Category: Watercolor

Chatter Drawing Watercolor

Pencil, Ink, and Watercolor

By -N- on

Ahhh.  Frustration.  Nothing like it to make you feel like crap!  Or to push you past your comfort zone.

Comfort zone:  Ink, watercolor washes.

Sort of comfort zone:  pencil drawing.

Disaster!  Warning!  Alarm zone:  Watercolors!  We won’t even consider these at present.

Comfort Zone

There are times when a good book helps you out a lot.  These are studies copied from a book by Claudia Nice.  What is good about these kinds of studies is that there is detail, but not a desire to be so realistic you are going to scream, if super realism is not your thing.  (It’s not mine.)  Here, you will fine stippling and hatching, and cross-hatching.  Each of these brings dimension and texture.  Add some watercolor washes, and it can really make things pop out.

Sort of Comfort Zone

I think I mentioned in an earlier post that I have never really done any formal consideration of pencil drawing.  To me it seems counter-intuitive to think about pencil drawings beyond pencil drawings of a casual quality, like the scribbles and doodles students turn in with their work.  Rather, I looked at a drawing book from the library and had a deeper appreciation for the textures pencils can make.  As with pen and ink, stippling and hatching are at work – but so are circles and lines in varying directions, along with lines which depict texture, such as the little hook-shaped lines at the very bottom.

Alarm Zone!

Today, I filled up a palette with watercolor pigments.  Now, I am slowly studying washes and wet-into-wet.  I am also using a whole slough of pigments I have never used and dropping some of my old standbys.  I am feeling like crap.  But, perseverance.  Onward.

Whatever.

 

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Chatter Drawing Watercolor

Sketches with Pencil, Ink, and Watercolor

By -N- on

Deciding to take the bull by the proverbial horns, I enrolled in a few of the online classes on Craftsy.  I have used them for a number of other courses, such as sewing or photography, and really enjoy their format.  Demonstrations which are practical, well presented, and make sense are worthwhile.  Online streaming format, without limitation (once bought), is another advantage – you can watch, play, replay, go away, and revisit.  I really like Craftsy for this one reason.  So, I enrolled in a drawing class called See Better, Draw Better: Exercises for Beginners by Kateri Ewing, and a couple by Shari Blaukopf on Sketching with Pen and Ink – one for landscapes, and one for cityscapes.

I am alternating between the drawing class and the sketching landscape classes.  I have my chrome book, pens, paper, ink, water, coffee, and watercolors, and who knows what else.  I am using one notebook – it’s a standard sketchbook, so the paper is thin – and taking notes and playing with the exercises as we move along.  I have also been doing some sketching while listening to an audiobook.  The watercolor studies are essentially play – not serious – because I do things as Blaukopf moves along in her class.  I want to see her class almost completely before I really do anything on watercolor paper, whereas the drawing class is easier to play and do some “serious” stuff as it moves along.

I’ve doodled with drawing throughout the years, but never really focused on drawing in the way Ewing presents it.  She uses 3 pencils – 6H, 4B, and HB.  She also explains the differences between willow and vine charcoal, which I never thought of.  As well, she discusses hatching, cross-hatching, broken lines, stippling, and other techniques for texture.  I never thought of drawing in the direction of the shape of an object.  She has you begin with gestural drawings and them move onto the shading techniques and so on.  I’m surprised at what I have been able to do – as you can see below!

From the gestural drawings, she moves into shape and shadow to give volume – light and dark.

And then, I’ve been sketching in between.

As I said, I am moving through the watercolor / pen / ink classes differently.  I want to focus more on listening, and observing, and hoping that the drawing class will help with my ongoing issue of contrast and value and tone.  The pencil pictures are helping a lot already, but the real key will be painting.  Below are some sketches made from the landscape class and done on non-watercolor paper, just to show some of the stuff I’ve been playing with.

My problem is a lack of time.  Work and life get in the way.  Still, it’s wonderful to feel the focus of drawing and painting and thinking I just might, just might, be able to do something worthwhile!

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Chatter Watercolor

Frustrations with Contrast

By -N- on

Sunday, 3 September 2017

It’s sort of a quandary.   Should I blame myself, the weather, the paper?

First, we have been housebound, not by hurricanes, but by interminably hot and stinking weather, weather so fiercely hot that heat stroke is easy to come by.  Temperatures have been soaring to 112 F and 30% humidity – for a desert gal, this is not fun.  Dry weather and moderate heat is okay, but living in the darkened house, in a house filled with air conditioned air, and melting outside, is getting old very, very fast.  Tempers are short around here, and hopefully the weather will break tomorrow with 85 F and begin to cool.  I hate being inside and being inactive.  I don’t belong to a gym, but it is too hot to go for a walk or a run, probably even in the middle of the night.  So, it pisses me off!

Next, I am impatient and annoyed – a lot because of forced inactivity because of this disgusting weather.  This doesn’t help when watercolor paper needs to be used up for practice, but the sizing is so crappy it buckles and creates weird areas that show poor quality – and possibly poor quality control.  And the practice itself is hard to do – in part because of my monkey mind and my need for some good aerobics to rid myself of the wiggles so I can focus.

Oh, poor me!

But now that I’ve bitched a bit, maybe I can look back at what I am doing . . . working on my ever-present nemesis:  contrast.

Monday, 4 September 2017

Okay, I got over myself.  I tell you, though, that a week of unrelenting heat and humidity of 110 F and 35-100% humidity is not fun.  Today, humidity has dropped because of rain, the temperature is down to about 85 F.  I am in a much better mood.

Yesterday, I walked away from my abominations, knowing full well that contrast was the real issue I have.  Like I have said many times, I am drawn to color.  Color.  COLOR!  I don’t like doing the “basics” in knitting (i.e. swatching) and I have never given much credence to monochrome studies, even though it has been stated and re-stated multiple times.  Finally, I gave in, and did some grey scales in pencil and watercolor.  In watercolor I did some wet-into-wet, and then layered washes.

And finally I did a watercolor.  The grey-scale study was invaluable – lesson learned!

There are parts of the preliminary drawing and final grey-scale study which are good, and some which are bad.  I followed a video on YouTube by Paul Talbot-Greaves that was very clear.  He has a few others I will look at as well.  Seeing something done always helps me to learn.  A book is good, but watching the steps a painter takes is even better, especially when recorded and you can go back again and again to do the studies.

The steps I took here began with a simple light wash over all parts of the building – very, very light – into a lot of other areas in the picture.  Then I did some medium layered dry washes, just to do them.  These are on the bushes and foliage behind the two trees on right.  the building had wet-into-wet, moving it into the bushes in front of the door.  At this point, I had my white and middle value established, so I thought it would be fruitful to do the very darkest areas next.  I think it was a good idea as it then allowed me to then return to shades between the whitest and darkest shades.  This study was in Payne’s Grey on a student-grade Strathmore paper.

I also found another video, but cannot find the link for it.  There was an excellent suggestion of creating a grey scale, and holding it against colors as you paint.  What shade is your yellow or red?  That will help with the contrast.  Right now, let’s see what I can do with a few colors . . . this is gonna take a lot of discipline!  But, I am doing it, which is more than I was a few weeks ago.  Yay!

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