Draw with me

A little vehicle practice for Draw with Me today with Danny. Quick and not so accurate!

Reading theme

I may have mentioned a few times that I want to do more paintings with a reading theme and then possibly sell the images on various products online, attached to my identity as The Book Adept. Although I have painted a few that I like and am using as Facebook and website art, I haven't done anything specifically towards this goal for a while. So I decided to do a Deb Weier special with that intent. Or I may do two or three!

Some of you may recognize a part of this image, since this person and this particular photo of this person have modeled for me before. This time, however, I took a more colorful and whimsical approach to the subject, and also didn't identify a specific book that he was reading, but allowed it to be a generic "good book." This time I also included his beloved companion, although I'm not sure I did that subject justice. I got carried away with sketchy line work, and at one point considered ditching the whole thing and starting over, but instead I gessoed out large parts and managed to salvage it. I'm not entirely happy with the result, but I went with it.

Here is the first portrait I did of Michael:

And here is the new one, a little exaggerated in DW style, with his furry friend, and some dialogue...

My scanner was clipping the top of his head and the border at top and bottom, so I performed surgery and took off the bottom and right borders. I think it still works..... I'm going to have to remember to either work smaller or buy a bigger scanner!

Mixed media: pencil, Daler Rowney inks, Paul Jackson watercolors, gel pens, Uniball, on Fluid 140-lb. watercolor paper.

Images from chaos

The third exercise for Deb Weiers's class is to make a background and then to sit with it, observe it, and see what emerges. As in, are there people's features buried within the scribbles and zigzags of the gouache underlayer begging to come out? Are there little critter faces peeking at you between the colors you mixed and spread and flung about? If so, find them and reveal them!

I must confess I was skeptical of this process...and then I saw the first cat. And the second cat. And the third cat.... The more I squinted and scanned the page, the more revealed themselves to me. So I started sketching them in with white pen, and then I discovered that they weren't only cats, they were some of them cat gods—a cat buddha, the goddess Bastet, the Mayan leopard god, and a few others whose provenance might be sketchy but whose regal attitude required recognition. So many, in fact, that they began crowding one another off the page. So I gave each of them the forms they had chosen, overlapped them where necessary, and filled up the page with "Cats and Deities."

Here is the first stage, with just the background and the first few cats to reveal themselves to me, just so you can see the process:

And here is the finished piece, in which the gods have emerged in a sort of Chagall-like floaty night sky.

It's a bit messy and confusing, but I didn't have the heart to do what I probably should have, which is to edit out a few in favor of clarity for the others, and then black in the background to highlight them. I'll have to try that technique (which is actually part of Lesson Three) later, when personalities aren't fighting to see the light, and also when I receive my order of black gouache from my friend Dick Blick, because I don't think India ink would have been a sufficient blackout medium.

Gesso, Daler Rowney acrylic inks, watercolors, LuminArté fluorescent paints, Uniball, gel pens, on 140-lb. Fluid watercolor paper, 9x12 inches.