Teen reading

I picked up and read a couple of new teen books over the weekend, and decided to make a quick painting to go with my reviews on the Burbank Public Library teen blog, YA Think? Here is the picture, and if you want to read the reviews, you can go here.

Nasturtiums

I've been wanting to try my hand at some fan art by doing an illustration to go with Cornelia Funke's new dark fairy tale series, but it's been so long since I painted anything (two months? how did that happen?) that I thought I'd better get my eye and hand back in working order first, so I backed off of complex and opted for still life for today.

I was inspired by this block print, May's calendar illustration, by American Arts and Crafts artist William S. Rice.

The nasturtiums in my yard have been so magnificent this year that I decided to preserve a few of them on paper as a way back in. The rose bowl vase that holds them is nearly impossible to duplicate in watercolor, because it's irridescent glass with an intricate incised floral pattern; so I just went for the color, which is a reflective turquoise-y green, and tried for the feel of glass by preserving some highlights. Perhaps I will paint it differently someday, but for this picture I didn't want the vase to take center stage, I wanted the nasturtiums to be the focus. For this one, I abandoned my latest style/tool (drawing in pen) and went back to pencil to give a softer, more natural feel. The pencil around the edges erased, but stayed visible wherever it was painted over, but it doesn't really bother me. I don't feel like I captured those characteristic nasturtium leaves as well as I managed the ruffly flowers, but I enjoyed focusing closely on these beautiful, vibrant flowers for a couple of hours.

I don't really know why it took me two months to get back to my paints; I'd say lack of time, but that's not really true--we make time for what we want to do, and I certainly spent many hours reading that I could have been painting. I never have understood the reluctance to commit time to something that I enjoy so much once in the midst of it, but I hope not to interrupt momentum for such a lengthy period again.

Cowboy Caliente, Take Two

I tried it again. I simplified, took away the bowl and the can of corn, and had a little fun with the label on the bottle of hot sauce. I'm happier with this result.

Notes about watercolor: It's so easy to go too far. It's so easy not to go quite far enough.

On the first one, I went too far on the avocado and it got muddy, so I was careful to leave variation in color on this one. On this one, I was about to call it a day when I noticed the tiny cast shadows beneath the stems of the tomato, onto the tomato's surface, so I added those and it really improved it.

As I look at this one, I can see that I need to go back in with a little more shadow on the underside of the garlic bulbs, as I did on the first one--I'm still a little hazy on the effects of cast shadow (especially when the objects are in weak, neutral light rather than with a strong light source, as these were on my patio). Practice, practice, it all gets used. On to the next recipe...

Question: Does it bother anybody that there is no horizon line? Do the cast shadows sufficiently "seat" the objects on a surface, without indicating a surface in some other way?

Serve with tortilla chips!

Another recipe illustration, this one for "Cowboy Caviar," which is kind of a salsa, made with corn and black-eyed peas, tomatoes and avocado (and a bunch of other stuff), and seasoned with vinegar, oil, garlic, and hot sauce. I wanted to include something "cowboy" in the drawing, so for this one I put it in the title of the hot sauce. (There actually IS a hot sauce out there called Caliente Cowboy, by F. McClintock's, but the packaging was way too complicated for me to reproduce, so I just made this up.)

This is probably a redo; I chose to use the paper vertically, and ran out of room in this rather horizontal layout. Also, there are parts I like a lot, and parts with which I'm not happy. But I think I'll move on to something else for now, and try this again in a couple of days. If I do the same thing over again right in a row, I tend to get impatient/discouraged/burnt out more quickly. For the next one, I want to try adding a visual (instead of just a title) for the "cowboy" part--we'll see!

A book in search of (another) vision

RECKLESS, by Cornelia Funke.

Started reading it, put it down. Picked it up again, couldn't get into it. The thing I found it hard to get past was that it felt like the reader was dropped into the middle of the story, and I couldn't wrap my mind around what was happening or why there was no back story at the front, so to speak. It made it hard to care about the characters. I worked up a bit of a block, but I finally HAD to read it, for my 6+7 Book Club at the library, and now I have to say that I have fallen for this book! And the reason is all about the imagery.

Her descriptions are rich, lush, tactile, visual, completely evocative. This book so longs to be illustrated, and I can see the pictures in my head--I wish I had the skill set to do it!

It needs an Arthur Rackham, or (better) Edmund Dulac, or (maybe) Kay Nielsen, or...?

Maybe somebody more modern, but with that fairy tale sensibility, and a bit dark. Maybe Nadezhda Illarionova. Or Jean-Baptiste Monge. Somebody lovingly focused on every detail, somebody with patience, somebody with vision, somebody who can draw and paint from their imagination instead of needing something to look at as a model. Somebody with that level of ability and vision should take this on and turn it into the fairytale equivalent of a graphic novel.

Funke has commissioned the special effects company Mirada to create a Mirrorworld App for the iPad to go with this series. We are getting a special preview of the app this week at Burbank Public Library. (Thursday night, 7:00 p.m., Buena Vista Branch at 300 N. Buena Vista in Burbank--please come by, if you're local.) They did an amazing job: The app features a lot of back story on some of the peripheral characters, plus a panning feature that lets you look around Chanute's Tavern, embroidered panels that tell the Tailor's story, a segment on the botany of Mirrorworld, and a lot more. I can see why their rendition is so inspired--but I still say, Illustrators, step up!

Spinach / Artichoke Dip

This weekend I started to work on some drawings/paintings for the library cookbook. First recipe up: Spinach/Artichoke Dip. So I headed out for the farmers' market this morning to buy an artichoke and a bunch of spinach.

My first two drawings were of just the artichoke. I don't want each illustration to slavishly duplicate all the ingredients of each recipe, nor can I see necessarily painting the finished product--after all, a bowl of white goo with green flecks doesn't make for a very interesting illustration; so I thought since the artichoke is the most fun element to paint, I would just do that. Then I tried representing a few more ingredients, too, in combination with the artichoke.

I was pretty happy with this one (above). The darks could have been a bit darker (and I might go back in later and add some), but I really enjoyed how the shadow turned out, and I like the attitude/angle. (I'm going to have to re-scan, though--I had some bleedthrough from the picture behind this one in my sketchbook.)

With this one I spun the artichoke around to get another angle, and the sun was at another angle as well (I was painting on the patio), so the shadow is in a different place. This time I tried doing it more wet into wet, at which I am not very accomplished, and I think that shows. I also overworked the shadow, which became muddy and weird. Then I tried some spatter, but it's a bit of a mess--too much, too large, too regular, and I haven't got the hang of directing it where I want it yet. I won't be using this one, but it was fun to do and I did learn some things for next time.

And for this last one, I cut off the stem of the 'choke so it would stand up (although not very straight! I think I'll have to use Photoshop to rotate the whole picture), and added a handful of fresh spinach (the recipe calls for frozen, but this is called artistic license) and the Philly cream cheese. I quite like how the spinach comes forward, and I always enjoy doing some lettering/labeling work. Not sure about the artichoke, though, it feels a bit pallid--in fact, the whole sketch feels that way to me. Again, I could go back in and work on it some more...

I can see that this is going to be a challenge for me--to work hard enough to achieve the results I want without getting too crazy about redoing and reworking! I guess I'll just keep going and pick the most successful ones at the end.

More next week...

Experiments with a purpose

It seems that my recent habit of sketching my dinner is going to pay off. (Not in money, but in comparative fame. Well, familiarity, at any rate.) At my day job (librarian at a public library), we are celebrating a Century of Service--i.e., library services have been on offer in Burbank, California since 1913. One thing we have decided to do to mark the occasion is to make up a combination book list / cookbook. We will feature books from our catalog with short annotations/reviews by our staff, and then incorporate a variety of recipes, also gathered from the staff--presumably from some of the cookbooks in our catalog, but also personal recipes passed down in our families. And...I have volunteered to illustrate it. No, I didn't have enough to do, what with holding down a full-time job, doing movie titles on the side, and trying to find time to paint, read, write, and (always last on the list) clean my house. I needed something else.

So--here is my first experiment. I'm trying to decide whether to go with "straight" watercolor (drawn lightly in pencil and then painted) or to do my (comparatively) new thing by drawing in pen and then watercoloring. The former is softer and more realistic, the latter a little more illustrative verging on cartoonish.

A friend recently asked for a recipe to use up the bushels of lemons being produced by her backyard tree, so I asked my friend Triste for her lemon curd recipe and then decided to illustrate it. Rather than print the recipe here, I will give a link, because the live video instructions are quite helpful. Triste makes this every year, and I get to keep a jar because I supply her with the lemons! http://www.finecooking.com/recipes/lemon_curd.aspx (Triste says she doubles the amount of zest.)

In the first (pencil) version, I did a better/more realistic job on the jar (being at liberty to erase and fix until I got it right), plus the curd inside the jar looks real; but I like the pen drawing (this time using a Faber/Castell in a sepia tone instead of a more harsh black pen) better for the features of the cut lemon. On the former, I also inadvertently spattered some blue paint up into the white, so I did some spatter on purpose to camouflage that, but I haven't mastered the art of spattering (ANY TIPS FROM ANYONE?), so it looks rather like blue arterial spray! (I want the spatter to be larger but not hit in straight lines the way it did here.) In the latter, I used some Daniel Smith cobalt and black, and it granulated, which I quite like in some instances but didn't really care for here. I'm going to try this sketch one more time with black ink and see.