LFI 37...sort of

Week 37 of Let's Face It was a black/white/gray oil painting. I loved the reference photo, but I don't possess any oil paints, and although I'd like to learn to do that sometime, I'd rather wait to buy them until I will be using them regularly or even exclusively. So I decided I would just do a watercolor of the beautiful subject.

The thing is, though, that I loved the black and white. So I went back to a technique I have only done a couple of times before ("Smoker" and "Kurt Vonnegut") wherein you draw with a Uniball and then, before the ink dries and becomes waterproof, you use a paintbrush loaded only with water to move the ink around and create the lights and darks and shadows.

It makes for a little less stark image in terms of contrast, because the only way to get the darks super dark by doing this is to keep scribbling with ink and then moving it around before it can dry, and it's all too easy to mess that up and have some unlovely marks become permanent. So the lights and darks are more subtle here, especially regarding her black hair and in the darkest shadows. Her tank top was also black, but I chose to just suggest it with the outlines and a little shadow around the detailed edges, leaving the center pristine.

After I was done, I couldn't resist putting some pink into the rose, and echoed a tiny bit of it under her cheekbone; and then I inked in the border, and then I decided that some background color would really make the figure pop.

I'm pretty pleased with this, especially because I drew it freehand while the teacher used a grid! Some of the angles are not quite right, but all in all it's a pretty faithful reproduction of the model's stance.

"Blush Rose"—pencil, Uniball pen, water, Paul Jackson watercolors on Fluid 140-lb. coldpress paper, a little smaller than 9x12 inches.

#theydrawalong

 Got an inadvertently early start this morning—got up at 8:25, fed the cat, then checked my email and saw that the latest draw-along session with Nate and Salli had just started (in New York, so they start at 11:30 their time), so I jumped on. This session featured guest artist Jennifer Orkin Lewis, aka August Wren. She mostly works in gouache, which we have established is NOT my thing, so I played along in my familiar media of Uniball pen followed by some watercolor. She laid out an array of semi-random objects, so I picked some that could maybe go together in a dish if I were cooking, and did this little sketch, throwing in a couple of the flowers for decor and the fig because figs! Nothing is quite proportionately to size, but...?

These draw-along sessions are fun and helpful, in that they get you to draw and paint quickly, without thinking too much. And at 8:30 in the morning, who can think anyway?

#theydrawalong #theydrawlearnalong #theydrawandcook

Playing around

This one didn't quite come off, but it almost did. What I really needed was to start with a bigger piece of paper—I needed more room for her hands, arms, and upper torso. And also, probably, to know what I was trying to pull off, instead of just throwing everything at it and hoping it would work.

I do like that it came out a little more painterly than some. The hands are kind of lame, but I left them somewhat undefined on purpose. The stencil in the background turned into kind of a mess so I partially obscured it and hoped it would look like wallpaper or something.

A good afternoon of practice and experimentation.

"Blonde Wig"—stencil, charcoal pencil, acrylics, Stabilo pencil, on watercolor paper, 16x12 inches.