Touchstones

Touchstones (C) Susan Langdon 2017

mixed media on 8 x 10 CP watercolour paper

I am taking an online course of artistic self discovery called Touchstone, offered by an English artist who I found through P interest. Her name is Tara Leaver and she is amazingly generous with her ideas and philosophies. She is also a gifted teacher when it comes to communicating those things as well!

This piece was done to commemorate this chapter of exploration for me and I've utilized a photo reference belonging to Karen Broemmelsick. Used with permission accorded to members of the FB group Photos for Artists, to which I belong. 

So pleased with this!!

Hoarding Bits and Bobs

I'm always amazed when something that seems to have gone wrong in the first pass can eventually be turned into a much better something with a little time and perspective. 

This was a random doodle basically done as a stream of consciousness painting last Fall. No pre-planning just sketch out a pumpkin and some indian corn using only my brush. 

Wasn't happy with it - the husks from the corn were going every which way, defying gravity; it just wasn't speaking to me. And yet, I couldn't put it in my scrap/testing paper pile. Fast forward to this year where I had forgotten what my original intent was behind the exercise and sat down to see what I could salvage. This is what I came up with.

The husks are still as willy nilly as ever but i feel like this was more what I was hoping for. Knowing me, I'll continue to play with it - the husks continue to cry out for more attention in terms of texture and shadow - but at least I don't feel like I should be using it to test colours on either. 

EDM2015 - something with a handle

This item is pretty much somewhere within my vicinity at all times so it was not a hard choice for today's prompt. However, it's been ages since I painted glass and I soon remembered why LOL.

At first I thought I'd do the whole thing in watercolour pencil but given the tooth of the paper, I wasn't happy with that so I decided to wet it and see what happened. Well we were off to the races then as I was chasing colour all over, trying to maintain the subtle shading of areas on the handle and heavy bottom.

Minimizing brushstrokes in the coffee also proved a challenge - and that blue-grey, which appears such an innocuous hue in dry pencil, certainly got bluer than intended on the handle.

Once I was able to step away from it and let it dry, I'm actually quite pleased with those two parts and would like to beef up the top half of the glass but it already feels overworked to me so best leave it to fresh eyes tomorrow.

ETA 30/5 - glad I painted this because a little furry someone with wandering paws decided to give it a push and see what happened. I really liked this mug - great size, good balance in my hand. It will be hard to replace.

EDM2015 - bottle of herbs/spices

This is as far as I've gotten today - took me awhile to decide what I wanted to draw and then trying to get my sketch right means it's not going to see any colour today.

Haven't decided on what to put in the bowl yet. Think it will depend on what colour palette I select. Possibly tomatoes or garlic heads or red onions. Can't be too big because I need to keep the peppermill and glass jar in scale. Maybe some lemons as if I was making lemon pepper chicken. That would work. 



Lemons it is! I also decided to ink this one. Will update it when the paint is on and dry. It's rather grey today so the sunny yellow lemons should help brighten things up.

This is what happens when you're not paying attention

SEYMOUR
 

So I set out to do a simple still life of a potted tulip. Seems straightforward enough right?

Well, I was focusing on the terracotta pot because one of my favourite things about watercolour is the lovely mix of colours you can end up with. I wanted it to look worn and slightly dirty; a pot with character not some newbie fresh off the shelf.

So far so good, until I looked up and my lovely clay pot suddenly had this mutant ninja tulip growing out of it LOL. It doesn't look as bad here on my monitor but trust me, in real life it looks ready to devour the viewer. The more I tried to tame it with shadow and light the bigger it grew.

I'm going to keep it, because if nothing else it makes me laugh every time I look at it!  As for the terra cotta pot - mission accomplished LOL.

Kickin Up My Heels

Kicking Up my Heels(c)2015 Susan Langdon
 8x10 in on 140 lb CP Strathmore paper
 

Considering I'm a diehard Crocs girl, I'm not sure where the inspiration for these came from but I sure had a ball painting them.

I like the right shoe better than the left but I think that is only because of the foreshortened perspective, something I struggle with but admittedly am getting better at the more I draw it.

I'm really pleased with this, my first attempt at leopard print. it doesn't really show here but in the original there's a fair bit of texture so that the material looks more touchable. All that's left to do is get them matted up and packaged to go to Nan's shop for her April Fools Sale. Who knows, they just might follow somebody home LOL.

Another post

Nothing posted for a couple of weeks and then two in one day. This is one of the sketches I did when we were studying contour drawings a number of weeks ago in Sketchbook Skool.

I wasn't sure how I felt about it at first but now, after not seeing it for awhile, I'm quite taken with the results. Gotta love complimentary colours!

It was done using a photo reference from a class I took years ago where we all brought items in according to the theme of the week - fruit, vegetables, glass, metallic etc and then spent the afternoon putting together still life setups to photograph for our own reference libraries.