Just a Tad

Cave Shots

 

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

 

The morning was overcast today, even a bit drizzly, so I hurried back to yesterday's site of painting disaster. I wanted to get more shots of those burrows which I hope to turn into caves and populate with creatures sometime in the future. This time I got the camera lower to accent the cave effect. You'll notice my fingers in one shot. It was an accident but ended up being great reference.

For about two years, I worked at WED,now known as Disney Imagineering, creating attractions for the new park, EPCOT Center. One of the people I worked closely with was Tony Baxter, one of the company's major ride designers. He was telling me how people would try to take flash pictures of the Electrical Light parade but were always disappointed when they saw their prints. This was in the days of flashbulbs and flashcubes. Tony would tell people to put a used bulb or cube into the camera. The camera adapted for the flash by widening the aperture, expecting a flash. Instead, the guest got a low light photo showcasing the lights of the parade floats.  I think that's what happened here. I set the phone's camera to flash, then unintentionally blocked the flash. The result is much moodier than the others.

My blunders continue to educate me!

"It Would Be Stupid If I Forgot to Pack My Sketchbook"

Which is what I said last night when packing my painting gear so I could get an early start this morning. It is also exactly what I forgot to pack.

Also this from Twitter:

So, it was that kind of day. At least, that kind of morning because I'm hoping to paint from some photos I took - which pretty much defeats the purpose of Plein Air painting, but it's more about the learning than the philosophy. So I packed last night. Made my comment about not forgetting the sketchbook then got distracted and my brain evidently checked it off its "To do" list.

I picked out a palette, based on some of what I had learned with my "swatches." Definitely felt prepared with a hazy notion of the locales I'd check out. I was eager to paint. I had been traveling the day before and was eager to jump back on the gouache train.

My location ideas turned out to be too hazy. Nothing seemed to leap out at me. I wanted a natural setting, not an urban landscape. I also wanted an unpopulated site. I was feeling brave, but not that brave. I was getting frustrated, driving around, looking for a subject. Finally found a spot with a dry hillside with a variety of textures and colors that I felt my limited palette could handle, along with some impressive oak trees and convenient parking. I unpacked, set up the tripod, water, rag, poshade and didn't find my sketchbook. Let's call that Mistake #1. No matter how eager you are to splash some paint around, you need something to splash it onto. I remember had a heavy piece of cardboard protecting the diffuser  in my backpack. I would not be deterred!

So here's what it looked like. That cardboard had been on my desk where I tested pens and markers with random doodles, but it easily fastened to my pochade with my handy clips. The photo also shows Mistake #2. Do you see it? It's the big, damn oak tree I had chosen to paint! It was a mass of twisted limbs and branches, really impressive and way beyond anything I was ready to attempt. Perhaps if I was using my horizontal sketchbook, I wouldn't have been tempted. I would've moved closer to something. What was I thinking? It might have been the frustration of searching so long for something to paint. Even as I started, I knew I should start with a sketch which would probably take an hour in itself. All those limbs! But my brain was not having it. It was a grey morning, the sun was covered by the clouds behind me. I just dove in.

My thought the night before was to put down a color wash of warms and cools. But the cardboard was already brown so I thought  the paint needed to be more opaque. "Sure, I can do a grey sky and a warm hillside. I just have to keep it wet." Hah! First a savior, then a scoundrel, the cardboard turned out to be Mistake #3. It sucked all the water from my brushes like a sponge. The gouache didn't move like I was used to (in my long experience of two painting and a color chart).

I've watched plenty of videos of Plein Air artists, working on small, impressionistic sketches. There is often an early stage where it all just looks like a blobby mess and you want to pack it in. That certainly happened in my previous paintings. But I felt adrift. I had nothing to latch onto to focus on. It should have been the tree but by then I realized just how big Mistake #2 was. If I was working on decent paper, it might have been different. Might.

And then the sun came out, changing all the colors and values. And the sky behind the tree started to clear to a beautiful blue. That's it. My outside adventure was over. I packed up and had a pleasant talk with a jogger. And of course had the wonderful moment that I documented in a tweet.

But I had learned a lot. The biggest lesson was what I had to learn to paint that tree someday, or even a cloudy sky. I needed to learn some techniques to suggest textures. I'm not going to paint tree bark a crack at a time. I have to think like old school matte painters whose "photorealistic" paintings were actually color patches and light reflections when viewed close up. Then I looked around for what I could have painted instead.

A chunk of trunk would be better for practicing bark techniques (someday). The colors of the hillside itself is already impressionistic and I could focus details on the plants closest to me. But the last pic really sparked me. It was just dried brush but the dark tangle of branches, if you rethought the scale, felt like a spooky, Brian Froud-type forest. The overcast day made it even spookier.

Farther down the row, I found an even better spot. There were what looked like animal burrows. In my mind they were caves. I realize this could be my subject matter when I get some consistency, if not mastery, of painting. A blending of real and imaginary.  James Gurney talks about this, covering it in his book, Imaginative Realism, and YouTube videos. But these burrows/mystical caves suddenly brought it home to me. The photo doesn't do them justice, which is the point of Plein Air painting. The eye sees more than a camera when painting outside from life. I'm going to make a sketch of this and paint it here, since I want to adjust the colors drastically. Which is wimping out. Despite the color shift, it would be better to return to the spot if tomorrow brings another overcast morning. We'll see. I wouldn't mind a painting experience with fewer learning mistakes.   --Tad

 

 

 

The Pigment is Always Greener on the Other Side of the Palette

So here are my "swatches" in search of the kind of green that might have made the leaves pop in my gargoyle painting. Coupla things. They're not swatches. I used a half inch flat brush and played with creating various leaf shapes. I also did not measure out exact amounts of paint to achieve perfect gradations across every color. I just mixed the warm color with a set of blues, and one green, to get a dark tone and a light tone. Two, I didn't adjust these images digitally to match the originals. This isn't a teaching blog. It's just tracking my learning as I try to improve my drawing and my painting.

These were the blues I have from my recent purchases: Phthalo Blue, Cerulean Blue, Cobalt Blue, Ultramarine and Veridian which is a green. The warm colors I have Cadmium Lemon, Yellow Ochre, Gamboge, and Cadmium Yellow Deep which is basically Orange. I think a blend of Cadmium Lemon and Cerulean would have given me the sunlit leaves I was searching for, although it might benefit from a bit of Cobalt Blue. Along the way I came close to the color of the spikey, darker green plant using Cerulean and Gamboge, although I'd experiment with adding a bit of Ivory Black so I'm not adding another color for a single bush. Blending Cerulean with Lemon and Yellow Ochre in different amounts seems to cover everything I might need.

The rich browns I got from some of these mixes was a surprise. Looking at the Cad Yellow Deep and the Ultramarine bring home what I have been reading about: limiting the number of pigments on your palette doesn't mean limiting the colors on your painting.

 

 

 

 

If you really want to learn about color, I don't know of any book better than James Gurney's COLOR AND LIGHT. I devoured it, finding it a  very easy read. But that may be because I was hungry to learn. On the other hand, I've seen many talented artists recommending it online. Buy it from Gurney's website or Amazon. Meanwhile, check out his blog for REAL information.

I won't be updating this blog every day. Life intervenes. I'm out of town tomorrow and leave for a Russian comic convention next week (where I'll be doing LOTS of drawings but not from life). But I'll try to keep up my daily drawing routine. How else can I improve?  -- Tad

Panic in Troll Town!

If you don't know anything about painting, I get it that you may think this looks okay. But this blog is about me improving as an artist. A writer/artist was even rarer in television animation than now. But, although everyone thought of me as an art kid, once I moved into TV animation, I was a writer/producer first. I might draw a rough character design idea (picture worth a thousand words and all that) or add sketches when giving storyboard notes, but it wasn't my art wasn't going on the screen. I hired fantastic artists who were awesome to work with them. Meanwhile, my artistic skills didn't atrophy but they did stagnate. This blog chronicles me challenging myself, trying to draw from life and learn to paint in gouache.

Why gouache? It's a opaque watercolor medium that doesn't smell. Thinned, you can use it as watercolor. But then, making it opaque, you can paint over mistakes! It's not Photoshop but it's the comfort level I need. So let's talk trolls, or specifically, a gargoyle birdbath.

First off, my drawing is better in that the ellipse is fairly uniform, ignoring my weak brush control. But the gargoyle is close. If you were my stalker you'd recognize it as a statue in my backyard (please don't stalk me). He's actually a squatter figure than this which gives him a lot of character. I may use him as a model for pencil sketches again. The more I understand his pose, the better a new painting will be.

But my colors and values are way off. Especially the values, which should be one of the most important aspects of any painting. Squint your eyes at it. It's light saucer with Yoda riding it in a sea of dark. Maybe there's a slight blob of a medium tone to the left but that should be brighter because the sun was hitting in. The photo on the right shows very clear light, medium and dark values. Plus the values make interesting shapes in themselves. Had I captured this, the painting would be much better.

I got up early, planning to get the morning sun hitting the birdbath. I looked out the window and saw that it was well withing the shade of the house. I'd have to wait. Oooorrrr... I could make use of the time to really tie down an under sketch. Generally, a plein air painter keeps a pencil sketch loose, just mapping out basic shapes, but I'm supposed to be practicing my drawing so this was perfect. Sketch and painting practice in one.

I took some time to collect my gear. (From now on, I'll pack it up each day as if I'm going on a field trip. Good practice and keeps my office neat... uh, neater.) By the time I was outside, the sun was already hitting the top of the bushes. And by the time I was ready to sketch, the light was just above the little guy's head. Yikes, did not realize how fast light changes.  I finished a rough drawing, at least the gargoyle part, and realized I had to start painting fast!

Then it hit me. What about my palette? I hadn't thought of what colors I should use. It's not a coloring book, I don't pick "leaf green" and "grey." I want to limit the selection of colors to keep the painting unified. There were a lot of bushes with different shades of green so I grabbed Ultramarine, Yellow Ochre and Gamboge. Added Titanium White, Cadmium Red Light, and Ivory Black. Did I know what I was doing? Hell no! But the sun was not stopping.

I applied a warm wash to the top and left and general cool shadows which immediately wiped out all my pencil lines. I will have to press harder or use a better grade of color pencils. I laid in darks but worried too much about the gargoyle instead of the over all. I pushed into opaques, but nothing I did gave me the light green of the light hitting the leaves on the left. The bush behind that bush had a cooler, blue green shade. Values! If you hold up your hand to cover the warm bushes on the left and extend your thumb to cover the sides of the birdbath, it could almost be a night scene instead of a warm lit morning.

The panic of catching the light just right was long gone. I was painting to learn and I had realized the first part of my process should be to squint! I must decide where the light, shadow and medium values are and how they might connect. I played with holding various brushes in different ways to get leaf patterns. But mostly, I was thinking of what I was going to do next.

Swatches. Not following a chart or a color wheel, but just mixing the warm and cool colors I already have to learn what kind of range I'll get. As I paint more, maybe even out of my yard, I'm sure I'll hit other colors I have problems with so I'll do the same thing with them. I'm hoping  that will give me a better chance to retain the knowledge. So, onto swatching!

                                                                                                                    -- Tad

 

 

 

It's Never Too Late. Is It?

I originally started this blog because I wanted to share my creative process. I had so much fun writing my Hellboy Animated blog that I wanted to continue that sort of sharing, kifting the veil from the arcane secrets of animation and show development. 

But, whereas I was encouraged to create an ongoing blog for the Hellboy Animated production, all my following projects demanded secrecy. For awhile, I dipped back into old projects and explain my thinking in creating them. I posted pages of an old comic project that was never finished. But when I was working all day on the projects of other creators, it was hard to muster up the energy to talk about a random animation concept. From time to time, I reposted art that was easier to share on Facebook and Instagram, especially after I retired and was creating art for conventions.

I posted drawings from another comic project that went through many form mutations in an effort to not turn it into an unpaid job (after I had retired from a well paying jobs). Ultimately, I realized that the concept was better suited for animation than print. Posts here became more infrequent. I continued to pay for the blog account because I think the Hellboy Animated blog is filled with interesting information. But now, I have a new idea.

It may be little painful. For me, not you.

I have avoided drawing from reality for my entire life. Not that I wasn't drawing. I drew all the time, characters from my favorite cartoons, superheroes and all through my career in animation. But I managed to avoid, aside from a college course and some Disney life drawing classes, looking at anything in the real world and translating it into a 2 dimensional drawing. My advice to you? Don't do that.

As a result of running away from the "hard stuff," my sense of perspective is weak, proportions are off, and my line is not confident. So I have decided to work on that, and at the same time, take on a skill I always wanted to have, painting. I've done some painting, some okay, most not. So this blog is getting back to its roots: sharing my creative process as I fumble through and, hopefully, improve.

So here's the story so far.

Back on September 9th, I resolved to do at least one sketch from life per day. Here's my first. It's an exterior lamp in my backyard. The foliage and pilaster to the left is actually below the light. I wasn't trying for a work of art. I just needed the practice. I intended to have the whole lamp in the drawing but I grew bigger as I tried to correct its proportions.

The following day I drew a cell phone. The next day, an umbrella and chair. Next, a gargoyle on a birdbath. I felt like I was getting better had a hard time with the sloping lines of modern cars. Much harder than Mickey's jalopy or a Ratcatcher. I liked the cap sketch but the ellipses of the stool are wonky. Somehow I couldn't get the basic shape of an electric kettle although the little sketch above it is closer but still squatty. Click on the pictures for a clearer view. I tried a couple of portraits but they are so bad that my ego won't let me post them. Then a few days break as I assembled this.

It's a homemade, portable easel for painting in a watercolor sketchbook. The design was created by James Gurney (the Dinotopia Guy). Check his YouTube channel for all sorts of painting demos and tutorials in many different mediums. I was just finishing it when I split the wood on the little gripper arm that holds a light diffusing shade. I decided I needed to take a break from construction and slap some paint down.

So this morning I took the easel outside and started laying in color. It was a silly setup, in that I was painting from a photo on my iPad. But I wanted to get the feel of sitting on a portable stool and working with the easel. I learned to keep my palette fairly level so the gouache doesn't slide down and pool at the bottom. Also, my "thin," starting wash instantly blotted out my pencil underdrawing. Generally, I found I was picking up more paint in my brush than necessary. I increased the torque on the hinges. I never gave a thought to how I was sitting on the stool so I guess that works.

 

As to the painting, color mixing remains a mystery to me but I was pleased that I came close when trying to match a specific wall color. Overall, the goal wasn't to create a beautiful work of art but to overcome my insecurity and get started painting. My drawing is still a weak point but I was happy I actually manage to make something that looks okay... from a distance, through a spiderweb.

Tomorrow I have to do another sketch at least and maybe I'll attempt a painting. Maybe that gargoyle.

                                                                                                --Tad