Experiment

I have some leftover odd pieces of paper, and decided to do some small paintings to use them up. Today's is a literary experiment—I'm reading a mystery novel, and the author is good at describing characters; after reading one description today, I decided to see if I could take his words and turn them into a visual of the character. So, this is Richie: His background is that he dropped out of medical school due to a bad cocaine habit, and is now a computer hacker. The description said, "Richie was in his late twenties, skinny as a one-iron, jug-eared and hawk-beaked. He wore thick, rimless glasses and had a scraggly mustache that looked like a squashed caterpillar." (I made his mustache squashy and caterpillar-like, but then couldn't resist giving him some dastardly twirlers after the fact.)

Some aspects of this were a fail: I have to stop believing despite all evidence to the contrary that I can use ink or watercolor when it comes to stencils! That mess of turquoise shapes on the left was supposed to be a cluster of numbers, but the ink leaked and moved and it looks mostly random, though you can make out a few discernible outlines. The "hawk" nose is more of a schnozz, because I didn't give him a "hump" at the bridge like I should have. Also, I keep making these characters' bodies too small to fit their heads! But I was happy with Richie's face and general demeanor, so I'm keeping him!

This is a little one, only 5.5x6.75 inches, on hotpress using Daler Rowney inks and white gel pen. A short session today, but fun.

Circus guy

This guy doesn't look like he would be featured in a circus, but that's because the bottom half of him is missing. I started to draw him on a long, narrow piece of paper, and he was so tall that I couldn't fit him in, if I stuck with the proportions I started with, so I just cut off his bottom half and made him into a portrait. He's the tall man, or the thin man, or the tall thin man, at the circus, coming in at something like 7ft8in. I already downsized him a bit below his neck, trying to make him fit, but by the time I got down to the feet, I knew it wouldn't work.

The reference photo, again, was an old one, so I decided to do him in monotone. I did use two colors—Raw Sienna and Burnt Umber—but that's it, other than the black Uniball pen I used to draw him.

I got his frame a little crooked (probably because he leaned too hard against it while I was drawing him), with the result that a smidgen of it got cut off at the bottom. Oh, well...just an exercise.

"Tall Man"

Uniball and Daler Rowney ink, on Fluid hot-press 140-lb. watercolor paper, about 6.5x9inches.

Pretty girls

I'm a little worried, after four weeks of Let's Face It 2021, that all we're ever going to paint is pretty girls. That's been pretty much it, when it comes to reference photos: Jenny's Russian bun lady was based on an abstract, and also loaded with color and ornamentation, but Angela's was a sweet young girl and Natalie's, while colorful, was still focused on a pretty woman. Jerney's also started with a beautiful model in elaborate makeup, although the way she ultimately used the reference was quite different from the original.

I'm not complaining about the classes: I'm learning some new tools and techniques, and Jerney's lesson inspired me to do the portrait of Amanda Gorman with type behind her and a personal symbol included in the picture, with which I was quite pleased. But in its source materials it's a little monotonous—completely different from the six months of Deb Weiers's wonky people, in which we included people of all ages and genders (or no perceptible age or gender because they were too weird to tell!) and a few critters crept their way in as well. 

I feel like I should at least try to achieve each week's objective; but maybe the answer is to pick my own reference photo and do the techniques on that, instead of slavishly mimicking whatever the teacher does, just to stay entertained. Either that, or I have to find some time in between assignments to continue making the offbeat art I have come to enjoy and at which I feel I excel. Otherwise, I know myself well enough to know that I will become bored and quit.

Given that second objective, I went online today looking for offbeat people, and ended up at the circus. Ironically, after the sentiments expressed above, the circus performer I ended up picking is also a pretty girl; but I think I have wonkified her sufficiently to make that not the first thing on which the viewer focuses!

This is drawn with pen only (Uniball), then painted with Daler Rowney inks, and I used a Signo white gel pen for tiny accents and filled in the background with black gesso. It's on Fluid hot-press (smooth) 140-lb. watercolor paper, and it's about 7x10 inches.

My own spin

What I like to do, if I have time, is to try out the teacher's assignment once, using the given reference and methods, and then do it again but this time with my own spin. So today, I decided to have another shot at Week 4's exercise. I used inks, watercolor, a little colored pencil, and then ended up adding Micron pen, which wasn't part of the original assignment but seemed necessary with this mostly monochrome image. I also added some background of my own, using the gesso trick with a stencil and then painting over it with transparent color once it was dry.

The reference photo is of Ellen Terry, a renowned English actress from a theatrical family, who performed both Shakespeare and comedy between about 1856 and 1922, with two short hiatuses for relationships, once at age 16 (a marriage to 46-year-old painter George Frederic Watts, who made her famous as his model) and again for six years while involved with the architect Edward William Godwin, with whom she had two children out of wedlock. Other than those brief pauses, she acted for nearly 70 years, also briefly managing a theater, and appeared in films from 1916 to 1922. The photo was taken of Terry at age 16 by Julia Margaret Cameron, just one of the artists and photographers in the Pre-Raphaelite and Asthetic movements who sought her out after her association with Watts.

In the photo, Terry is leaning against a wall-papered wall, but since I had nothing with that kind of repetitive pattern, I instead did a botanical theme. I think it still works. I chose this particular photo because it repeats two of the challenges of the Week 4 lesson, to capture a person in 3/4 profile, and to render hands (or in this case a single hand). I will confess it was a difficult exercise, and the lines of the face aren't quite right; but I am pleased with the color scheme, which somewhat duplicates the sepia-tone photo but with a little "blush" on it. Looking at it against the photo, I'm thinking I need to darken the shadow behind her....

Gesso, stencil, pencil,  Liquitex, Daler Rowney inks, watercolors, Micron pen (brown), on 140-lb. hotpress (smooth) Fluid watercolor paper, 8x8 inches.

Using the paper

I had a few odd bits of paper left over from various portraits lately, because I ran out of my 9x12 pad of watercolor paper and am cutting down from 12x16. That means I have a few pieces that are 12 high and either seven or eight inches wide, which doesn't seem like enough to do much, especially because I don't ever tend to paint small. But I saw a photo in a Wonky friend's vacation pix that I thought would be fun to try, and it was able to be fitted into an extremely vertical format, albeit with no border to speak of.

I compromised on this one between trying to capture likenesses and going wonky, so it's kind of a hybrid, with a few wonky elements but mostly a straightforward portrait. I went back to drawing directly in ink without pencil first for this one, as a necessary exercise of a skill I need to keep.

I tried and mostly failed to do a thing for the background at the top: I have a new stencil with a bunch of random words on it, so I picked out a few that seemed appropriate for vacation mentality (happy, curious, great, etc.) and put them down on the paper first in gesso, then covering them with ink afterwards. It probably would have worked better if A. I had done a thinner coat of gesso, B. I had let the gesso dry longer, and C. I had used a dark background color. Oh well, live and learn. I'll try it again soon.

This is Corinne and her hub, on their recent vacay. Uniball pen, Signo white gel pen, gesso, and Daler Rowney inks.

Let's Face It, Week Four

The title of this could be, Let's Face It, Hands Are Hard. Yeah, that was the part of the lesson I really needed, and yeah, I bollixed it a bit. Admittedly, they were folded up in a super complicated way, but if I'd spent half an hour more in the drawing process before jumping to paint, they would have looked less like someone's hand with extra fingers grafted on and more like a real pair.

I was fairly pleased with the rest of it, although as usual I varied the lesson a bit since I didn't have all the materials. Only the primary wash was to be watercolor (the cloud of hair and the shape of the face) and everything else was supposed to be colored pencils, but A. I don't own many (half a dozen random colors in watercolor pencil, which runs if you get water on it, since it's supposed to!), and B. I'm not really a pencil kinda gal. I did end up using a brown one to add some shadows and some definition to the hair at the end. I did use my Uniball to do the eyelashes, because I also didn't have a teensy tiny brush. Everything else is watercolor. Also a new experience was working on hotpress paper (smooth) instead of coldpress (textured/rough). It was actually like painting in my sketchbook, so not all that different. Easier to do fine details (although you might not notice here!).

Here are the reference photo and the photo of the teacher's final product. She liked the red and blue combo but decided to switch them; I just couldn't let go of the idea of long red hair. She also ended up doing some of the blueberries in gold, but I couldn't find my gold paint, so...no. I liked the blueberries against the red hair, anyway.

The other thing I did, a trick I learned from my previous class, was to put a light wash of pink ink behind the whole thing, to give it both a background and a glow behind the other colors of paint. I think it was successful on this assignment! Here is mine:

Daler Rowney ink, pencil, watercolor, watercolor pencil, Uniball pen, Signo white gel pen, on Fluid hotpress 140-lb. watercolor paper, 8x10 inches.

Birthday portrait

 Today's was an impulse when I saw that one of my new friends from Deb Weiers's Wonky class was having a birthday. (I wish Facebook would give me the heads up a day or two before, instead of on the day!) I'm a big fan of Denise Malm's work, and decided to do a portrait of her as an homage.

In case anyone wonders, yes, she has freckles! Short of putting them in individually, which would take more time than I had today, I did random spatter to convey the general idea. I'm not very GOOD at spatter, so they don't look exactly like hers, but hopefully she won't mind.

I ended up putting the quote and greeting in afterwards, using Photoshop, because I thought if the portrait were to be framed later, having the birthday stuff on it would make it too specific/dated.

Pencil, Uniball, Signo white gel pen, white gesso, Daler Rowney inks, watercolor, on Fluid coldpress 140-lb. watercolor paper, 7x12 inches.