and blues.  It looked terrible but underpaintings always do and my confidence never slipped.  I spattered on more masking fluid after the underpainting to get some different coloured snowflakes.

Then it was just a matter of putting two or three coats of colour over all the shapes, gradually creeping towards the colours that I wanted.  In the later coats, I was starting to get some 3D effects going on in the door and a tiny bit of detail/texture in the brickwork and the upstairs tiles.  The rose dore was being a bit of a pain with the red door, either looking too orange or too garish or both, so I found myself reaching for the Winsor red.  The two reds together got me to an acceptable door colour.  I also found that the Winsor red could get me to a better roof colour and to a nice dark for the TV aerial and the outdoor light.  The rose dore was good for the brickworks, though, so I think I needed both reds.

Then came the fun bit.  Off with the masking fluid, leaving lots of bright white.  To tone down the whites, I put cerulean blue on the most shadowy bits of snow and some watery variegated blues/reds/yellows on all the white bits of the house.

Did I say that was the fun bit?  No.  There was even more fun to come.  The painting looked good at this stage and worth framing but I knew from experience with the church painting how to make it better. I squeezed out a blob of titanium white.  With this, I first spattered on lots more falling snow.  Then I want over the top of all my existing snow.  Where there were cerulean blue shadows in the snow, these mixed well with the white.  And, yes I know I've said before that white isn't for mixing.  This is different.  Finally, I dry brushed more white onto the roof and drive using the edge of the brush.  And maybe added more snow in places too.

I think this looks great.  Michelle's happy with it so Barbara will be getting it for Christmas.  I think she's expecting a painting but has no idea what this is going to look like.

And I think that's me done with watercolour until the Spring.  It's just too cold out there.  It's back to markers and inktense pencils until then.

Sunday 3 October 2021

Thea

Still pouring with rain outside: I think I might be done with watercolour and oil pastel until the new year.  So it's more figure drawing today and it's a new model, Thea.

The source photo had a lot of dark, shadowy areas, so I started with some quite thick shading in bark in those areas.  Then I put some willow pencils in the slightly lighter shadowy areas.  And then I got to the  usual point when I fancied putting in some colour, so I added sea blue to the right facing edges, fuchsia to left facing edges and leaf green wherever else I fancied some colour.  This included going over some edges in sea blue and fuchsia lines and adding all three colours to the shadows.  Here's what I ended up with:


I admit the pencils do look a lot heavier than optimal on this one.  I can already sense this won't be a masterpiece.  Anyway, the next step was to add the water following my usual rules: detail with the small brush first, try to make strokes follow curves, brush light coloured pencil marks into dark rather than the other way round.  And this is what I ended up with:


I wasn't happy with this.  There wasn't enough contrast between the dark and light values.  And in those dark areas the bark is dominated by fuchsia and sea blue.  So I took what for me is a very rare third step of adding a second coat of inks.  It didn't feel right to add more bark to darken the shadows, so I reached for the indigo, which is a dark colour that fits better with the other colours.

The final painting is at the top of the post.  The indigo has improved the painting but still feels like an outsider.  Maybe if I'd started with indigo rather than bark, everything would have hung together better. There are some other problems with this though.  The shadow area in the bottom left is too big.  With the inktense pencils, I need to avoid big, monotone, dark shadowy areas like this.  Just lighten them up.  Save the big monotone dark areas for the markers where they really add something.  And obviously the hand isn't great.  So not a success, this one, and it's not going up for sale.