More contour drawing

More practice with contour line drawing and adding watercolour. Funny, I'm now starting to look at objects as to whether they'd be a good subject for this kind of drawing. Even if I don't actually draw it, I'm sorting out in my head where I 'd start.

This is a (somewhat skewed) drawing of a pewter candlestick with floral candle ring and a small bowl from Pier1 that sit atop an old pine secretary desk at the moment. The linework was done with a ProArt 0.8mm pen, which bleeds quite nicely when touched with a wet brush.

I also did a sketch of a matching piece of ceramic holder for salt and pepper shakers that does not want to bend to my will and be posted where I want it posted. I do love blogger as a platform - it meets my needs quite nicely most of the time, but it doesn't always let me put images where I want them.

So I end up rambling on, like I'm doing now, so that the page ends up looking as near to the way I see it in my head. Brown Tombow pen for the linework. I tried mixing the paint on the paper but it ran together into a hot mess. I was a bit more patient when doing the bowl above and am much happier with the paint flow in it.
I used to think of myself as a patient person but I'm finding out this just isn't true LOL.

Conversation

Despite some long term neglect, it seems Nuki and I are finally back on speaking terms. There's still a lot more to do with it but I'm pleased with how things are going thus far.

I have a few other ideas as well but I'm not yet happy with the drawings for them so they'll continue to float around in the ether for awhile.

New Day

Okay, so I don't hate it today LOL!

It's amazing what a figurative and literal step back will do for perspective. I was able to eliminate the weak lines of the plate with my little paint dot net program and that made a huge difference for me. Got rid of a distraction and let me look at the piece itself.

I think all that I need to do is glaze some more layers on the remaining cherries in order to get the depth of colour I'm liking in the middle left one.

Glazing is something that I don't have much experience with but there's only one way to get it so I have nothing to lose with this little study.

Still have more contour drawing to do but here's the single object I did for the first part of the assignment. It's the little sprayer bottle I use to wet my palette. Tombow marker done in my sketchbook.  The next assigment involves a still life grouping of three objects, contour drawing with watercolour applied later. I want to set up something with a variety of shapes yet have a unifying theme so will have to have a look around the house.

ETA: not sure why the image here looks like some of the vertical lines are broken. Must be how it scanned. Clicking on the image will show you what it really looks like.

On a different front Nuki is speaking to me once again so I'm going to spend the afternoon working on him and his cardinal friends.

Love and Hate Rant

There's so much about watercolour that I absolutely love but it can be the most frustrating medium to work with. When something unpredictable and beautiful happens I'm over the moon with the results. When I can't make the magic happen again, I just want to pull my hair out LOL. Take the following for example.

This started as an exercise in contour drawing - you start wherever you want but once you've started, you mustn't lift the pen from the paper, drawing in one continual line, trying not to backtrack over the lines if possible. The idea is to get you to slow down and really observe the subject. (This session of Sketchbook Skool is called Seeing after all)

Turned out to be much harder than I thought and I admit to losing patience once I made it through all of the cherries, so just ignore the piss poor plate if you will. Once the drawing was done we could go back and hit it with some colour and this is where the frustration comes in for me. I absolutely adore the look of the middle left cherry. It looks luscious and juicy and 3 dimensional to me. Happy, happy, joy, joy. But here is where the angst comes in. I painted it at the same time as the remaining cherries and I'm not nearly as pleased with them.

The funny thing is, when I was painting them, that was the one I thought I'd really screwed up - it was darker than I wanted, I lost the highlight and had to scrub it out, I inadvertently painted the stem with payne's grey instead of the undersea green - so I thought the whole thing was going to be a loss and yet I just want to pick that one cherry up and eat it LOL. And I don't even really like cherries.

(Sigh) this is one of those humbling moments where I remember all mileage is good mileage, that not everything is meant to be a finished product as long as I learned something from it. At the moment that lesson seems to be I need to screw up more often; once I've stepped away from my paints for the day I'll find a better way to phrase that LOL. The really good thing though is that I want to do this exercise again.

Nuki's not talking to me

Clearly my little inukshuk character Nuki is peeved with me. I've been neglecting him for months now, giving all my attention to new classes and ideas. Now that the holidays are approaching I've sat down and sketched out some ideas for this year's xmas cards. I have a few, one or two I really like so you would think all systems would be go to paint them. You would be wrong.

Instead, this is what shows up on my paper.  Inspired by the graphic on an Avoca HandweaversTM coffee mug - a sheep that I've dressed, not in one of their fabrics but in the family tartan of a dear friend. She's been calling to me to paint her ever since Kate brought the mug home a few weeks ago, so I'm hoping that now that I've done her, I can get into Nuki mode. Otherwise I'm slapping a xmas bow on her!

SBS Seeing Week 1

Fast and Slow exercise

One of this week's assignments is to first draw quickly, with a wet medium, the basic silhouette of an object. In my case it was a teal plastic sprayer bottle that I use to wet my palette box paints. This should be done in roughly one minute.

Then, using pen draw a much more detailed sketch over top of the first one. The hardest part for me was ignoring the painted undersketch in order to get the correct perspective for the ink sketch. I kept wanting to incorporate the painted bits LOL.

It was a lot of fun to do and I'll definitely try it again but I think the thing that surprised me the most was how recognizable the undersketch was considering it was pretty much just dashed off. Not bad for someone who has a hard time forgoing erasable pencil lines and working directly in pen. Drawing with paint is just madness I say LOL.

Now I have to finish the other part of this week's assignment which is to draw a piece of toast; a very detailed drawing of all the nooks and crannies.  Being wheat free for well over a year, obtaining the toast was the first challenge. Thanks Nan! Will post when it's completed...

Consider this as 'toast in two parts'! The basic outline and left hand side of the toast were done while doing the 'deep diving into the drawing'. Goal achieved. Then along came Cous, my carb obsessed Abyssinian.  I was so focused on my toast road map, which again was the whole point of the exercise, that he managed twice to grab it and run off with it, the little beggar. Found himself in timeout after that!

But I can see that my concentration was broken as I started in again, this time from the right hand side of the toast. Sigh. I've lost my enthusiasm for the task as well so I'm stopping here. Besides, week 2's lesson is already in my inbox and I'm ready to move on.

Autumn Goodies

We waited to celebrate Canadian Thanksgiving until this weekend when the whole family could be together.

Since Nan was making her always delicious roasted stuffed pork, Kate decided to complement this with applesauce made from scratch.  This turned out so tasty that it just had to be presented in a nicely shaped jar. And what is a jar without a pretty label.

Done with watercolour pencil on 20 lb plain white paper, hence the ripples in the scanned picture LOL.

Online Courses

"Fungi"   8in x 3in watercolour on Arches 140 lb CP paper

I so enjoyed the 'Beginnings' course from Sketchbook Skool that I have not only signed up for the second one called 'Seeing,' but I found another online course called Sketching Now -Foundations being taught by Liz Steele. I came across Liz' blog on my own  one day when I was wandering through the art blog corner of the internet a couple of months back.

Funny how things go though - she is also one of the instructors for Seeing. Liz was an architect in her previous life and it was her building sketches that drew me to her work. Plus she's a teacup afficionado and I like that quirkiness factor about her.

Seeing starts a week today and will overlap for a week or two with Foundations but that's okay. It's to be a slower paced, 12 week course with one week building on the next, that should take me through to the end of January by which time I imagine the next semester of SS will be up and running. And winter will be over before you know it!

See, this is my master plan to get through my least favourite season as quickly as possible.

Housekeeping

Lately, I've been starting things and then stopping in the middle. I have no less than 4 different things, in various stages of development, on the go in my studio. Then yesterday for some unknown reason, my creative mind was focusing on xmas cards. Possibly because it was the first day of Fall and we've been tossing around ideas for this year's celebration. Not really sure - all I know is I now have a short list of some ideas sketched.

Today was a more measureable bit of progress. I finally bit the bullet and settled on a selection of colours for my sketch palette. BUT here's the most important part - I actually put them in it! See, I had this idea of making my own paintbox, starting with the tin that comes with an inexpensive set of mathematical instruments from the big box office supply store. I then used the white plastic caps that I've been saving from small milk/cream containers as empty pans. By sticking them into the bottom of the tin with 2 sided tape I can switch them out as desired.

Because they're round, not rectangular like regular paint pans, I can only fit 11 into the tin. My final paint selection - cerulean blue, phthalo blue RS, undersea green, lemon yellow deep, raw sienna, burnt sienna, sepia, payne's grey, carbazole violet, quinacridone magenta and perylene maroon. It's pretty close but not exactly the same as the sketch above. I won't really know if it works for me until I take it for a roadtest, so more thoughts on this colour palette to come later.

I also did some much needed cleaning and refreshing of my workhorse palette. I haven't changed it since I set it up years ago and there were some colours that just weren't earning their keep anymore. In hindsight, I probably should have just flooded the whole thing and washed it out completely but a couple of slots I had just recently topped up so was loathe to waste the paint.

Through this exercise I've now become better acquainted with which of my colours are staining colours. I'm trying to clean up their little wells and damn, the paint is getting everywhere. They just don't want to be cleaned up LOL! I also learned today that paint is a cat hair magnet. OMG, the amount of hairs that I pulled out of the wells was astounding. Not really but I was impressed with what was lurking in the depths.

Now that that's all done it's back to finishing the works in progress!

Stratford sketch

During Kate's recent visit we went on a drive to nearby Stratford. While she did some shopping, I drove down by the river to do some sketching. There were lots of people enjoying the beautiful summer weather, some with their dogs, others with kids. 

As always there were plenty of Canada geese hanging around but this fellow caught my eye. Swans are such elegant, graceful creatures on the water and yet quite ungainly and awkward moving about on land. Reminded me of my earlier trip there with Nan in April to see the annual parade bringing the swans out of their winter housing and onto the river.

I did a preliminary sketch on site using a Prussian Blue watercolour pencil and then painted it in studio this morning. The background is a mishmash of blue, green and violet watercolour pencil washed over with a layer of DS Undersea Green.