Gouache...sort of

The Sktchy challenge this year is half and half, watercolor and gouache. So far I have only done watercolor because, although I bought some tubes of gouache, that was about a year ago, and since I don't use it much, I put it away "somewhere safe" and haven't been able to find it. Well, today I found three tubes of it. Don't ask me why some of it would be in one location but not the rest. I found ultramarine, primary yellow, and burnt sienna, but for the portrait I was going to paint, I also needed black, white, and red. So I used gesso for my white, and substituted watercolor in Payne's Gray and Quin Red, mixing it and using it thickly like gouache, for the others.

The problem with gouache portraits is, you can go on forever. Watercolor is an unforgiving medium, in the sense that once it soaks into the paper, it's there, and mostly immovable, especially if it's a staining color. Also, even though watercolor paper is forgiving to a point, more than three or four or six glazes, particularly if you are a "scrubby" painter, is pretty much all it will tolerate before it starts coming apart.

With gouache, however, you can just keep painting over the top. And since you can mix it to be translucent, you can also glaze and get some effects from the paint underneath. But you can't make the mistake of trying to treat it just like watercolor, because it dries more quickly and has a much flatter appearance.

Previous to this, I have been wildly unhappy with any effort I made in gouache, because of that flatness. But today I had a little revelation, because the teacher was an expressionist painter and the portrait wasn't so much about the model but more about the colors and effects he liked that conveyed a feeling. Once I followed his lead and started painting like that, my painting quit looking as literal as a coloring book and took on a little glamour.

I certainly couldn't deliver the kind of thing on first try that Nicolai Gánichev, St. Petersburg painter, achieved...(also, her nose is too long) but letting him direct me in a more impressionist (?) direction certainly helped the quality of my gouache painting. Maybe I will learn to like it after all.

"Abstract Girl"—pencil, gouache, gesso, watercolor, on Fluid 140-lb. coldpress watercolor paper, 9x12 inches.

Familiar territory

Day 11's Sktchy artist, Nadyia Duff, paints in a style similar to my lately evolved one, using both watercolor and pen to define her subjects. The only difference is that she uses pan watercolors (not colors from the tube squeezed into a palette), and they were both better and worse than what I use for the style she was teaching.

Pan watercolors tend to be light on pigment, so it's hard to get rich colors. Additionally, they are a little chalky, because they are much more opaque due to the addition of white, or filler, or however they make them (I confess I'm ignorant of the exact difference, except in workability and appearance—and price!). In her case, however, it worked for her, because she was focused on building up somewhat painterly layers of pale pastels, and her entire palette consisted of pastels! Even the one she called "black" looked like a pale Payne's Gray. (I have to say I winced repeatedly as she scrubbed her brushes around in the color, trying to pick up enough on her brushes. With my Paul Jacksons, all I have to do is touch the tip of a wet brush to the color and it's loaded up.)

So my challenge was to mix and layer my more vibrant and much more transparent colors in a way that they would give approximately the same effect, without adding white or doing anything to make them either paler or more opaque.

I feel like I succeeded fairly well, with the exception of that ear, which I overworked to the point where it was not the same "color" as anything else, and I couldn't lift any of it. But I'm pretty happy with the rest of the face for maintaining highlights and using colors in the same way Nadyia did to define the light and shadows.

She is a little more eclectic than I am about her pen work. I stuck to my Uniball, and used a little judicious white gel pen here and there. She had about five different pen widths and colors on call, so hers came out looking more "mixed media" than mine.

I loved the model—his long head, his big, beautifully defined "schnozz," his curly hair and slightly devilish beard and smile. This was a fun one.

"Vida Claudio"—pencil, Daler Rowney inks, Paul Jackson watercolors, Uniball pen, Signo white gel pen, on Fluid 140-lb. coldpress watercolor paper, 9x12 inches.

Fun one

Another artist who likes lots of color, in the background and in the face—yes! This was a fun one, first putting down a smudgy background of four or five colors, then drawing, and then painting over the top. It's hard to know when to quit fiddling and stop—I wish I had been able to save more whites and highlights, and there are color areas that got a little muddy, but I'm pretty happy with her. And it was interesting doing a profile, which I don't think I have ever done! This is Kennedy (the teacher introduced the muse with a name for once). What a beautiful woman she is, and so fun to paint. Thanks to Sophie McPike on Sktchy for the lesson!

"Kennedy"—pencil and Paul Jackson watercolor on Fluid 140-lb. coldpress paper, about 8.5x11.5 inches.

A new style(?)

Well, apparently I can paint this way, if I try, even without mimicking Milind Mulick step by step. I followed the process he shared yesterday, making my pencil sketch rough, using geometric shapes and then targeting the specifics of the features afterwards, and after a few false starts as to placement, I got everything pretty close to where it was supposed to go. The angle of the face and the head tilt aren't quite right compared to the photo—her face is shorter and a little wider at the cheekbones—but I think Elena Mahoney Sánchez would recognize this as her likeness.

I put in the cools and the warms palely with a big soft wet brush, and while that dried I roughed in the hair and the sweater. Back to the face, and I just built up, looking closely at the reference photo for all the colors, and when that was dry I went back to detail all the darks and finesse everything else one more time. I started work on the drawing at 11:00, and finished the painting at 1:30.

I mention her name because this is one of the teachers at Sktchy for the "30 Faces in 30 Days" class. I liked her painting demo, but I found her face more interesting than the reference she selected for us, so I did her instead.

So...NOW what do I do? Keep painting like this? I like it—I have always wanted to be a more "painterly" artist—but I also love my bright acrylic inks and the double black line I use to delineate features in what is increasingly becoming my signature style. I worry if I keep going with this, I will lose the facility for that. After all, I never learned this from that, I had to learn it from mimicking someone else...

So here we are, derailed by Attention Deficit Disorder again....

"Elena"—pencil and Paul Jackson watercolors on Fluid 140-lb. coldpress paper, approx. 9x12 inches.

Breakthrough?

I have never done well doing what traditional portrait painters do, which is to rough-sketch the face in pencil by using geometric shapes. In fact, when I teach my contour drawing class, I tend to discount people who draw like that, because I have always believed that drawing a person (or any other object) that way leads to a generic and sometimes lifeless result.

After I learned contour drawing, it took me years before I got up the nerve to apply it to portraits, and it took me a long time to get it down to a process through which I could get a recognizable likeness. I still sometimes err on the side of a too-long nose or face, and the angle can occasionally defeat me; but the process I have evolved, of starting with the eyes and moving downward and then outward has become increasingly reliable, and I have enjoyed creating a sharply defined face to which I can add seductive color.

Today, however, I watched one of my idols when it comes to urban sketching and architecture, Milind Mulick, start with a fast and sketchy face made up of planes and geometric shapes (it took him less than 5 minutes to draw it) and achieve a painting that was accurate to the reference photo and yet more. As Milind put it, he wants to make a good painting first, before it's a good portrait. So I decided to try it for myself.

I have never painted in this way, and I will be the first to admit that my drawing (and my painting!) took a little longer than his, and that some of the nuances of light and shadow escaped me, especially because I followed his example and used a large brush with a giant capacity to hold water and paint, and things quickly got messy. But despite the failure to save some of the lights and whites, I ended up fairly chuffed with my result. Milind himself used a gel pen to capture the scruffy white hairs of this guy's beard and mustache, so I didn't feel guilty for doing likewise. Other than that small indiscretion, the portrait came out spontaneous, painterly, and even resembling the subject, despite a few moments of panic midstream that I had totally lost control and might as well throw it out!

Here is "Man in Turban"—Pencil, Paul Jackson watercolors, Signo white gel pen, on Fluid 140-lb. coldpress watercolor paper, 9x12 inches.

Two characters with funny names

Last night I felt like doing another painting but didn't want to do anything too complicated, so I drew this little portrait of my friend Phoebe's cat, Kablooey, in ink, and added some color. (Since he's mostly white/beige, it was able to be minimal!) Who could resist a cat named Kablooey, or that big flat nose or those mesmerizing eyes?

Today I didn't want to get into a big production (I have plans for chores and cooking), but since it's the last day of the Olga Furman challenge, I decided to do a contour drawing of one of the reference photos on offer, the model Twiggy. Her name came from her stick-like legs and arms, and she was the bane of my existence in high school when that slight figure was the ideal and I was growing increasingly buxom about the chest and hips.

I thought I would do her with just some eye and lip color, but then I added shadows and green to the flowers, and thought I should probably recognize those ruddy cheeks, and got a little carried away. It was still way more minimal than the usual, and I like the contrast of some fulsome features with the spare black and white in the rest of the portrait. Since she was known for her big puppy dog eyes and rosebud mouth, it's appropriate as well.

"Kablooey" and "Twiggy"—Uniball pen and watercolor, on 140-lb. Fluid coldpress watercolor paper. 9x10 and 9x12, respectively.