Just a Tad

Pushing Outside the Comfort Zone

Gotta admit to a big screw up right up top. I added a darker blue pastel pencil to vignette the image. However, when I went to put wax on the painting, I was thinking "watercolor pencils." The difference is that you can smear protective wax medium on watercolor pencil, no problem. When you do that to pastel, it makes a huge mess. I corrected it a bit in photoshop in the above version.

On the plus side, by not coating it with wax, I was able to go back in and reactivate the paint to make corrections, mostly for the better. Normally, I put on wax when I'm tired of working on the painting, or think it's finished, or to purposely seal it to move on and avoid over working it. But here I made subtle corrections that really helped.

I painted this from a news photograph. It was a simple composition with the challenge of capturing the glow of the candle on the center woman, along with the warm light hitting her face from out of frame. I didn't quite get what was in the photo but I think it's a striking color scheme. I see that I wiped over the mask strings around her ear. But the net result of the changes are positive.

What's really outside my comfort zone is the fact that I'd try her face at all. I haven't tried close up humans since my cosplaying vikings piece. Human faces are just more shapes with varying values and color temperature. They should be no different than painting a flower. But we know what humans are supposed to look like. When it's a little off it can quickly look weird, even alien.

I'm still not sure what I want to do with painting. All these things I'm trying in my sketchbook are about getting more comfortable with the basics. Ultimately, I think I want to do more fanciful things. Early on. I planned on doing a western painting of cowboys riding herd on a bunch of giant bees. I did a test painting of a single bee and decided I had more to learn. Still may return to that one. But for now, I'm trying to get good enough so that I can do a decent job of getting my imagination down on canvas. Actually, more likely a heavy weight watercolor paper.

Here's the un-shopped image.  Stay safe!

Palette Challenge

My palette was a bit messier than this after I finished some tinting exercises. Actually, not exercises really, just answering my own questions about how certain earthtones looked as they were mixed with more and more white. But painting little squares takes very little paint which left a lot untouched. Even though I paid for my paints from the money I earn at cons, my "fun money" if you will, I hate to waste paint.

So I decided to try a painting or two using along with permanent white. I think I add some Cadmium Red to the second image but other than that it was all from leftover paint. The "downside" of this is that much of the painting is more like working with watercolor because there's no really juicy paint to dip the brush into. But it still can get thick enough to be opaque. My first painting was of a landscape just outside Sedona, AZ. That's Bell Rock on the left. I have one work in progress shot.

I laid in the basic colors quickly. I should have continued to work the whole painting, but instead I started with the foreground and cliffs on the right. I increased contrast and added details. Fell into some of my overworking habits on the cliffs and they began to look like a row of cylinders instead of a flat cliff face. Then life intervened and the painting sat on my easel where I saw it everyday. I kept thinking about what I needed to do: try to get the cliffs to look flat and recapture some of the glow of the light on its face that I had earlier then add more contrast to Bell Rock. But I wasn't looking forward to it.

Finally, I looked at it and remembered the wonderful question my wife had asked months before, "Isn't it supposed to be fun?" I decided to just take the tape off and call it done. I'm constantly berating myself for overworking the paint and realized that Bell Rock looked fine as a loose representation that looked fine. I will definitely be returning to the red rocks. We used to vacation there all the time and I want to be ready to really paint them pleine air.

The process of creating the painting below was the opposite experience. I think it came out great. I can tell because I look at it and can't believe I did it. Done all in one day, I loosely blocked in the major colors, concentrating on placing the darks. It might have gone even more quickly if I wasn't bingeing a rewatch of Ted Lasso. It's from a photo from the Paris catacombs but I pushed more color into it. I didn't worry about copying the photo exactly. I was more interested in controlling the focus to concentrate on the front skulls.

That catches me up to where I am now with a painting started on my easel from this morning. I stopped after laying in the basic colors because the paper buckled and I needed it to dry more. And then democracy was threatened by insurrectionists storming the Capitol building in Washington DC and I felt the need to watch.

 

Stay Safe!    -- Tad

Rusty Birds

More painting from life, albeit just another spot in the backyard. This is a wind mobile in the garden, a pair of very rusty birds balanced on a simple cup at the top of a pole. Why not? The point was to get out and do something.

I have to say that I didn't like this painting for most of the time working on it. I don't have any process photos so you'll have to take my word for how messy and mediocre it was. But ultimately I embraced the idea that the artist is not a camera. Yes, the foreground bird is too small and I wish I could change that without wiping out what's there, but at some point I tried making it a better painting instead of an accurate representation.

I left out the black steel fence that's behind the scene. The vertical shadow at the tip of left wing of the right bird, and another over the bend in his right wing were completely random. However, as I look at them now, they suggest how subtly I could have laid in the fence, putting all the blue grey foliage behind it, where it actually is.

Probably because I was working with a limited palette of the colors left from the previous painting, I was frustrated that I couldn't get closer to the color of the large bush. As I shifted to the mindset of the painter instead of a photographer, I stopped worrying about it. I worked in cooler colors around the left bird to make it pop more. I also made the shadows on the stucco cooler, as well as some of the underside shadows on the birds.

Ultimately the stucco is one of my favorite things in this one. If I painted an adobe mission doorway like this, it could be really striking. My wife loves the rust on the birds.

I'm learning that even when I don't feel completely in control when trying to match painted color to life, I can still produce something I like. Again, it's just a page in a sketchbook. I'm not producing "masterpieces" meant for sale. I still can't dive into a painting with complete confidence but working through it doesn't feel as arduous.

                                             --Tad

Painting from Life

Maybe it's from a career of sketching character designs, storyboard notes, and outlining story ideas on yellow legal pads, but I find it hard to draw on an easel when out looking for things to paint. Or maybe it's because I'm mostly stuck in my house and find my backyard boring, but I've done most of my paintings from photos. Even two of my "glow" paintings, the rose and the backlit trees, were practically outside my door, I took pictures of them and worked inside. But I know I must get out and paint things out in the world to improve. I'll get there, and here's a couple of baby steps.

First I want to say, I really like the above painting. The experience of working on two Hellboy animated film was a career highlight and I ended up with a lot of Hellboy toys. One of the best is this 18" tall, vinyl, Hellboy figure. And when I was wondering what I might paint, I looked up to see him, barely lit in the morning light coming around the Venetian blinds.

I think I did the pencil drawing in my lap or desk and definitely used a ruler for the straight lines. This one didn't go through an ugly stage where I get depressed but fight my way out. I didn't take a WIP shot, but it helped when I allowed myself to be messier at the start, especially with the blinds. I laid down a transparent wash of the tones which let me see the tones and values as I worked.

I rarely go back into a piece after it's "finished." Here's what it looked like when I first posted it. The scan is more accurate than the one above, showing Hellboy blending back into the shadows.

I was pretty happy with it. But the blinds were a bit sloppy and the light on the window sill needed to be brighter. There was also a jagged shadow cast by the blinds that I had pretty much ignored. So, having learned the lesson of "Waxing Too Soon" on the previous painting, and since I had a clear idea of what I wanted to accomplish, I went back in.

The top is the final that was waxed for posterity. I got the shadow pattern but the sill color is probably too bright. But I had worked the surface too much and wisely quit while I was ahead. The blinds are better but don't quite capture the look of being lit from below. I think they need a more even dark shadow at the top and a sharper, straighter end shape on the right. Because the corner is rounded, it can look like the slats are thick and catching light from above. I should have looked its reversed image in a hand mirror for a fresh perspective. I have one for just that purpose. Still, I call it a win.

One more sketch to post and I'll be caught up. I actually went outside and painted something in the backyard, then detailed it in my "studio" just like a real pleine air artist! Nothing great but at least I got out! 

The next couple of days do not have time for painting. But I want to try a simple subject like the above, maybe rocks underwater. There might be a lot of rocks but it would be an personal "assignment" with a clear goal. But since I don't have a stream outside, it's probably bac to photographs!

                                              Stay Safe!  --Tad

Less Than the Sum of Its Parts

In the last post I said that if I was smart I'd space out the posting of my paintings backlog. I'm not that smart, just distracted. Anyway, the above are two parts of the same gouache painting I did in the last week of November. I kind of like each on their own. I wanted to try rocks again, ideally with some transparent water to show the rocks below. I grabbed a frame from a high-rez YouTube video and ended up cropping all but a little bit of water out of it.  I was working with a limited palette at first a couldn't get close to the colors of the reference, or even a satisfactory tone overall. Here's what I was working from:

Looking at it now, "How did I get so far off?" It's so much darker and monochromatic. To be fair, you're not seeing the painting when I was still trying to capture what was in the reference. I gave it a rest then looked at it from afar and thought, That's looking fairly good. I just have to take it a rock at a time." Not the best strategy for a strong painting, but I was more interested in problem solving and playing with the water. Dove back in and, to my eye, things got worse.

I have a fantastic book on landscapes by James Reynolds who was an western impressionist painter with realistic results. He wrote that he'd often move or add trees or other pieces of landscape to make a better painting. His pointed out that a painter is not a photographer. Your goal is to make a great painting not to perfectly capture what you're looking at.

Well, I was not on a path to greatness so I stopped trying to capture the background rocks and made them much darker. I went the opposite way with the right side of the painting and added bright autumn foliage. And then I fought with that dang water puddle. I could not get the transparent feel. Some of that was working so small, these paintings are only three and a half inches high. The other problem was that I kept reactivating the lower layers of paint. I need to try an all puddle painting, maybe even doing a master copy of an existing painting. It's just something I want to conquer. It's like working out a puzzle.

So here's what I ended up with:

Geez, looking at this side by side with the reference, "How did that left center rock get so small? Especially since it's the source of the painting's major problem?" Quick aside, I had purchased a jar of Dorland's Wax Medium to preserve the paintings from moisture. Not usually used in sketchbooks, but that's all I work in. Again, I am too precious with these sketchbooks. Anyway, after a couple of days of playing with this one, I decided to call it quits and coated it with the wax. Once you do that, you can no longer paint on it. Which means I could correct anything.

Usually, I don't try correcting anything because I'm tired of working on it. Mentally I just want to be through. The Hellboy painting in the next post is a case where I liked it so much, and was clear on what I wanted to correct, that I did go back in and am pleased with the result. But after I waxed this one, I saw it with fresh eyes and realized the weird pear-shaped rock in the center looked more like an actual pear than rock, didn't feel connected to the ground, and had awkward shared outlines with the smaller rock beside it. And the smaller rock also feels like it's unconnected to the ground because of a very few paint strokes. The mossy rock in the left foreground is mostly warm with some cool colors where it faces away from the light. But those cool colors look like they're the bottom edge of the small rock - just because a couple of grey strokes at the bottom. Lesson learned?

I highly recommend the James Reynolds book. The landscape book is hard to come by but Traildust is easily attainable. At the time of me writing this, it's still on Amazon. I used to show it to background painters to examine how he used shadow and light in paintings like "Monsoon." Alas, our schedules and budgets never allowed for the scene specific level of color design that would be required to capture it. Little did I know when I bought the book at a shop in Sedona, Arizona that James was probably painting just a few miles away.

Check his website here: http://jamesreynoldsartist.com/

 

                          Stay Safe --Tad

Capturing the Glow

I'm behind in posting the few paintings I've done. If I was smart, blog-wise, I'd post these over a couple of weeks. But I'm not seriously trying to build up numbers. This is sort of a creative diary for myself. Plus, seeing the creative struggles of someone who has successfully created art and entertainment, might help young people who are struggling themselves. I also make similar notes in my sketchbook.

So, instead of retyping my notes, I'll just show you what some pages look like.

Stay safe and healthy. And keep creating!        -- Tad

Backyard Bobcat

I live in Simi Valley, California, a small valley to the west of the much larger and more famous San Fernando Valley which pop culture has designated The Valley." It's not wilderness by any means. The Toobe Hooper/Speilberg "Poltergeist House" is just a mile or two away from me. It's suburbia. But my house is backed up to a mostly undeveloped hillside. The shrubbery is home to many birds, squirrels, rabbits and the like which draw predators like hawks, coyotes and, making an appearance for the first time, bobcats. There are mountain lions in the hills but I've never seen one here. So here he is.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So since I had pictures of this cool cat, I thought I'd try painting him. Pretty quickly, I got lost in the spots. I did take a couple of process photos. I tried laying in basic values first. I believe I was working with a limited palette, although I couldn't tell you what it was. I have to say the hues of the bobcat's fur eluded me, even before I got to the spots but I soldiered on.

I went in, getting more detailed that I originally set out to do, although I don't know how to approach impressionistic bobcat spots. I got to a point where I was just going to call it done and move on. The cat seemed chunkier than it should be and I realized the forward leg had no stretch to it. I don't know how I missed that paw placement in relation to its nose.

I remembered James Gurney videos where he just wiped off half the gouache on the paper and painted the correction. And so I set out to do the same. You can see the lines where I marked the correction.

In addition to changing its leg position, I lifted its stomach to reveal the horizontal bar of the fence behind it. You know, the fence that he should be on the other side of.  I'm glad I went back and did the changes. I never conquered the spots or the color of his fur but I learned things in the process. That's the point of this sketchbook. So the final version is below.

 

 

 

 

Triads not Trifids nor Daleks

James Gurney put out a new "Color in Practice" video about Triads. Although it sounds sciencefictioney to me, it's simply a way to understand and practice the possibilities of a limited palette. Gurney puts out a ton of informational videos on YouTube but this series is the closest thing to having a formal course with him. There's also a Facebook group where you can share your painting struggles/adventure with others. James also pops in from time to time with a challenge and even awards prizes! Go to YouTube, visit his website, or best of all, buy his book Color and Light for a complete explanation.

The above is a page out of my 8.5x11 inch sketchbook. I picked my triads before I picked something to paint. The images are out of the royalty free site, UnSplash. The machinery photo is by Denny Müller of Germany. It's only part of the photo which had a glow about it. I would like to do a larger version that included more of the photo with a wider palette. The illusionary "glow" is what I would like to emphasize in a painting. Who knows? Maybe I'll return to it in the future.

After the fact, I realized that I did a pretty good job of drawing the machinery which is rare for me. The limited colors worked fine, not in duplicating the photo but in creating a harmonious painting. Because I mostly used paint that had dried on the palette from the triad chart, much of the painting is basically a watercolor. I think the transparency helped in keeping the contrast.

I'm less happy with the breakfast scene because I lost the feeling of weight and floppiness of the top pancake. After the border tape was off, I realize that, in concentrating on the color and highlights on the blueberries, I made them too big which threw off the size relationships in the entire painting! The lack of contrast in the sketch isn't helped by the black background of the blog and the high contrast painting next to it.

I'm in that mental spot of stalling. I need to paint more. I'm just not doing it. I found some nice 4K videos with great scenery but they're not things that I could fit in the sketchbook. Excuses, excuses.

Next: Bobcat!

 

Yay! Did It! Wait... There's More?

 

In the previous post, I talked about the last painting in my sketchbook.  I was excited about the idea. I almost did it before the last page but stopped myself in favor of sketchbook symmetry.

This is going to be one of those "Just how messed up is your brain and do many artists go through this?" posts.

 

I painted that last piece on August 12. I painted the carnival piece about a month later. Why couldn't I get myself to pick up the brush again? As near as I can figure, it was three things. First, the idea of finishing my sketchbook with that painting was fixed in my mind as an endpoint. Even though I had ongoing lessons at Schoolism, I had completed the book that started with my first painting of this self-improvement journey I started a year ago. Maybe it was a subconscious stop sign. On the other hand, this was probably the least of the three.

Secondly, the last painting turned out well, much better than my first page, but it wasn't as good as my previous painting of the mountain stream. Any other page gets a critique from me or at least a "Next time I'll try to --" But that stream not only still looks good to me but makes me want to get back in there and play with the illusion of water covered rocks again. I don't think it was a complete fluke. But there are definitely paint strokes that create an illusion I wasn't aware of at the time. Can I do it again? Or better, can I paint something completely different that I can be that positive about? What if I can't? So, it's a bit of a fear thing.

Finally, the next class assignment was completely out of my comfort zone. It was that photo of the County Fair after sunset. One advantage of having a yearly subscription to Schoolism is that you can take all the classes you want or skip around. One advantage of being retired is that I'm not trying to squeeze in classes around work or taking them to increase my employment potential. I love Nathan Fowkes work and learned plenty from his Landscape Sketching in Gouache class. But the goal of Nathan's class is to get you comfortable making quick sketches outside, from life. Between Covid lockdowns and  100˚F+ heat waves, I was not getting out much. And my current focus is not on painting quick sketches. So I had already decided to switch courses. But I knew I had to do that County Fair assignment because it didn't require going anywhere and I was scared of it.

Tons of people, complicated scene, dark, dark values, all things that weren't yet in my skill set. In his critique of other student work, he commented that no one was going as dark as the photo. I guess I could've gone darker but had trouble with the limited palette. There was no magic moment or revelation that got me painting again. Maybe just some internal shame. What was I going to do? Dump all my paints and stop?

The painting came out much more impressionistic than intended although that's exactly what is intended in the class. I did get some of the glow of the electric lights. And the suggestion of structures instead of detailing everything was fine. It wasn't that I was pleased at the end but it meant a lot that I survived.

That second painting is an assignment I gave myself. Although I found the location on Google Street View, it's actually a master copy of a painting by Daniel Aldana whose work I really like. He captures lighting in a way that reminds me of James Reynolds. Reynolds was an impressionistic painter that somehow captured the reality of a scene more than those who blend and smooth their strokes to chase photo realism.

I didn't want to put Daniel's painting on my page in case some sort of internet labeling linked it only to me instead of him. Anyway, I decided to try another master copy because the black and white ones I did a while back were a great morale booster for me. I tried scenes that I would never attempt on my own. I figured that's what I needed.

Except I'd do it in color.

That won't be hard.

It shouldn't have been hard but I made it hard. Master copies aren't supposed to be exact duplicates. Working through one should teach you about approaching the same challenges the original artist did. I learned but spent too much time trying to duplicate the exact tones and values of the original. There are places where I came close but many that I not only missed but put down several layers of paint getting to the wrong result. If I  had done this painting from life, I'd be damned proud. You should definitely check out the link to Daniel's page and scroll down to see the original.

But I survived that too. Then James Gurney put out a new video about color triads and started a new Facebook group. That'll be in my next post.

And then this happened in my backyard...

Nice subject but damn. That's a lot of spots!                          --Tad

 

 

 

 

 

Last Page is the First Page

 

Somewhere along the line, I decided to use the last page of my sketchbook to revisit the subject matter of the first page. It would be the clearest way to demonstrate to myself what I had learned since I started the sketchbook on September 22 of last year. I did the painting above on August 12, so around 11 months of painting, reading, taking online classes and fighting my fears, ridiculous as those may be.

So here's the photo. It's a storefront in Durango, Colorado. Obviously, not taken with any thought of artistry. It was taken to document the place. As near as we can tell from records, that was the site of a bottling company started and run by my wife's great grandfather. It's the building to the left of the awnings. I look at the white wall of the alley and imagine it to be the original wall that her ancestor touched.

 

And here's my first attempt. I had watched a ton of painting videos, especially those of James Gurney. I built an easel to sit on a tripod just like his. I bought the same paints he used and the same brushes from the videos. He worked so methodically and logically that I felt well prepared to start. Of course, I was missing that key ingredient of talent, and practice, and experience.

 

So when I hit the last page, I examined the photo with more experienced eyes. The most obvious lesson that came to mind is that an artist doesn't have to be a camera. I could move objects to simplify the composition or ignore them. I also didn't have to paint the whole photo. The things that interested me were my great grandfather-in-law's building, the mountain and the sky. So I decided to turn my sketchbook and its side and make a vertical composition.

The next decision was to change the time of day. I decided to attempt early morning, with a rosy sky and the building partially in shadow. So I found some paintings of early morning and tried to pick out the color schemes that would work. If I didn't do this, I would have been starting at a disadvantage. A midday photo with a lack of shadows and nothing special about it. Plus, I wanted to try this as an artistic challenge to keep me interested. So I did a little scrap paper color sketch to figure out the "colors of morning" that I'd use.

So on closer examination, the car was actually red. Also the building was much more complicated than it appeared in the original painting. It definitely had to be simplified but I felt it needed a little more detail since it would be the center of attention in the new painting.

My intent was to make the values of the mountain be closer to those in the sky. That would push them farther into the distance or shroud them in fog. The little scrap sketch arguably does this better than the final but the value is too dark and a bit muddy. The point was to clearly make the building the focus on the picture.

I warmed the white of the trim with yellow to suggest a warm light of the sun and opted for a gentle gradation of light to dark on the building instead of adding a harsh line of a shadow cast by an unseen building.

On the whole, I was fairly pleased. It wasn't the home run of the mountain stream but I approached it with a plan that I mostly carried out. I had certainly improved over the year. But looking at it for this post, weeks later, I see that the mountain should be a lighter value to blend with the sky. The building doesn't pop out as much as it should. I think if I made the top trim a bit brighter and the trees behind it a little darker and cooler, there would be a greater sense of depth.

I scanned it into Photoshop to test my theories. I also brightened up the top of the storefront, not just the trim. It would've been nice to have caught those the first time around but it shows my thinking is on the right track. Onto a new sketchbook!

                                --Tad