Negative space

This was a good exercise in perceiving something not so readily apparent. When you think about "drawing the negative space," you usually assume that the space in question will have some bulk or color to it, so that you can look at it,  fill it in, and have your image revealed from inside it. Maybe that explanation isn't clear, so let me give an example.

This is a picture I painted last year during the 30x30 Direct Watercolor challenge. For that challenge, you weren't allowed to draw in pencil or in pen, you were only allowed to go directly to paper with paint. I picked a photograph of my friend Susan's dog, Mouse, who is primarily a white dog, and I painted the entire background around Mouse to pull her image out of the paper, only afterwards going in to add the details of face, freckles, etc. Here is my painting:

In other words, everything rust-colored on the page was painted first, around the bulk that was Mouse.

In today's challenge, however, we were to draw the negative space when that space was white. So if you were going to draw a portrait in the conventional way, you would look at your model and draw the outline of the hair, face, body, etc., looking specifically at those things for your cues. But when drawing the negative space, you look instead at the background, and draw a line that encompasses that background, which in turn isolates your individual (or in this case individuals).

I drew this one in pencil, and stopped to scan it, simply so I could show the difference (it's subtle but it's there) in drawing the background instead of drawing the foreground. It's like a contour drawing in reverse.

Once past the drawing stage, I painted this as I would anything else, but it definitely gave me a sense of what was foreground and what was background. I also cry foul on Sktchy for today, because this was definitely TWO portraits in one, and took at least twice the time to finish! And I'm still a day behind...

Day 10—30Faces30Days

"Kate and Kat" on Sktchy

Pencil, watercolors, in Bee mixed media sketchbook

Day 9

Playing catch-up tonight...

Today's challenge featured a photo with a lot going on in it, and we were suppose to pick and choose what to include—fancy jacket, glasses in hand, etc. It was pretty easy for me, because I started a new sketchbook that is 9x9 square, and with the size that I drew, there wasn't room for the hand or glasses. So instead of simplifying in that way, I decided instead that I would be simple about colors, and left the white of the paper everywhere except hair, eyes, lips, and shadows.

Her left eye is a bit too high, her nose is a bit too long, and she ended up looking more like a sulky Russian model than the nice Scottish lass that she is, but...here's Jennie!

Day 9—#30Faces30Days on Sktchy

Sepia micron pen, watercolor, in Bee mixed media sketchbook

Day 8

Well, I didn't learn much from today's demo, since it was about making black by combining a crosshatch with red, green, and blue ballpoint pens. But oh, this was a fun one to paint.

The light reflection on her face was absolutely stunning, and I got out my Naples yellow and gave her face the once-over, then worked from light to dark in shades of lemon, rose, sienna, and umber. I made MY black by combining ultramarine and burnt sienna. I didn't quite do the model justice, but I think this may be the closest I've gotten so far to catching both the light and the angle. I'm enjoying painting people!

Day 8 of #30Faces30Days

Isabelle on SKTCHY

Pencil and watercolor in Bee mixed media sketchbook

Day 7

I can say that I made it for a week. I'm not saying that I'm giving up; I'm just celebrating a one-quarter victory for the month.

Today's exercise was to set a time limit for yourself to do your drawing, so that you could prove to yourself that drawing daily doesn't have to be a daunting prospect, it can be 15 minutes and done. So I set the timer for 15 minutes, and drew Andy with a Uniball.

Of course, since drawing isn't really my thing, I had to go ahead and watercolor old Andy, so I set the timer for half an hour and got that done too. I could have messed about a little longer, but honestly, it's the messing about that usually gets me into trouble, so here is the finished Andy. I had drawn his hat a little small, so watercoloring it also gave me the chance to adjust the dimensions slightly without revealing to the eye that it wasn't quite right. There wasn't much I could do about his ear, which is also a little small, so I let that stand.

Uniball Vision pen, watercolor, sketchbook

Day 6

Day six had an odd theme: Finding motivation in a word.

Basically, the contention of today's artist was that 30 days is a long time, and at points along the way we may get discouraged and want to quit, so we should look outside the drawing and perhaps into our own lives to find motivation to continue. One of the ways she does that is to pair a word or words—maybe a caption, but maybe just a feeling or a thought—with her drawing. So with today's model, we were asked to find a word that either expressed something about the drawing, or about where we were personally. I found one that worked for both.

Today's model, Jason, is a cool dude but he also looks like a guy with a lot on his mind. It seems like there must be a lot of worrying going on for a guy his age to develop those creases in that forehead. He's not an unhappy guy, but he's also not so lighthearted. So my word for him was "intense." This also worked for the more dramatic use of color in this piece. I wanted to get splashier and more random than I did, but I have this compulsion to smooth things out, to connect and fill in everything! Maybe by the end of the month I can get past that.

I'm also feeling that word right now, for a lot of reasons. January snuck up on me! On February 3, my very first online course (Young Adult Literature) goes live at Library Juice Academy, and I've just started developing the class. The material is all there—I can create the new class from the UCLA version—but I've never taught online before, and it's a whole different experience. Not only do I have to pare back a 10-week class to give as much content as possible within six weeks, but I also have to rewrite lectures into half-hour segments, redo powerpoints to illustrate those scripts, and then record audio class units.

January is also a big deal because I'm appearing at two Performers' Showcases for five different library systems to promote myself as an arts and crafts teacher for teens for summer reading club.

There are two art shows into which I would like to enter some art for the first time: One is a plein air show that benefits the California Wildlife Foundation, and for that I have to paint at least two paintings. The other is the Valley Watercolor Society annual juried show, into which I can also enter two paintings.

And, of course, there is the daily Sktchy 30 Faces challenge. Not to mention a little social life here and there—a retirement party, an evening at the symphony, a lunch here and a movie there.

Oh, and the IRS may be looking for me....

INTENSE is the word. Thanks, Jason, for modeling.

Portraits, Days 4 & 5

These were interesting exercises, but I couldn't really relate to the first one, since the expectation was that we would draw and shade in pencil, and I don't do that—haven't since life drawing back in the late '90s. I do enjoy working with either charcoal or conté crayons on toned paper, and would have been happy to do this assignment that way, except that I had no supplies in the house and, now that there's no Continental Art Supply three miles away, no way to get some without an expedition to Blick in Santa Monica.

I therefore did the assignment in paint instead, which kind of defeats the purpose. The idea was to shade in only one direction, instead of cross-hatching. The second part of the assignment was to preserve the highlights and whites around the figure herself, to distinguish her from the background and give her a bit of a glow. So, I painted all in one direction, and saved out my whites. It's not the most impressive thing I've ever done, but I suppose it was good practice. This is Kelly, all in shades of brown.

Today's exercise was much more to my taste, but I blew it by working too large, so I didn't include either the top of her head or her crossed arms below, which would have made it a more powerful portrait.

The lesson was that when you have someone in profile, rather than all of their features (eyebrows, eyes, nose, mouth, chin) being on parallel lines running across the face, they are instead on intersecting lines that meet up in a vanishing point in the direction in which the subject is looking. I did manage to make the vanishing point thing work, slanting the eyebrows and eyes up a bit, the nose on the level, the mouth on a slight downward trajectory, and so on; but because I drew the sections of vanishing point too large, my portrait was likewise too big for the page.

It's not a bad portrait, however. I liked that her cheek is so close to matching her rosy background that it almost fades into it. I also used the lesson we learned on Haley, which was to make note of the extreme highlights (light bounce) and save them. The dress was supposed to be white polka dots on the navy, but I didn't have the patience for that today. Another time....

This is Jenell Del Cid. #30Faces30Days

Pencil, watercolor, mixed-media sketchbook.