Landscape In Ink And Coloured Pencil, Helen Hanson - Book Review

Here's the review of the second of the three books on coloured pencil that I got for Christmas.  It's a 160 page paperback and is not just about a new subject matter (landscapes) but also includes a second medium (ink).  That ink can be from rollerballs, markers, dip pens, twigs dipped in ink, fountain pens (presumably) so my rollerball pens have me covered.  The bookmark in the photo isn’t included - I put it down on top of the book and was shocked at how it blended in, so left it there.

There are twelve chapters in the book but I think they can be broken down into about 70 pages of introduction, 40 pages of tips and 50 pages of demonstrations.  Let's talk about those three chunks.

What I'm calling the introduction takes up five chapters.  There's some stuff in there on equipment.  This includes an interesting comparison of the best coloured pencil brands.  The most interesting bit for me is always the paper as there seems to not be a general consensus on what's best.  I was glad to see that Helen had tips for what to use with coloured pencil on its own as well as what to use for coloured pencils with ink.  There's also stuff on going outside looking for good source material and on composition.  Then there's the mark making, both with the ink and the pencils.  Burnishing gets a mention but Helen points out that burnishing is all about flattening the paper, not about mixing.  For mixing without flattening, I need paper stumps and I've just ordered some of these.  And then there are advanced techniques like embossing, sgraffito and lifting out.  It's a decent introduction.  I'm not sure it would work as a a complete introduction to a newbie though - while Helen tells us to be light with the pencils and that extra layers are better than extra pressure, I don't think this was hammered home hard enough for a complete beginner.  Still, this probably isn't a beginners' book, so no harm done.

We then get to the middle of the book, the meat in the sandwich.  Four chapters on how to do an ink and coloured pencil painting.   There's stuff on putting down an initial drawing; not a chapter on how to draw but one on what ink and pencil marks to actually put down.  And there are tips on drawing trees, water and sky and how to integrate the two different media together.  There's an amazing chapter on how to do detailed drawings of foreground material like stones and grasses - Helen’s style is all about having detailed stuff like this in the foreground and less focus further back.  And then there are the final checks on whether a painting hangs together and what to do if it doesn't.  In all this section (and in the introductory chapters) the tips are tightly packed together, like in a Liz Chaderton book, and there seem to be more words than in normal art books - this took longer to read than other, breezier books.

And then we get to 50 pages of demonstrations.  As usual, I found myself drifting away at times when reading these, although I did learn from them.  A lot of the time, the demos served as illustrations of the lessons from the middle of the book.  The biggest of those lessons, for me, was probably the way that Helen paints the foreground before the background and the darker areas before the lighter ones - in both cases the opposite to what I do in watercolour, so something I definitely needed to learn about coloured pencils.  Somewhere at the start of the book, Helen makes the point that people will learn more by creating their own works than by copying other people, which had me punching the air in delight.  And throughout the demonstrations (which are worded as demonstrations, not as recipes) she keeps emphasising this point, telling readers that they don't have to go out and buy all the exact colours in the demos but can use similar ones that they already have if they really need to copy the demos.  And at the end of the demos, when Helen says she had to darken an area to get the balance right (or whatever) she says that's what she needed to do to her painting and that readers will have different problems that they'll have to sort out.   It I expect that message will be lost to the recipe followers.  After reading the Lisa Ann Watkins book, this all represented a refreshing change in style.  While the demos weren't the most useful bit of the book to me, they were still inspiring and there was enough useful stuff in the first 110 pages that the demos were just a bonus.  And there are always people complaining on Amazon about any art instruction books that don't include detailed recipes, so maybe this was all about keeping the peanut gallery happy.

This was, without a doubt, the best book I've read on coloured pencil so far.  It teaches things the way I like to be taught.  Lots of tips and examples of how Helen has used them, rather than a set of instructions on how to exactly replicate her art.  It's close to being a good introduction to coloured pencils but not quite there.  I do think, though, that it's a great introduction to coloured pencil landscapes, even for someone not intending to supplement the coloured pencil with ink, although it helps if the reader's interested in these detailed foregrounds.

I've not only learned a lot from this book but am feeling enthused and energised at starting on some coloured pencil landscapes over the weekend.  And you know what that means?  Five palettes.

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Drawing Animal Portraits On Coloured Pencil, Lisa Ann Watkins - Book Review

I've finished reading the first of my Christmas books.  This was a 144 page paperback, one of those paperbacks with the glossy covers that are a few inches too big and bent back inside, so will never end up dog eared.

Contents-wise it's roughy split into three equal pieces: an introduction, then two sets of exercises on studies and portraits.

First up is the introduction.  It includes some stuff very specific to this book's subject matter on how to get good source photos.  And then there's obviously stuff on materials, mark making, colour.  This is the third book I've read on coloured pencils and I'm amazed that I keep learning things from these introductory chapters, something that I very rarely do with introductions to watercolour books.  I like how Lisa described drawing surfaces as mountains and valleys and used this to explain their capacity for holding colour.  There was also some useful stuff on the pressure to apply and on how to tell when the surface is full to capacity.

The second and third chapters are quite similar and worth describing together.  The chapter in studies refers to doing paintings of individual elements like eyes, noses and fur.  This is something I've seen in a Jean Haines book but Jean made the very important point that if you can get an animal's eyes right, you're well on the way to a likeness and, indeed, Jean often stops early without drawing a whole portrait.  Lisa, though, doesn’t make this point, presenting the studies, instead, as just one of lots of things that have to be just right in the final portrait.

I always like to comment on where books like on the instruction vs demonstration spectrum.  Lisa is right up there at the instruction end, as extreme as I've ever seen anyone.  She tells the reader exactly what pencils to use (colour and manufacturer), what surface to draw on, even what technique to use in each exercise to transfer the shapes from the source photo to the drawing.  I like instruction books that set us exercises and books that do demonstrations but Lisa's modus operandi here is I'm going to do a painting and you have to copy everything I do religiously.  Not my cup of tea.  I'm not surprised when books like this get reviews on Amazon from people complaining about having to buy loads of gear.  It's the only way to learn if you're buying into Lisa's mode of teaching.  Me, though, I don't buy into that.  Instead, with books like these, I'll treat those follow me exercises as demonstrations and look for lessons from them.

And there are lessons there.  I counted six.  The most interesting thing for me was the number of layers that Lisa uses in paintings.  She'll put on (say) six layers of different colours and then I'll be expecting her next step to be burnishing but instead step 7 will be to repeat steps 1-6 several more times until the surface feels like it can’t take in any more colour.  This is very different to what I've seen in the first two books I've read on coloured pencils.  In fact Lisa doesn't mention burnishing at all in her book.  This feels like the biggest takeaway from the examples.  I say that, but the photos in the examples are also useful.  There are so many places where the photo looks like somewhere I'd be happy to stop but where Lisa carries on.

Just as with the Arlene Steinberg book, I found the demos to be a bit boring and repetitive after a while.  I did wonder why there were so many but I think I found the answer.  In this book, the five full portrait demos (two dogs and a cow, horse and cat) were on four different surfaces and I think Lisa wanted to demonstrate how the approach to all these different surfaces differed.  In which case, I wish they’d had labels on the contents page like how to paint on crescent suede mat board rather than how to paint Brandy, the red Angus cow.  When the same techniques apply to different animals but different techniques apply to different surfaces, it would help if the author made this clearer by how she structured things.

I'm dotting about a bit here, but there's something I was a little disappointed to find missing from the book.  And that was about getting down a good initial drawing.  There's lots of talk about all the different ways of using tracing paper (yes, there are lots of different ways) but nothing about drawing freehand or even about copying images using grids.  So, bit of a hole there in my humble opinion.

The artwork in the book is amazing. Not as unrealistically photorealistic as someone like Alyona Nickelsen (thankfully), so some artists will be inspired by it and aim for something of similar quality.  It's almost certainly beyond my reach, but even if I can never get there I can actually see the direction I need to head in.

Overall, I learned stuff from this which will change the way I use coloured pencils.  Despite my issues with Lisa's instructional style, this means it scores a respectable three palettes.  I still dream, though, of coming across the perfect beginners' book on coloured pencils at some point.  After reading this one, I wonder whether that book I'm looking for might not even be marked up as a beginners book but instead be about a particular style or subject matter and have a really great introduction.

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'Andles For Forks

And here's today's second painting.  It's Candle as the model again and this is her fourth appearance.  This time it's my second attempt at using the Artgraf blocks.

Just as before, I drew the figure three times, using the yellow, red and blue blocks with some twisting to vary line widths.  Just as with the oil pastel work earlier today, I did the drawings freehand, with a grid on the source photo not on my paper.  Oh, and this one was on watercolour paper rather than the cheaper stuff I use with the inktense pencils.  I tried to put down a lot less pigment today than I did yesterday.

When it came to wetting the marks, I used a smaller brush than yesterday and tried to sculpt the 3D shapes rather than just wetting the 2D shapes.  And things just went really badly.  I'm not sure whether the blue is just really strong compared to the red and yellow or whether it was all down to me not keeping the water clean but everything was coming out dark and blue.  I tried hard to wet the reds and yellows and brush them into the blues but with no luck.

Still, lessons learned.  When I say be gentle with the colours, what I really mean is be gentle with the blue.  That's what I'll do next time.

In terms of colour keys, my Artgraf colours include a cool blue, two cool reds and a warm and cool yellow.  So if I only use the cool yellow the painting will be in the key of green cool and if (like today) I only use the warm yellow, it will be in triadic left.  Of the two, I find that triadic left generally makes for more colourful paintings.  Not today though.

But you know what?  This painting has grown on me.  I’m liking the colours.  They remind me a bit of some of my abstracted Western scenes where I fill figures in with starry space backgrounds.  But, unlike the figures in those paintings, this one has some 3D form.  Those creases on the right side of Candle's waist help.  So do some of the white, yellow and red areas, which look like highlights with the light coming down from the top right.  This one's going up for sale.

Candle In Oil Pastel

I'm not in the mood at the moment to take my time and come up with perfect paintings.  I'm feeling loose and energetic and wanting to rattle off some fast, energetic works instead.  Today, I tried to follow an exercise from the Bill Buchman book, and for starting material I used the same pose from Candle as yesterday.

I followed bill's instructions pretty well at first.  I put down the drawing without putting a grid on the paper, although I admit I worked from a photo with a grid to help me put my first marks in the right place. I first drew the figure with a tiny spare chunk of yellow oil pastel, then the same with red, then blue.  In all three cases I would twist the chunk in my fingers to vary line thickness.

What I ended up with wasn't too bad and is where I should have stopped, but I disobeyed instructions and carried on.  First I tried some finger smoothing to harden some of the edges.  Then I used white oil pastel to smooth out some colours in highlighted areas.  Then I did loads more finger smoothing.  I thought the painting was missing a bit of yellow, so added more of this at the end and tried to smooth it in.

The final result was just a bit bleh.  If there's anything encouraging about this it's the gestural shape to the bottom but otherwise it's like something that's been rushed with little or no care.  Which it was.  But at least I can say that I completed one of Bill's exercises, even if I carried on working and ruined it.  To be fair, Bill does say in his book is that knowing when to stop is the difficult bit.

First Go With The Artgraf Colours: Candle

I wanted to have a quick go with the Artgraf colours today: see what they were like.  I thought I'd start with some figure drawing, so chose a pose by Candle.

My idea, based very loosely on two or three ideas from the Bill Buchman book, was to throw down three loose outlines, first in yellow, then red, then blue without worrying too much about whether they were all in exactly the same places.  Then to dilute my marks and see where I ended up.

I started by putting down a pencil outline as a guide.  This was a big mistake.  How were my three coloured outlines supposed to be out of sync with each other in places when they were all trying to follow pencil outlines?  My second mistake was to add too much colour.  I should have learned from my experiences with Inktense pencils that I need to apply minimal levels of colour before adding water.  But I became obsessed with another idea from Bill's book, which was to add some swooshing lines with the edges of the blocks to make some of these body parts look cylindrical.  This would have been a great strategy using charcoal (which Bill probably was doing) but not with a dilutable dry medium.

When I came to wet the paint (using a combination of water flicks, wet towel dabbing and brushing with water) I was shocked to discover just how much pigment I'd put on the paper.  These Artgraf blocks contain loads more pigment than even Inktense pencils.  With the amount of pigment I'd used, everything went opaque and a bit muddy, although I could see that there would have been some great colours in there if I'd used the blocks properly.  I tried adding more of the yellow, red and blue in places by using the blocks like watercolour pans but only got very marginal improvements.

Overall, there's some looseness, energy and colour in there.  All the things I was wanting to see.  But they're all more muted than I'd like because I've used too much pigment.  This one was successful as a learning exercise but not as a painting.  I need to have another go at something similar and see what happens when I hold back a bit more.

Christmas Art Stash 2022

Happy holidays everyone!

I thought I'd put up here all the new art gear I've been gifted today as it's a bit of a sneak preview of what to expect in 2023.

You'll see in the picture above:

- a new brush.  It was a size that I needed.  Not much to say about that.

- three new books.  All on coloured pencil.  I'll be posting reviews on these once I've read them and made notes.

- two supergranulating Schmincke sets.  There's a set of tundra paints; I've been using tundra during 2022 and my colours were going to need topping up soon.  And there's a new set, the desert colours.  I'm looking forward to trying those out and am expecting them to create hot atmospheres without me really trying.  I also still have the Shire colours in my collection.  Both these sets I opened today are in the 15ml tubes in fancy wooden boxes and ooze luxury.

- finally there are two sets of Artgraf colours, nine colours in all.  These are highly packed graphite colour blocks like tailors' chalks.  They can be used as pans or can be drawn with and the marks wetted afterwards.  I may use them as pans for dash and splashes or could try drawing figures or portraits using not just the corners but also the edges.  I can't wait to use these, probably trying out some ideas from the Bill Buchman book.

Steps Up From The Street, Hartlip

The World Cup is over and there's only four days to go to Christmas.  It's hard not to switch to wind down mode and watch Westerns all day but I do need to get back to painting with some regularity.  Today I went for the oil pastels and picked a scene that I walk past most days.  It's a set of steps from The Street, Hartlip up to somebody's back garden.  People must walk past them all the time without noticing them but they make a great painting subject.

I put down a starting drawing in pencil.  I did use a grid and worked upside down but the grid was only three squares by four, so nowhere near as fine as what I've been using for portraits.  I then went over some of the more important lines with the black oil pastel.  I didn't erase any pencil outlines or grid lines - there's no point if they're all going to be covered up.

After that, I just worked from the back of the painting to the front.  For most of the layers I started by putting down lots of spots in different colours.  For the sky, this was just white and my lightest blues but for the wooden fence, tree trunks and concrete, I threw in just about everything.  Once I had enough spots down, I smoothed them out with my finger, sculpting the paint as I went, with finger strokes in the most appropriate feeling directions.  For the sky, some of this smoothing was done with a white pastel to get things even lighter.

The gate and the foreground greenery were the exception, not being smoothed.  The gate was drawn in with raw umber and a bit of white for highlights.  The greenery was stabbed in with lots of colours, most of them greens and yellows but also a bit of red deep and delft blue, my favourite two colours.  Some very thin branches were added in a dark green.

I also used the scalpel in this one, not just by scraping out twigs in the foreground greenery bu5 also to mark out wooden slats in the fences: I drew in some thick lines in raw umber, then tried to scrape them partly off to leave a hard edge down one side of the line.

As a final step, I added more red deep and delft blue wherever they were missing.  These colours play a huge part in my oil pastel paintings and their influence needs to be felt everywhere for balance.

I see this one as a success and it's up for sale.  The colours in the tree trunks, concrete and wooden fences do it for me.  It's hard to go wrong painting garden walls with these oil pastels.  Oh, and that thin branch sweeping across from left to right brings everything together.

William Shatner

It's been a long time since my last post but I've finally got to a day with no Christmas shopping, university pickups or doctor/dentist/optician appointments and the football doesn't kick off until 7pm.  So I finally have the chance to do some painting.  Not before time too as stats show views of this website are dropping  off.  Today I thought I'd try to get back in the swing of things with the inktense pencils and a portrait of William Shatner.

First up, I got something onto paper using a grid and working upside down .  That's got to be the best way to get a likeness.  It took me a couple of attempts in places and I still don't think I got it right.  Anyway, after that I followed my usual method of colour the darkest areas first.  So I started with deep indigo, then worked through to violet, shiraz and fuchsia.  I also put a little bit of sea blue in the eyes.  I then thought I'd better get Bill's shirt the right colour, so put in some sun yellow and apple green.  I also added a little bit of this to the face.  And then I reached for leaf green, always a favourite colour, and added it in random places all over the painting, not really worrying about values or about where I could see greens.  Not that I could see greens anyway, working from a black and white photo.  And all of the colours went into the hair.

After wetting the painting and leaving it to dry, I thought the indigo neckline on Bill's shirt looked too light, so put some bark over the top, taking the opportunity to make a correction to his jawline at the same time. This worked but made the neckline too dark, if anything, so I added more bark over the darkest indigo areas, including the hair, facial creases, and bitsof the eye and mouth.

And then I stopped.  It was good to get back into swinging the brush and I like the interesting colours that I've brought out in Bill's face but the likeness isn't there and there's a lot of, well, amateurness singing out from the painting.  The eyes and mouth, despite being carefully observed and drawn, look like the sort of eyes that a kid at primary school would draw.  It's as if I've never drawn anything before using observation.  I'm clearly not back to match fitness after a long layoff.  This one can't go in the shop window.

Watercolour Nature Unleashed, Jane Betteridge - Book Review

This book keeps popping up on my Amazon recommendations.  When I took a look inside, I immediately recognised it as a repackaged version of Jane's earlier book Dynamic Watercolours.  Why do authors and publishers pull tricks like this?  A poor show.  Hang your head in shame Jane.

On a separate subject, it's been a while since my last piece of work.  Blame the World Cup.  I will be back in action soon.

Nasser Hussain

More cricket portraiture with  the markers today.  I'm going to continue with cricket portraits until I have a complete balanced team together, or maybe even a squad of 12, giving me a choice of whether to go in with four seamers or pick a second spinner.  My team needs a captain and I still need a couple of middle order batsmen, so it's Nasser Hussain's turn in the seat today.

Today's portrait was almost entirely done upside down.  The initial pencil drawing was done upside down using a grid.  I turned the picture the right way up briefly to check I'd got a likeness, then put it back upside down and started in the markers.

As is my wont, I started with some greys on the darker areas, just to get down some values and some structure.  I then went on to the fun stage where I added more interesting colours and, at the same time, darkened all the greys from my initial values plan.

I think with the greys I should have stopped at my second darkest today rather than going all the way to black - Nasser looks like he's been a bit heavy with the Just For Men.  For the interesting colours, today's flesh tones were made up of the greys, the flesh coloured markers and a bit of blue pearl.  Maybe I've been watching too many Liron Yankonsky videos on YouTube but a lot of today's colours were motivated more my temperature than by colours I could see in the source photo.  So where, for example I could see greens in the source photo, rather than going for greens in the flesh tones, I'd translate the colour to "cool" and put on blue pearl.  It's interesting to compare these colours to those I used for Adil Rashid.  I th8s the Rashid colours are more interesting.  They're also much more risky to use, though, as they're highly saturated and can easily ruin a painting if not used carefully.

I think I've ended up with a reasonable likeness today.  The distinctive mouth and head shape are spot on.  The hair is too dark, though, and the nearer eye isn't quite right.  But Nasser's going up for sale.

Adil Rashid

My third successive cricket portrait and they've all been in different media.  Today it's the first outing for markers since last winter.  I picked out a photo of Adil Rashid to work from.  He's a member if England's World Champion T20 cricket team and his economical bowling in both the semi and the final were indicative of a player who steps up for the big occasion.  It's his beard that made me reach for the markers: to paint a beard like that in any other of my media would require a lot of texturing skills which I don't really have, so they were a no brainier.

To get my initial drawing down, I again used a grid and drew upside down.  I'm going to keep doing this.  I know I said at one point that I'd be abandoning the grid.  I'm going to backtrack on that though.  Now my ambition is to complete a whole painting (not just the initial drawing) upside down.  I've seen Liz Chaderton do this on YouTube and the result looked amazing.

Anyway, back to today.  After putting down the pencil drawing, I put Adil the right way up for adding colour.  I started, as I always do, with quite a dark grey in the darkest areas, then lighter greys in slightly less dark areas.  Next I add colour in the clothes.  Then there are two things that happen in parallel in the third stage: I add impressionistic colours to the face and start to add darker colours and even blacks to those dark areas that I've already started on.  Finally, I add a background and (at least today) some outlines.

The best thing about this work is the look in the eyes.  The Jos Buttler painting showed fear in the eyes but this one shows a focus and determination.  The likeness is also better in this painting than I managed to squeeze out of Jos or Beefy.  The colours in the flesh are interesting to say the least.  I could have stopped earlier with only six shades of grey in the face but couldn't resist the temptation to teach for the pinks and the orange that I could see in the source photo.  At one point I thought the impressionistic colour might ruin the painting but in the end they made it stronger.  This seems like much more adventurous use of colour in flesh tones than I've ever put down before with markers.  Anyway, where was I?  Oh yes, the worst thing about this one is the black outlines that I've added - I could have done without them.

Overall, I think this one's pretty good.  Adil's up for sale.

Jos Buttler

Look, I'm still in the mood for cricket portraits and with England due to play Pakistan in the World T20 Final on Sunday morning, I thought I'd have a go at drawing our captain, Jos Buttler, arguably the greatest limited overs cricketer of all time.  I went for oil pastels as my medium as I quite enjoyed sculpting Ian Botham's face while wetting the inktense pencils the other day and oil pastels are the other medium that I can sculpt.

It took me a while but I finally found a photo of Jos where he wasn't grinning his head off.  The other thing I liked about my source photo was how his chin stick out defiantly as a result of the camera being quite low down.  If this were in a comic, the angle of this one would definitely remind me of Gil Kane's artwork.

Anyway, the pencil drawing went down first, again drawn upside down using a grid.  This method gets me as close to a likeness as I'm ever going to get.

To fill it all in, I start with the eyes, mouth, ears and nostrils.  These are the most important areas, so I take my time over them and even add careful lines using the edges of the pastels.  If you can get the gaze, that's 95% of the important stuff done.

After that, the rest is coloured in much more loosely, with lots of dots from stabbing the paper repeatedly with the pastels.  I put in all the impressionistic colours I can see in the source photo, and whites in the well lit areas, then follow the rules by dotting in goldish yellow in the forehead, red in the cheeks and blues and greens in the lower face.  Finally, I look at the mess I'm left with and add in more conventional fleshy colours like white, pinks and earthy colours.  At this stage, every point on the face should have at least three colours on or very close to it.  And then I have fun sculpting the face with my index finger, mixing the colours as I do so.  Once the face is done, there's always some further work to be done on it. Either correcting some shapes or correcting some colours - just like with inktense pencils I'm never sure how the colours will turn out.

The hair, clothes and background all work similarly but are even looser with a lot less thought put into them.

And the final result?  I don't think I've got a perfect likeness, but this one's still going up for sale.  It's an interesting painting and not just because of the crazy flesh tones.  I could claim to have seen a little bit of fear in Jos's eyes that I've put into the painting.  In fact I will make that claim.  It's definitely a painting that tells a story.  It was very tempting to call this one England Expects.  Jos is up for sale.

Sir Ian Botham

I've been watching more Liz Chaderton videos on YouTube. She's been busy with portraits throughout November and there was one yesterday where she did her initial drawing upside down.  This is something I've tried as an exercise while reading the Betty Edwards book but not something I've ever tried for a proper painting, so I thought I'd give it a go today.

I picked out Beefy as a subject as I do enjoy painting cricketers and for the medium I went for inktense pencils because I was in a loose mood.

For the initial drawing, I worked upside down but still used a grid of squares.  I think I got a decent likeness in my initial drawing that I'd never have managed working the right way up.  On the other hand, I do need to try out upside down painting without the grid at some point.

For the colour, I used sun yellow, tangerine, poppy red, chilli red, fuchsia, shiraz, violet, deep indigo, iris blue, teal green, leaf green, baked earth, willow and bark.  That's a lot of colours but that's the kind of mood I was in today.  I worked with the paper the right way up during this stage.  After reading up on coloured pencil and adopting a layering technique, I found myself doing something similar with the inktense pencils.  The suit jacket and the cheeks, in particular have multiple layers.  For the darker areas, I found myself layering up blue and red before switching to indigo, bark and purple later.

I did the wetting in stages.  I started in areas where I needed the most detail, so that was the eyes and mouth, followed by the ear and tie.  I found myself moving next onto the hair and wrinkles.  For the wrinkles at the top of the cheek, I was careful to follow the lines I'd put down that bent to mark the top of the cheek bones - something I might not have noticed had I drawn this one the right way up   After this, I moved on to the rest of the face and the jacket and shirt, one big shape at a time and allowing the inks to mix on the paper.

There's lots to like about how this one ended up.  The ear, the shirt, the colours in the jacket, all the different colours in the face.  On the other hand, I've lost the likeness at some point.  The bottom half of the face is great but the eyes look like they belong to Bradley Walsh.  The shape of the forehead may have something to do with this, as may the colour of the hair which is too dark.

The loss of the likeness means this one won't be going in the shop window but there's a lot here to be happy about.

Felicia, Blinded

So I finished reading Masterful Color and was ready to put some of its ideas into practice.  Today's model is Felicia, making her fourth appearance.  In fact this is a different view of a pose I've painted before.

Following Arlene Steinberg's recommendations, I started with an underpainting of complements.  I wanted a green background to contrast against fleshy tones, so put a red background in the underpainting.  And because blue-purple was the closest I could get to a complementary colour to flesh tones, I put in the dark values on the body in blue-violet.  I also put on some indigo in the darkest areas and some cool blues in parts of the body that I was intending to make redder.

In the underpainting, most of the colour was applied with sharp pencils moving in small circles (another book recommendation) although I also added some colour with the side of the lead where I needed less intensity.  I added several different layers to the hair too - I wasn't going for the pure black look today (book recommendation).  Here's the underpainting I ended up with:

The background ended up with just three layers of pencil colour.  The first layer was red, three similar but different reds in horizontal bands, blended together.  The second layer was green, six different greens in upward sloping bands from lighter greens at the top to darker at the bottom, all blended together.  And the final layer was yellow, a warm yellow in the left and cool on the bright, blended together where they met above the head.

After the initial underpainting, I added layers of red and green to the hair.  It was liking close to black after this, so I stopped on the hair at that point.

On the body, I applied several layers, generally alternating between realistic flesh colours and the blues and purples with which I'd marked out the darks.  Occasionally I would throw in some impressionistic reds, oranges, greens and blues where I could see them in the source photo.  Most layers were scribbled in small circles but occasionally (and every time for the impressionistic colours) I'd use the side of the lead if I didn't want full on colour.  I found myself getting a bit frustrated at how the flesh colours (like ivory, cinnamon and coral) weren't turning the purple in the underpainting into a neutral colour (so the purple can't have been the best complement) but I eventually found that raw sienna neutralised the purple.  So I put in a layer of raw sienna.  I was careful to leave light areas untouched by the raw sienna to prevent it overpowering the painting.  And flesh colours would have gone on top of the raw sienna at some point.

When I was finished, I burnished the flesh and hair with a colourless burnishing pencil (as per the book), not bothering to sharpen it when it went blunt (book again) and wiping all the burnished areas with a cotton wool makeup remover pad (yeah, book).  I didn't burnish the background because it looked great as it was and because the figure stood out against it.  Oh, and there were examples in the book where Arlene burnished the subjects but not the background.

It might be worth me saying at this point that the book tells me to not stop adding layers until there's no white of the paper showing and that I ignored this instruction!  I quite like how there are white flecks showing off the tooth of the paper.

And that was me done.  This took a lot longer than my normal paintings.  It probably took four or five hours, so I'd have to speed up if I ever made it on to Drawers Off and wanted  to do a painting like this.  But never mind that, the Arlene Steinberg book has both given the quality of my coloured pencil paintings a sudden step up and opened up a new direction in which I can keep improving.  This one's definitely going up for sale and I'm excited about continuing to paint in this style and to get better.

Masterful Color, Vibrant Colored Pencil Paintings Layer By Layer: Arlene Steinberg - Book Review

Ok.  I've been looking for a while for a book on coloured pencils that was suitable for a complete beginner after the Encyclopaedia Of Coloured Pencil Techniques left me feeling a bit let down.  I found this 144 page paperback by accident while googling around and it sounded as if it might be the book I needed.  But was it?

The book can be divided into two parts.  The first third is a beginner's introduction to coloured pencil and the rest of the book is a series of demonstrations.

In that first third, there's a chapter on how to use coloured pencils, then a couple more chapters on composition and colours/values.  I didn't learn much from that second and third chapter but I don't begrudge them being there.  One of the points I keep making about beginners' books is that they need to take the reader on a journey, and I don't think these chapters could have been left out.  The concept of complementary colours is key to the demonstrations and compositional planning is included in the  big demonstration at the end of the book.

That first chapter, though, is excellent.  I learned more in that first chapter than in the whole of the Encyclopaedia Of Coloured Pencil Techniques.  I learned about so many things that I've been doing wrong.  I've been holding my pencil too near the point.  I've been filling in areas by shading with the edge of the lead when I should have been scribbling  faintly in very small circles with a very sharp pencil.  I've been burnishing with a sharp pencil when I should have been using a blunt one.  I could go on.  Suffice to say, it's off the charts.

And then we get to the demonstrations.  There are 14 normal demonstrations followed by one huge demonstration that includes thoughts on composition and where the final painting is a combination of several of the individual paintings.  I have so many comments to make on these demonstrations that it's difficult to string them together into a discourse, so I'm going to give a list of bullet points:

- the demos are an important part of the book, introducing the idea of using pencils in multiple layers

- the colours to use in that first layer depend on what the final colours are going to look like.  This is the big idea idea in  the book.  The first three demonstrations discuss red, yellow and blue subjects.  These all require different colours in the underpainting, so all needed separate demonstrations.

- each demonstration has six or seven steps and each step can involve adding up to four or five layers to different areas of the painting.  There's a big lesson there about how many layers to add.

- the demos are prescriptive.  Too much do this, do that and not enough I did this, I did that.

- in particular the demos are very prescriptive about what colour pencils to use.  People who religiously follow the instructions are complaining about having to buy new pencils to be able to follow the demos.  Those who are happy to use similar but different colours or those (like me) who are happy to read and learn from demos, then do our own paintings are more chilled.

- the most useful bits of the demos (in my opinion) and at the very beginning and at the end.  The middle steps, where Arlene tells us to layer over this green and then this red I take with a pinch of salt.  In reality, surely you look at the coloured area, then decide what colour you need to lay over next rather than just following instructions?

- I thought there were too many demonstrations.  About halfway through them, I was switching off and skim reading.  I'd got the general idea about how to start and finish a painting and that the bit in the middle was all about adding multiple layers.

- The reason for there being so many demos was probably that the later ones got more complicated with glasswork, metal bowls, china cups and other textures.  At this stage of the book there seemed to be a big jump in realism and I think the book could have benefited from more discussion about the techniques to use in painting all those different textures rather than just showing us more demos with not much help apart from telling us to paint what we see, not what we think we see.

- a minor point but the demos all told us to spray fixative on the finished paintings.  I thought this was something that was only required for oily pencils and not for waxy ones like my Polychromoses.  If this is the case, then Arlene should really have told us this, what with this presumably being a beginners' book.

The book as a whole (including the demonstrations) is very much focused on still life paintings.  This is a subject area that's not that interesting to me but I'm not complaining.  I bought this book to learn how to draw with coloured pencils, not to copy all the examples.  And still life gave Arlene ample opportunity to dig out the red, yellow and blue (and later white, metal and glass) subject matter that she needed to illustrate her advice in the demos.  I'm actually looking forward to applying the techniques in this book to figures, portraits and even landscapes.

This is definitely a good book and is the one that I'm pointing anybody towards if they want an introductory coloured pencil book.  Provided either they use Prismacolour pencils or they're smart enough to be able to read Prismacolour pencil demos and apply the lessons to their own paintings using their own brand of pencils.  It's a tough call on how to grade this one though.  It's a good book so definitely worth three palettes.  But I was frustrated in the final third by having too many demos and not enough explanation of how to paint glass/metal/china, so it's definitely not a five palette galactico. It's between three and four palettes, and I'm going to round it down.  Remember three palettes is a good score.  And that this is the best beginners' book I've seen on coloured pencils.

🎨🎨🎨

Neil McCarthy

Neil McCarthy (1932-1985) was one of those actors everyone recognises but whose name nobody knows. I saw him in an episode of Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em the other day and decided that his chiselled looks would make him a great subject for one of my coloured pencil drawings.  A bit of research reveals that his looks were down to his acromegaly, a disorder resulting from an excess of growth hormone long after growth plates in the bones have closed.  It results in enlarged hands feet, fire head, jaw and nose.  I wasn't surprised to read that Richard Kiel also had acromegaly.  There's also someone I know in the business world who reminds me of these two actors who may also be a sufferer.

Anyway, this was one where I followed my usual techniques.  A pencil drawing first, using a grid, then some filling out with a dark colour to get all the edges and shadows, then lots of saturated colours where I could see them, then some neutrals and finally the burnishing.  After seeing Liz Chaderton on YouTube starting a watercolour portrait with a purple underpainting, I used a blue violet for my filling out.  I then followed up with reds, greens, yellows and blues.  Then browns and greys.  And I burnished all the flesh and clothes with white.  I didn't burnish the hair, preferring the tousled look which I'd built up over the course of the painting by first shading then scribbling in with most of the colours I'd used everywhere else.  Finally I did some tinkering, adding some outlines and a faint grey background and adding a little colour to the face in places.and then I was done.

I don't mind what I've ended up with.  The likeness is there and the acromegaly is definitely coming through.  I just wonder whether I shouldn't have bothered with the outlines though.  And the head seems separate to the t-shirt and shirt.  Neil doesn't make it to the shop window, I'm afraid.

<Edit: Neil was later used for a dummy run with coloured pencil solvent>

Stephanie R

I'm finding it hard at the moment to get the time to paint but I'm determined to take advantage of any opportunities that come my way.  I'm not going to spend my retirement watching day time quizzes on the telly.  I got an opportunity this afternoon, so reached for the inktense pencils and picked this pose by Stephanie R, making her debut on this blog.

I copied the colour scheme from Wake Up Kevin, starting with a monotone drawing in bark,  then adding in chilli red, Shiraz, iris blue, teal green and leaf green wherever I could see those colours in my source photo.  And I strengthened and livened up some of the darks with deep indigo.  I was worried that the amount of bark that I shaded in all over the photo might make things muddy but they generally came out OK.  The legs underneath the book weren't recognisable as part of the body after the first wetting because of a black of green, so I put more green over them and reset them.

But there are too many things about this one that I don’t like for it to be allowed anywhere near the shop window:

- the bit on the outline of the skull that points inwards near the eye has disappeared

- the legs now look like part of the body but that's only because of the colour: the shapes look wrong

- the hair looks cut and pasted in

- the shadows on the arms are too hard-edged

- the hands, which looked OK in my initial drawing, have lost definition amid the brushwork

So, yeah, a flop this one.

Upchurch Art Exhibition, 8-20 November

From 18-20 November, some of my work will be exhibited at St Mary's Church, Upchurch, Kent.  The exhibition from 10 to 4 every day.  There's a £2.50 admission charge, kids get in for free.  The works will all be by local amateur artists and I'm expecting most, if not all, will be up for sale.

After having a ponder, I've decided that I'll be exhibiting these ten paintings.  There's an abstract feel to a lot of them but I'm expecting to be up against a lot of landscapes, so thought I'd be a bit different.

All ten of these are reserved for the exhibition now and not up for sale until the exhibition is over (unless,of course, they're sold at the exhibition).

If you're local, do come along.  It's a bit of time outside the house and there will be other artists' work to look at as well as mine.

Shirley

Another house in the village but this time I've not been approached by the owners to paint it.  This one's a housewarming gift.  The guy that's had this dream house built was horrified at the slow internet speeds in the village so got everyone in the village to sign up to receive some sort of credits that meant that the infrastructure could be put in place for fiber internet all over.  It took a lot of energy on his part and the rest of us were too apathetic to get anything done, so he's definitely earned this painting and I'm hoping that once everyone knows who he is (they only moved in about a week ago) that he'll not have to buy his own drinks in the pub for a while.

This one started off as a drawing with the fineliners.  It doesn't count as a dash & splash, though, as I didn't do the drawing en plein air and as I picked out sensible colours rather than randomising.  This was my first go at using the fineliners on cold pressed paper.  It felt harsher on the pens than the hot pressed I've been using to date but that's just a sacrifice I need to make if I want watercolour paints to work properly.  One thing worth mentioning about the drawing is that I messed up the perspective on the nearest downstairs window, with its bottom edge sloping upwards to the right rather than downwards.  I tried  to cover this up in the painting stage and by adding new pen lines at the end.  It's harder to spot now.

For colours, I chose Winsor red, French ultramarine and raw sienna.  Two of them mix together to a brick red and the three of them can get to a decent black.  These are the two main colours of the house - it's all brickwork and black wooden cladding.  I ended up using some transparent yellow later in the foreground and cadmium yellow in the spatters.

The sky went on first, both in the sky itself and in the windows.  Obviously I couldn't just use the blue, so threw in the red and some raw sienna.  I used hitchin paper to blot out some clouds in a way that left the rest of the sky looking good.

Then the rest of the house was all about multiple layers.  All three in the roof but with a blue bias, all three in the black areas, with a mix going towards black and red and yellow in the brickwork with a tiny bit of blue.  In all three cases, my washes weren't uniform - I made different component colours stronger in different places.

I also used all three colours in the greenery but found that my red and yellow weren't producing a bright enough green for my tastes, so I used some transparent yellow in there to brighten things up.  I added some blue and red grassy tufts with the Merlin brush to keep things interesting.  I couldn't just make the grass green after not making the wooden cladding black.  It's either realistic colours everywhere for me or impressionistic everywhere.  Not that I use realistic colours often.

As finishing touches, I added birds and bricks.  And corrected the bottom of that window.  And then I was done.

They weren't in when I nipped round to surprise them, so I headed out to the orchards where they were walking the dog.  I introduced myself and they knew straight away I was the local artist.  When I handed the painting over they seemed genuinely touched.  Job done and a well deserved house warming present.

Number Eighteen

I was approached a week or two ago by a guy on the village who said he'd be interested in buying a painting of his house if I ever did one.  I finally found the time to do it this weekend and here's what I came up with.  I had a sneaky photographic reconnaissance trip during the week and quickly decided that the most interesting view would be one like this with the two trees framing the house.  I had to get down low to be able to see a gap between the tree and the top of the house, so this is an upward looking photo and the perspective vanishing points (of which there's only really one, on the left) are above the horizon.

The main three colours today were Mayan blue genuine, quinacridone magenta and Indian yellow.  Cadmium yellow (also warm, like the Indian) was used in all the leaves on the trees and for some tiny flower heads on either side of the front door.  And cadmium red also contributes some flower heads.  So this is in the key of triadic left.  The idea was to make things warm and sunny by having cool blues and reds in the shadows and a warm yellow for a bit of sunlight.

As usual, I put down a pencil drawing and reserved some whites with masking fluid.  I also put on a little spatter of masking fluid to make things look a little windy and to reinforce the impression of the house being high up (it does have good views out the back).  After that, I got to work on filling shapes.

For the roof and wall shapes, I started with mixes of all three primary colours that I thought approximated the real life colours, and then charged in drier versions of the individual primaries while it was still wet, generally using the yellow in the sunniest bits and the blue on the darkest.  Afterwards, I glazed over both shapes with the same mixture, maybe with a tiny bit of charging.  For the brickwork, I wasn't entirely happy, so laid over some kitchen paper to try to dry it.  I was shocked to take the paper away and see that it had left the impression of brickwork.  That was a lucky break.

The trunk of the tree was where I had the most fun, not mixing anything on the palette but just putting on all three primary colours, allowing them to mix and occasionally charging in more of the three primaries.  At the bottom of the tree, I didn't have any sort of line separating the tree from the grass - I just dragged the tree colours out into the grass and everything just blended together.

Next came the leaves of the trees.  Here I just squeezed out some dry cadmium yellow and Mayan blue genuine and stabbed them onto the paper with the Merlin brush.  There are some great greens in there but these just emerged naturally as the blues and yellows mixed on the paper and as the blobs of blue and yellow on my palette became more contaminated.  I also stabbed in a little quinacridone magenta to keep the greens under control and brushed in the odd branch.

Then it was time to add the shadows.  I mixed the Mayan blue and the quinacridone magenta and watered it down to get my shadow colour.  When I added the shadows to the house, everything burst into life.  It was as if the sun had come out.  Watercolours can be amazing.  My final step was to stab in some cadmium red and cadmium yellow flowers in the pots on either side of the front door.

I'm more than happy with this.  Everything stands out against the granulating sky and the cadmium yellow helps the trees stand out against the houses.  The colours in the tree trunk work brilliantly.  Burnt umber must be really worried by now about its place in my palette.  The worst thing about this one is the roof of that building on the far right.  It's too dark, drawing too much attention.  When I frame this one and things get slightly cropped, I'll be losing as much of that roof as possible.

The owners loved it and bought it.

The Wood Of The Dead

It feels a while since my last painting but it's only been a week.  My excuse is that I've been playing in a correspondence chess tournament.  I also have other things coming up this week (new glasses, a couple of jabs, a new computer to set up) so thought I'd better do some painting today.  It's a bit chilly outside and the day will soon come when I put away my paints for the winter and only use indoor media.  I didn’t fancy long spells outside, so went for an abstract landscape, where I wouldn’t need to be especially careful with the details.  I was inspired by a YouTube video by Steve Mitchell, but my techniques ended up diverging well away from his.

For colours, I went for some underused gems.  Cobalt blue (not in my regular palette), green apatite genuine (not yet shown its class), hematite violet genuine (ditto), cadmium red (because it granulates) and raw sienna (my least used yellow and a granulator).  All five colours were granulators and I wanted to start with a watery underpainting that let them all show off their granulating talents.  Cadmium yellow and titanium white made appearances at the end, and not just in the spatters.

I started with some random spattering with masking fluid.  I included some horizontal lines around the horizon after seeing Steve do something similar.  And then I sprayed water over the paper and put on some colours.  I was hoping to see some "roots" appearing at the bottom but instead I got dribbles.  I tinkered around too much at this stage and things got muddy.  I did get a good sky colour and some green tree shapes with blue tree shapes behind them but I could see very little of the individual colours.  Raw sienna, in particular, was shouted out of the conversation.  And I didn’t get any good granulation patterns.

After that, I put on two or three layers of paint on an attempt to turn this one into something recognisable. This was easier for the top half.  It only took a couple more layers to bring out the trees.  Some dabbing with dry paint (cadmium yellow, hematite violet genuine, green apatite genuine and cobalt blue) resulted in some pretty good looking trees.

The hillside, though, that was another matter.  It started muddy and it stayed muddy.  I tried to use the cadmium red and cobalt blue to add some colour, thinking their opacity might help.  Didn’t really work.  I blotted put a diagonal path up to the trees and made several attempts at painting in steps.  That didn't really work either.  I tried using salt in several of the layers.  Nope.  I added some white grass with the Merlin brush and a hill for it to sit on in cadmium red.  Looked wrong.  So in the end I gave up and spattered on some titanium white, cadmium yellow and cadmium red.

So this ended up as a big flop, although the trees look good and a cropped painting might work.  It's not going in the shop window.  The title of the painting is from an Algernon Blackwood short story.  Pines was an alternative Blackwood-inspired name but I think I'll save that name for a better painting.

Summer 2022 Poll Results

I messed up slightly with this poll.  About half the paintings in it were of naked figures and I think this is why 26 of the first 40 people to click on the link closed it without voting.  Polls For Pages only allows me to see the results from those first 40 people (unless I wanted to fork out £39 for this survey or £76 for as many surveys as I want in the next twelve months) so the survey's effectively closed after 14 people have voted.  And I'm one of those 14.  Maybe next time I need to warn people first or have the nudes as a separate question, with the option to just skip them.  Anyway, what's done is done.  Here are the results.

First, these paintings didn't get any votes:

I didn’t vote for any of these, so I can't complain that nobody else did.

Then these paintings all got one vote:

Not sure about the top left but the votes for all the other nudes were mine.  The coloured pencil nudes with their less revealing back views seem to be just as unpopular as the more revealing inktense pencil paintings.  Still, both are great fun and make a change from landscapes.  There's also only the one vote for each of the two oil pastel paintings in the survey and one of those isn't even a naked figure.

On to the two vote paintings.  These all got at least one vote that wasn't from me.

Those four nudes are the only ones that anyone else voted for (unless it was someone else that voted for the oil pastel one in the last set).  Some dash and splashes starting to appear here, so they're more popular than the figure paintings.  Two of the conventional landscapes (top right and second top left) seem to stand out as superior to the rest when shrunk down like this.  But the real thing jumping out from these is the greenness of everything.  That's more about what I've been doing this year than it is about the survey results.  But it's still a surprise.  I've never thought of my paintings as being particularly green but there you go.

Three votes for all of these:

A strange set of results, with three landscapes and two dash & splashes scoring more highly than some of their cousins in the previous set that I thought were better.  But the main message here is that there are at least two people who like my coloured pencil portraits - I need to do more of these during the winter.

Four votes for these.  Four votes doesn't normally count as giddy heights but with just 14 visible voters, it's feeling that way today.

These are looking better than the last set.  One of the things that catches my eye about them is the moody looking skies.  Looking back up the page at other paintings, this seems to be a theme that's been coming through during 2022.  It's not only when I'm using the tundra or shire supergranulators either - I've been putting weird colours in the sky when I've been using my conventional watercolours.  Again, nothing to do with survey results.  And, on a separate subject, interesting to see the most abstract painting in the survey scoring so highly.

Then we have five votes these three:

Three paintings with hills in them, two of Black Rock Cottage and two in tundra colours.  There are messages there.  I'm already wondering whether I should do a third painting of the cottage at some point using shire colours.  It wouldn’t look very Scottish but might be interesting.  The skies are worthy of attention again.  Even the one in the top left, with its more conventional colours, looks decent.   While I've been experimenting with crazy sky colours, my sky painting generally may well have improved.

And finally, a big jump from five votes to nine for this one:

Any, you know what?  I'm not surprised this one came out in top.  It's the sort of painting that always does well in these polls.  Colours not too adventurous.  Idyllic, chocolate boxy scene.  My favourite bits are actually the hanging baskets, the purples in the nearest white wall, the shadows across the road and the car in the bottom corner.  Lots to like about this one and it is now up on the wall inside that cottage.

People are, of course, welcome to keep voting in this poll or any previous polls.  Remember theSummer 2022 poll is effectively closed as I've exceeded my Polls For Pages limit.  Here are the links to all of them:

- Summer 2022

- H1 2022

- H2 2021

- H1 2021

- 2020

- Portraits with markers

- Summer 2019

- Q1 2019

- Summer 2018

The Summer 2022 Artistic Actuary Poll

I'm needing some help again please.  It's been a busy Summer and I already have another 50 works that I'd like to put t the vote so I've set up a Summer poll.

Voting should only take a couple of minutes.  If you click on this link, you'll see 50 works.  All you need to do is highlight all the ones you like and then click on Send at the bottom of the screen.

All responses are appreciated, and I'll put the results up here when votes have dried up.

Black Rock Cottage, Glencoe In The Key Of Purple Cool

So, as promised, here's another painting of Black Rock Cottage, but this time using more conventional watercolour.ours rather than the supergranulators.  Because that this is a whitewashed building, the colour scheme is a no brainier.  Quinacridone magenta, French ultramarine and transparent yellow male up the all conquering purple cool combination.  Titanium white also made an appearance, just tidying up some white edges.

I really went to town on this one.  With the supergranulating colours, I needed to keep things quite watery to get the granulation patterns but now, with conventional watercolours, I could use multiple layers and build up some dark values.  Apart from the shadowy wall, I think everything here has used multiple layers, with some quite random colours going on.

For the roofs, for example, I started with fairly random yellows, reds and blues which I left to dry before mixing a reddish brown and glazing it over the top.  With the sky I threw on the blue and red fairly randomly before dabbing out some clouds.  The hills are a mixture of multiple random glazes with some dabbing and the odd bit of deliberate darkening around the chimneys in an attempt to get them to stand out.  For the greenery, there were the random glazes and some flicks with the Merlin brush to create grassy textures.  No dabbing though.  And for the sunny wall facing us, I went through a process several times where ai put on some random watery colours, wet them more to make them run, then dabbed most of them out.

And that was pretty well it.  Just as I was packing away I realised that my brown glaze over the roofs had wiped out the roof windows, so I added these back in as a last step.

Overall, this isn't too bad and looks good from a distance, even if those roof windows stand out a bit too much for my liking.  And I don't think it's my best multicoloured sunny white wall.  But it's going up for sale.

Comparing this to the same building in tundra colours, I prefer the tundra version but that's mainly down to the roof windows.  In terms of colour scheme, they're just different and hard to compare.