Furry Friends

Well, I never said these 100 portraits had to all be people!  I just HAD to paint this guys’ portrait!  He was beggin’ me:  standing there in Mr. Whicker’s field chewing and staring at me.  What I didn’t realize when I snapped his photograph, was the bright sun bleaching out the green grass and making one big shape of the grass, the fence behind, and the side of his face…totally cool for a painting!  I wanted to achieve the connection between all these “things” into one large shape.  And then to connect the dark shapes of his face, his body, and the green trees behind him.  It was a terrific way to practice this whole thing of seeing the light & dark shapes and connecting them.

Then, after I painted the first one, I just had to try it in a different color scheme.  I had a theory forming in my head from Portrait #10, that one can achieve a wonderful sense of light without having to “match” the dark value to just what you see in a photo.  I noticed this in several of Charles Reid’s paintings from his book Watercolor Solutions.  In it, there are two paintings of John Singer Sargent where Mr. Reid paints from a black & white photo of Mr. Sargent.  None of the dark values in Charles Reid’s paintings are anywhere near as dark as the photograph’s.  It struck me that the sense of light he achieved was just as strong…perhaps even better than having such dark shapes.  I stumbled on this in the last Portrait (#10).  And wanted to make another go of it with my new furry friend from the field above our neighborhood.

It’s fun to make a series of the SAME painting.  I might just keep going with this…see what I come up with.

My Kids

“Are you drawing me again?” says the teen (either the 15 year old girl or the 13 year old boy).

“Yes, dear” says me.  <sigh> says the teen.

“Oh mommy, will you draw me?” says the 8 year old.

“I’d LOVE to!” says me:)

Out of my head…

I cannot explain to you the whys and wherefores of where my creative path takes me.  Sometimes I wonder if I walked around dragging a crayon behind me like Harold, drawing where it is I’m going creatively; the line would look like either a zig-zag, or a criss-cross mess of lines much like the “can of worms” turnpike in Rochester, NY.  Sometimes I feel very settled in what I’m creating (such as the 100 portraits) and I’m focused and single-minded in that trajectory.  But then, something happens…like the end of the school year with its weekly routine of kids at school and work as an art teacher.  Perhaps its a trip to the beach, or a gift of a ukulele, and then my trajectory goes hay wire and the line takes a different turn.  The one thing I know is constant in my creative life is…CHANGE!

So lately, I find myself wanting to draw out of my head.  I have done this a few times before, like here, here, and most recently here. But my usual MO is to observe and draw.  I like having something in front of me to draw, whether it’s a person, a landscape, a corner of my room, or a photograph.  But just before heading to the beach, I wanted to “just draw”…without having something in front of me… to just draw out of my mind’s eye.  I always feel that these drawings end up looking a bit cartoony, but that’s what I’m enjoying about them:  simple, a bit “illustraty” (is that a word?).  What’s interesting in most of these cases, is that they are often drawings of me.  I don’t typically draw myself from photos, indeed I don’t have a ton of reference photos for that.  I have drawn my face from looking at a mirror once or twice before, but that is still “observation”.  These drawings out of my head are an attempt to express a feeling, or an idea, and “reality” is less important.

Another thing that has been at work is an inspiration from the following illustration:

Just before we left for the beach, I picked up a copy of Skirt! magazine (love it for the graphics and such!) and the cover artwork captivated me.  I promptly used it to cover my most recent sketchbook.  I just love this artist’s work…click here to go to her website.  I love the simplicity, the joie de vivre in each line and pattern.  Her art reminds me of Ludwig Bemelmans’ wonderful illustrations in the Madeline books we read and re-read.  So I headed off to the beach with a desire to make some drawings out of my head and this new little jaunt is still with me as our summer family schedule gets underway.  I know I’ll continue with the 100 portraits, but for now, I’ll enjoy “just drawing”.

Sometimes I do worry that I’m “out of my head” literally!  But I ‘spose there’s no  harm in being a bit loony in one’s creative life rather than in real life.  If one tends to live a fairly “straight and narrow” life, then it’s good to have a safe place to be quirky, spazzy, following twists and turns that real life may not allow or support.  Hmmm…now there’s a thought.

Daffodil Dance

I ‘spose I could consider this as one of the 100 Portraits…a portrait of a flower, or two, or three.  But I won’t.  I’ve been spending so much time painting without pen lines, I wanted to revisit a previously drawn subject where I did paint with watercolor, but had the line work to depend on for the structure.  When you don’t have lines, you have to depend on other things, such as color, values, and edges to express your subject.  I’ve had this one propped up on my desk for a few weeks.  I was trying out Arches hot press paper…and discovered that it isn’t my favorite.  But the painting has grown on me, and I like the play of colors.  I love paintings where it seems as if the artist dropped the watercolor onto the paper and it oozled and wazzled into an image…I think this has something of that look to it.  The following is the line version of the above painting from a while back:

I hope your day is a daffodil dancing kind of day!

More Thoughts on Play

As I relaxed on the beach, listening to waves lapping, I mused further on the benefits and need for “play” in our lives.  Just as we need to play with our art materials, we need to have time to play in our work-a-day worlds.  Even if we enjoy our “work”, we can become hunkered down trying to make it through the week if we don’t find ways to play a bit, let go of agendas and the incessant striving to “get better”.

Over the last 12 or so years of “being an artist”, I’ve seen how something that begins so playful and full of life, can lose its lustre when it becomes one’s job, a money-maker, a grasping for being professional…whatever that means!  There is a delightfulness in being a newbie to something.  I re-realized this as I plunked haltingly on my new ukelele.  There’s something intrinsically wonderful to being a beginner, to being on the first steps of a new journey of discovery, to doing whatever-it-is poorly…but doing it with fervor and passion!  It infects the rest of your life.  The wonder of discovering chords and chord progressions, the delight in realizing that the complexities of music are sometimes quite simple, figuring out how to finger-pick a little…gives you a renewed zest for doing the dishes for 15 people after a lasagna meal, and for getting all sandy and gritty with your 8 year old to make, yet another, sand castle.

So for all of you newbies out there, whether you’re a newbie to drawing and painting, or photography, or quilting, knitting, crocheting, or a musical instrument, here’s my thought for you:

Enjoy being a newbie!  Celebrate being a beginner! Rejoice at all the wonky drawings, splotched paintings, halting plunks on your uke, buzzing strings, lost stitches in your knitting, ripped out rows…they are all part of the play!  Play on!

Watercolor Play

One of the most fun and beneficial things I do is to “play” with watercolor.  You could call it “making abstract paintings”, but that makes it sound like there’s intention involved.  Seriously, when I play with watercolor, I am really PLAYING!  I just start with one color, any color, and then put down another, responding to each color and shape (if there is one) that gets put down on paper.  It is a great way to rev up the ‘ole creative engines for the more intentional paintings, or to learn about how watercolor behaves, or to just have a no-stress paint sesh (“sesh” is a word I’m using a lot lately due to my skateboarding 7th grader!  A skate “sesh” is a skateboarding session: a few minutes or several hours of skating.)

So, if you approach a watercolor play “sesh” with an eye toward learning how watercolor behaves, you can discover all kinds of things: like how hard and soft edges are formed, how colors mingle and mix to make other colors, how blooms are made, how you get drybrush effects, scraping, spattering, drips, etc.  It’s loads of fun too!

I’m headed off to the beach with the fam and the whole extended fam on my husband’s side…we do this every year: the pater and mater familias get a big house on the ocean and all the siblings and their spouses and children pile in for one whole week!  I’m taking, of course, my sketchbook along, as well as this beauty:

It’s a ukulele!!  My parents got it for me for my birthday (which isn’t until the end of July, but hey! This way I get to celebrate all summer long, right? THANKS MOM & DAD!!)  My 15 year old daughter also just got one, so she and i will be strumming by the ocean in true ukulele style!  Seriously, folks, I’ve never played a fretted instrument (only the violin, for years as a child and for a time as an adult) but this will be an adventure in being a total newbie!!  I promise to return from beach/ukulele heaven and continue the portrait journey.  Maybe I’ll even paint some portraits of my daughter and I playing our new ukes!  Hee! Hee!

**I can’t decide whether I’m more excited about learning to play the ukulele or about all the drawings and paintings that will ensue!:)

Chillin’ with Pen

Lest you think I’ve completely abandoned my continuous line drawings…I thought I’d share just a few of the ones I’ve made lately.  We’ve had some lovely, rainy evenings.  As our back deck is not a covered deck, I find myself sitting in the garage with the door up to enjoy the rain.  Pen and I hung out one of these evenings, tracing the lines of various and sundry garage thingys: bikes and tools.  Wow, people, there’s SO much to draw in your garage!!

I’ve got loads more to draw in there…pen is very excited too I think.  If you feel like you’ve exhausted all the rooms and closets in your house…check out your garage! Oh, and check out the continuous line WORDS! That’s totally fun!

Didn’t think I could…Portrait #10

I felt like “the little engine who couldn’t” as I painted this…I kept thinking: I don’t think I can do this! I don’t think I can do this!  But looking at it now, I think I did! It’s a weird thing to explain to someone that you really haven’t the foggiest notion how to go about a particular painting.  You have some vague notions about shape and value, but it really isn’t until you put paint to paper that you begin responding intuitively to what’s happening and somehow it begins to fall into place.  Not always…but sometimes.  And when that happens=oi! what a feelin’!

The drawing part gave me fits!  The angle of her face, plus the downward gazing eyes, the shadows from the hair, and the overall high-key feel to painting a blond.  This is my oldest daughter’s best friend who came over to help Catherine get ready for prom.    I painted this on the “good” stuff…the 140 lb. Saunders Waterford and I loved working on it this time!  I concentrated on laying down the color and not noodling it to death.  I’ll give it several more tries and then switch over to say, Arches, or Fabriano, just to get a feel for all these different papers.  If you are a watercolor painter…let me know what paper is YOUR favorite to paint on and why.

Wanna know what brush I’m using? Well, for many, many years I used Cheap Joe’s Starving Artist brushes, rounds in sizes 10 and 12 for all the sketchbook work and even some of the big paintings.  A few months back I purchased the same size brushes in Leow Cornell’s #7020 Series Ultra Round brush recommended by Laurelines some months back.  It has taken some adjustment, but I’m loving these brushes!  I used the size 12 throughout this 10″ x 11″ painting.  I’m learning to use the shape of the brush in different ways as I paint.  I’ve always wanted to own those cadillac sable brushes that all my favorite transparent watercolor heros use (Charles Reid, Eric Weigardt, Janet Rogers…), but have never been able to quite bring myself to spend the $100+ dollars on one of them.  I’m quite happy with these Leow Cornell brushes.  Perhaps if I ever tried the real sable brushes, I’d know what I was missing…but ignorance is bliss in this case and I’m happily painting with much cheaper brushes!

Happy painting to everyone and thanks again for sharing the portrait journey with me!

More Prom Beauty: Portrait #9

Well, I reverted back.  Back to the cheaper paper.  It’s actually an American Journey watercolor sketchbook from Cheap Joe’s and they “said” that it was filled with their Kilimanjaro paper, but I told them I didn’t think so.  It is much thinner than the Kilimanjaro 22″ x 30″ sheets and it doesn’t have the same cold press (or hot press) feel to it.  Anyway, it definitely has a different response than the Saunders Waterford paper did.  And I loved going back to it for this realization:  I felt just as “off my feet” as I did with the good paper.  Perhaps it’s because I’m reaching for something more now.  New territory in approach and in what I’m after, so I don’t feel confident.  I did rework this a good bit in places and it didn’t fall apart on me like my Aquabee sketchbook would have.  What I do like here is the “pieces of paint” effect I’m after.  But I’m realizing that it takes a very confident stroke, letting it stay there, and NOT noodling it to death.  I noodled A LOT in this painting! Oi!

I took great care with the drawing.  I do spend a bunch of time trying to get the drawing “correct”, so that my map for color shapes and values will allow the portrait to look something like a face.  It certainly did this.  But it wasn’t until I painted it, that I could see the flaws in my original drawing.  I won’t go into all the places where I should have drawn this here, paid more attention there, shifted this left, that right, elongated this, raised that.  Ah me.  It can be discouraging.  The likeness to our oldest daughter is not spot-on.  But I believe the overall effect is good:  a pleasing mix of colors, love the cropped, up-close view, and the hands.  Oh boy, did you see the hands?  I’m very tickled with those!  They turned out looking like hands AND having that tossed off look to them.  Can’t wait to do more hands!!  Oh, and I like the eyes here.  I ALWAYS like painting eyes and these were no exception.  Ahhhh…..<sigh of contentment>.

But the one thing I’ll remember about this portrait is: the unfortunate blue stripe down her neck.  <Meh..>:(  I can definitely say I’ve learned: don’t paint a blue stripe down the neck…you can’t lift it completely off.

“Good” Paper: Portrait #8

Perhaps it doesn’t show, but I felt quite “off my feet” working on this 140 lb. Saunders Waterford Cold Press Paper.  I used to use this paper all the time for full-sheet paintings using watercolor opaquely, thick & gloppy.  I didn’t know how it would behave using the watercolor transparently.  Now I know.  But one mustn’t judge based purely on one try.  I need to give it a few more tries before I say whether or not I like it.  This first go on “good” watercolor paper, was frought with: too much water, too little pigment, too much pigment, too little water, etc.  But here’s the thing I found out I liked: this paper allowed me to work and rework, to scrub a little, and it withstood the treatment!  With cheaper papers you can forget about any reworking, a very little will sometimes yield a hole in the paper, or a permanent blotch that forever says, “Here’s where the chik messed up!”  This “good” paper doesn’t scream that out at you:)

I’ll be working with a few of the photos I took of my oldest daughter getting ready for prom back at the beginning of May, so you’re in for a few Prom Works:)  Her best friend came over to help out with the hours of pre-prom hair and make-up, so you might see a portrait of her as well.  The photo I worked from here did not have the background…I made that up.  She was indeed in front of her dresser mirror, but you couldn’t see anything really because of how close we were to it.  So I “created” the image in the mirror, and I think it holds together.

So, to be picky and analytical (after all, I want to learn from this, right?), I have to ask myself some questions:

1.  Is this painting decidedly “mostly dark values” or “mostly light values”?  Skip Lawrence drilled into his students to be decisive about things like this…don’t let  a painting be 50/50 of ANYTHING!  Plan your values, and have MOSTLY light with a little bit of dark, OR MOSTLY dark with a little bit of light.  Hmmm…when it takes me a while to come up with an answer, it usually means I have a wishy/washy 50/50 going on.

2.  Did I connect shapes of values?  I did NOT want the dark hair be isolated, so I tried connecting it with the dresser and mirror behind.  I’m not sure that they create a nice flow through the painting however.  Ideally, you want your shapes of light and dark to create a flow through the picture area…hmmm…perhaps I did.  Perhaps not.  Again… when you’re on the fence, it is at best a weak connection.

So what did I do that I like??  Yes, well, I do like this portrait overall:  love the colors, both in the hair and face.  Love the oozly background in the mirror which I think does not detract from the face.  Love the presence of so many colors in the face, but am aiming for something not quite so smooth as this.  The smoothness was one of the things this paper “forced” me to into. (I know that sounds weird, but there it is!)  I really want “pieces” of paint which is what the cheaper paper gives me.  I may need to try out some Hot Press papers, or other cold press papers to see if I get different effects with the watercolor.  Overall, I am pleased with this one, even though it did take a good bit of wrestling!