I admire the paintings of Deborah Paris who uses an indirect painting method. I had those value studies sitting around from last week so I decided to try some glazing.
This is after a couple of layers but I think I need to get some softer brushes for the technique to be effective.
Deborah Paris explains her method here.
Quick monochromatic value studies. Rather than using black, the greys were mixed with different combinations of complements and Titanium White. Some are made with Ultramarine Blue and Burnt Sienna, Alizarin Chrimson and Pthalo Green, Prussian Blue and Cad Red Medium.
All 6″ x 6″ oil on canvas, paper or board.
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8″ x 5″ ink and watercolor
This is my daughter’s dog. She’s away at college. He looks like a puppy but he’s really getting quite old, 15 or 16. That one eye is blind and he’s mostly deaf, except at dinner time. My daughter picked him out at the pound, when he was 5 and she was about 8. His papers said that he’d been an outside dog and was not good with cats but he’s never complained about sleeping in my daughter’s bed nor chased our cat. He likes to wear one of his ears flipped back. He blew his knee out, a few years ago and needed surgery and, although he spends most of his day in slumber, he still has a little bounce in his step on his walks.
I’ve been very busy with work and haven’t had time or energy to do anything but some sketching. I’ve enjoyed trying to learn a little more about goauche.
This is another quick sketch, testing out papers. This is a piece of Arches Text Wove/Velin Arches that was sent to me by a fellow Sketch Journaler, Roz Stendahl to try out.
watercolor ink and gouache
It wets more readily than the handmade paper put it is quite a bit less substantial and buckles a lot when wet.
I also did a little more testing with Noodler’s ink and it does seem to run on the Twinrocker paper I just bound into a sketchbook. I checked their website and they say that it should be waterproof on cellulose paper. The paper is cotton rag so should be cellulose. I’ve written them for advice.
I splurged and bought some handmade paper from Twinrocker Paper Mill to make my next skectchbooks. Although I like to paint with watercolor, I don’t really know what I’m doing. After I made one sketchbook, I wanted to try the paper out so I did these little sketches of our dogs on some leftover scraps.
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Watercolor and ink on Twinrocker Handmade paper
I was a little disappointed that the paper seemed to resist the watercolor more than I’m used to with the Fabriano Artistico I usually use. Maybe this is the way good watercolor paper is supposed to be. I seem to remember that you’re supposed to wet the entire paper before painting on it, which I did not do. Since I work back and forth with ink and watercolor I’d rather not have to do that. If any expert watercolorists happen to see this, I’d appreciate it if you could enlighten me on this.
The other thing I wanted to test was if the ink I use would be waterproof on these papers. I use several kinds of inks including Noodler’s and Platinum Carbon in my fountain pens. For dip pens I use Calli and Dr Martin Bombay India ink. I like to be able to paint back over ink lines with watercolor. Some inks depend on a chemical reaction with the paper to become waterproof and the reaction depends on the content of the paper. The testing I did was also a bit disappointing. Most of the inks ran when I painted over them, some worse than others. My testing was not very thorough so I still have hope that I can find a method that works for me.
This is a really weird color scheme. I wanted to see if I could make the oranges read against a red backdrop. The red is pretty much pure cadmium red medium. I found it challenging to read the values with all this red.
6″ x 6″ oil on canvas
I would have to say that the end result is pretty ugly. I don’t think I could live with this on my wall but it was an interesting exercise.
It’s my birthday today. In a previous post I mentioned that I’ve had, for many years, a project to do a self portrait in the same general size and format every year near my birthday. Here is this year’s installment.
24″ x 18″ water soluble graphite and watercolor crayon
some earlier drawings from the series
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I got some good advice from visitors that I applied to this little sketch and this is the result.
6″ x 8″ oil on canvas
What did I change? I moved the bottom of the bridge so that it didn’t align with the roof line of the building (thanks Frank) and intensified some of the values as it was pretty much all mid tone before (thanks Ujwala).
I tweaked a few other things to help distinguish between objects and probably got a better photo this time than last.
I always see something else I want to fix after I post it so I may play with it a bit more but I’m getting tired of looking at it now so I’m more likely to toss it in the drawer and move on to something else.
I appreciate the feedback both positive and critical and I think this one turned out better as a result.
