paint, pastel, paper
I had a brainstorm the other day: Why not use vacation photos for drawing and watercolor subjects? I certainly do have a bucket load of photos. And, last summer we went to a lot of historical and beautiful places as we wandered through parts of the western U.S. Here, a view from a cliff in Mesa Verde National Park.
Colors include indanthrene blue, quinacridone yellow, organic vermilion, burnt sienna, cobalt blue, phthalo green and Carbon Ink in a Pentalic watercolor book.
This is an interpretive / impressionist sketch. I may have adjusted the colors a bit much in Lightroom. I did this at 6:30 a.m., barely awake, and without any light except what broke through yonder window. Same with the scan. I’ll check it out later today, when I am at work or something. Interesting to see the white spots in the scan I cannot see in my gloomy room . . . .
Last night I was getting ready for bed and decided to just do a quick drawing of something – anything! – before hitting the hay. My camera caught my eye. Instead of being blue, it is really black, and the strap is black, and it was on a copy of something in black and white. Strong shadows, too, from a lamp on the desk. What the hell . . . just do it and then paint it. As I like the effects of lines – Sailor’s Carbon Ink in a fountain pen – I decided to just use primaries, and blue was the choice for the strap, red and blue (i.e. violet) for the strap, a green for the rest of it. I wanted to catch the shadows – the light and the dark – more than anything. And here we are, half asleep while doing it.
Journey by Paper 