Just a Tad

COLOR!

Just putting a second layer on top of a first. Getting the right consistency of gouache. Two different methods of blending and getting soft edges. I'm not going to repeat everything. Take the course yourself. But today was fun because of the second tangerine.

 

I was using the mixed media paper that I had been sketching on. Turns out it soaked up all the moisture from the paint.

Since the first method was all about blending the wet paint, that put me at a disadvantage.

But the second method was blended after the paint was dry. Gouache is a water based medium. You can reactivate it with just a bit of moisture. That allows you to work more slowly.

So yes, I know I was following behind the video, step by step. But at the end, it looked like a tangerine.

The gouache is too thin. You can see the pencil lines through it when it should be opaque. But it looks like a goddamn tangerine! Yeah, the shadow is wonky but I feel like I painted something that was executed successfully.

"Lookit me, Maw! I'm paintin', I'm paintin"!

             --Tad

Learning to Draw All Over Again

I decided that if I am to make some real headway in learning to paint, I needed to take a course. I watch lots of videos by James Gurney and have learned a lot. He can take something as mundane as the door to a supermarket and turn it into a color sketch worth framing. But I needed something more formal that would start with the basics like, "This is how you dip your brush into water." Which turned out to be a real thing that I was doing "wrong."

I looked at the samples of several courses. I picked Lena Rivo's COLOR MASTERY IN EIGHT WEEKS. It was certainly not the cheapest of options. Schoolism looks like it has a great course and you get access to all their courses and all the critiques of students' work. But I picked Lena's course because it was the opposite of what I tend to do. She breaks subjects down into basic shapes of color. She does not paint a lot of details. Gurney's work can be photo realistic. Rivo stops at the basic shapes. She captures a unique quality of light but there are few details at all in her painting. When you look at my previous posted painting of a Talavera pot, you see that I can get lost in details at the expense of the whole.

It's not that I want to paint just like she does. But I want to learn to paint how she does, knowing I will naturally modify it when I do a new subject. She teaches basic techniques by having you copy her painting, explaining choices, methods and technical facts as she does so.

The first module was about contour drawing. The third dimension is completely ignored. It was totally foreign to me. There was no drawing through or thinking of arms and legs as cylinders or perspective. They are excercises that train you to break and image into shapes. In fact, you start with a small shape then draw each line in relationship to that first shape. Lots of use of negative shapes. To help with this, the third exercise was to draw the porcelain duck we had already drawn but upside down.

I think this technique was big in "Drawing with the Right Side of Your Brain." It makes it easier to stop seeing the duck and instead, just see 2 dimensional shapes.

 

Arguably, this drawing of a woman would feel more solid if I had drawn her hips and legs first, without her skirt. You can see faint lines where I started to do that. But the contour method forces me to concentrate on what I see in front of me, rather than adjust it to my weak sense of anatomy.  Now... color!

 

 

 

Talavera Marigolds

I don't spend a lot of time color correcting the images I post, if any, but this one definitely looks off. But then, I don't spend time calibrating my monitor either. Anyway, this. I will say, "I learned stuff." Which is actually the point of all of these. Some "What Not to Do" and a little, "Hmm, I can see where that might work."

I wanted to pain from life, not a photo. I looked at this pot that sits outside the kitchen window. It's Talavera design is super complicated but I thought I might isolate it. Just the pt and a bit of the column. I set up outside and adjusted my tripod height, "Maybe just the pot, the column and a little bit of that second pot peeking around the corner." Honestly, I don't know what happened after that. Suddenly there's more. That's not really a mistake. It's just being unrealistically ambitious.

Here's a problem: It was early morning and the column and pot were in shadow, evenly lit. In fact, since gouache can be used as an opaque, I should go in and drastically lighten the right side of that column. Any faint shadow or highlight on the pot was hidden in the complicated decorations. I was at a loss. The plants are too dull and the pot too bright. I was aware of all this as I added more detail to the pot instead of simplifying it in some way. But then, the original idea was to just paint the pot as a study. The bird is actually a rusty, flat metal decoration. It could really use a drop shadow on the column.

But the lawn may look like a hedge, but those steps in the background? The purple shadows? That little area is starting to look like a real Plein Air painting. All right, all right. I did say, "starting."

To begin each painting, I have to fight through a near paralyzing fear which is stupid. I would love to get to a psychological place where my thought is, "Wow. That looks cool. I can't wait to paint it!"  To overcome this, I've signed up for a painting course. It starts with drawing, approaching it in a way I feel is alien and unnatural to me. But they're probably the kind of hand/eye coordination exercises I need.        --Tad

Trying out an online course. I'll let you know how it goes.

Halloween Still Life

My wife decorates early for Halloween. This year it was up and perfected before I left for my Russian trip. We have a china cabinet in the dining room and one of the kitchen cabinets has glass doors to display things. But almost every shelf, table, mantle and reasonably flat surface has visitors from the shadow side or pumpkin-headed jesters come to entertain us. The above is a tea table near a sliding glass door.

    Finally, I chose something with some basic shapes. I limited my palette to five colors: Titanium White, non-cadmium Cadmium Red Light, Yellow Ochre, Burnt Sienna and Ultramarine Blue. My goal was to make it near monochromatic. I had done the under drawing the day before and was anxious to start the painting first thing in the morning. But I got a little distracted. Fires tend to do that to me.

    The fire was over the hill in the San Fernando Valley and we were in a Santa Ana wind event. Winds blow off the deserts with gusts in the mountain canyons around 70mph and literal Gale force winds where we are. Burning embers can be carried more than a mile, over fire crews, to start fires well past any fire line. Plus the electric utility serving our area was reacting to the fact that 50% of the 10 worst California fires of recent times have been started by downed power lines. We had been warned that our power might be shut off any time during the wind event. We never lost power but blocks less than a mile away went dark. My wife had seen to it that we were stocked with food that didn't need refrigeration. We were covered on that front. We all packed suitcases with at least three days of clothes, toiletries, meds, and whatnot. Bags were loaded into the cars and we kept the car keys in our pockets.

    Thus prepared, I turned back to the painting. I had taken a picture that morning but took another to better match the angle of my drawing. I had intended on painting from life but didn't want to put the dining room rug at risk with my enthusiastic brush flailing. So I retreated to the rug protector behind my desk.

What a difference a bit of planning makes! My Cintiq monitor is on a swivel arm. I loaded up the photo and swung it up above my tripod and sketchbook. I "cheated" by tuning it black and white so I could better see the tones.

    Generally, I'm happy with this. I can see where it's sloppy, like the tilt of the candlestick where it meets the pumpkin and not making the shutters more uniform. I chalk that up to getting used to working on my portable easel. Taping the edges of the paper, shrinks the work area. I feel I want to work larger. On the other hand, I might get lost in pinning down details instead of working on the painting as a whole. But this felt like a victory after the twigs and branches of those burrow. I am still apprehensive when starting to paint. I just have to dive in.

 

    Meanwhile, the bags are still in the cars.

                                                                                             -- Tad

 

Kind of a Mess

I don't have a proper date for this one because I started in in late September then finished it October 10th, jet-lagged and with a cold. On the ill-fated day that I set out and tried to paint a tree without paper, I had noticed what seemed to be animal burrows underneath a hillside of brittle bushes filled with twigs and dried creeper vines. I took a few pictures and even returned another day to get it in the early morning light.

    I was struck with the idea that trying to paint a hillside and a tree was too much for me and I needed something smaller to focus on. But once again, my mistake was in subject matter choice. The scene was a mass of twigs, leaves, rocks and branches -- just as much detail as the tree. Possibly more because if I was more experienced in plein air techniques, it would be easier to "suggest" the wider scene than the jumbled details of the burrows.

    I don't remember the colors I chose for my palette. I felt the early light somehow gave a violet tint to the scene. While I was away, I considered not finishing it. But only for a few seconds because I feel committed to this self-challenge of talent improvement. It doesn't mean I have to keep working on something until it's beautiful (hah!) but I have to make a solid attempt. I thought it needed some light colors outside of the "caves." So I mixed up a new palette of some sort and added in the lighter colors, defined some more twigs above the holes, added texture with watercolor pencils... and called it a learning experience.

    It is way more colorful than it should be. Although, I guess that could be a style choice, if I had made choices instead of just falling into it. Here's some of the reference photos. I photoshopped the second one to push it toward the color I had imagined and add edge material from the other photo.

Not quite the psychedelic vision promised by my painting. So my main take aways? Chose some subject matter with basic shapes. Squint my eyes to see how I might group them tonally. Limit the palette! Color adds a lot of complexity at this stage of learning.

Luckily, my wife has filled the house with perfect subject matter!      -- Tad

Back From Russia

I drew full pencil sketches and "doodles" nearly all day for four days at Comic Con Russia. But they were all pictures of my cartoon characters from 28+ years ago. I was completely exhausted at day's end so my determination to draw something from life everyday faltered. However, I did do a sketch while waiting for my flight out of LAX.

The grid of the window frames should have been a great help in getting the correct proportions of the plane outside but I didn't get their proportions right so it affected everything else. Typical of animators/cartoonists moving into painting, this drawing is mostly line work when it would be a better exercise to think in terms of tone and shapes.

But the line work can be the under drawing for a gouache painting. It's more a matter of learning to draw the correct proportions of what's in front of me. I was happy that I was disciplined enough to sit there and keep drawing a complicated scene. True, I crapped out on the people but it was getting close to boarding time!     -- Tad