Tag: Art

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Ink and Wash/Watercolor sketches

Now that the class is over I’m finding it difficult to keep up with the oil painting practice. I SHOULD just dig it out and paint something every day. But I seem to have a mental block where I think of oil painting as ‘hard’ or ‘time consuming’ and have trouble getting started with it. I think this is mostly in my head because aside from needing to clean the brushes I don’t think it really takes all that much time. Still – it’s a barrier. But I don’t seem to have the same problem with ink sketches and watercolor. Or it might be that I consider ink and watercolor to be ‘doodling’ and ‘not serious’ and therefore I don’t feel the need to be as precise. It somehow doesn’t count for me and I’m more willing to let it be flawed.

These are some tiny ink sketches in my notebook. And from here, it’s just a tiny step more to add some color to them.

I really enjoy the line & wash technique. I like practicing getting as much of the value established with the lines and then adding color as a little ‘extra’

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Mastering Composition – Class by Ian Roberts

I enrolled in a composition class taught by Ian Roberts. All of our exercises were about 4×6″ and done on smooth bristol with a pencil. I haven’t used just pencils for quite a while, and never exactly like this so there was a fairly steep learning curve just for me to be able to feel like I could make effective marks on the page. Luckily he seemed aware of this and the earliest exercises were all about making smooth shapes and gradients before we ever tried to really draw anything.

The class was self-paced, but there are advantages to keeping up in that you can expect better feedback from your ‘buddy’ – the other students in the class.

Note – I wrote this post LAST YEAR and then left it sitting in drafts for 10 months. I’m going to try to get caught up to current day.

starting with simple shapes
simple shapes
surprisingly hard bushes
simple shapes
beginning compositions
Still Life
finding a focal point
Still life
my own images
NM Puddle
Snoqualmie
Palouse
Cascades
France 2018
still life
Ancient Lakes
France
Sultan
Barrels
White River
Fields
The Berm
Orcas
Cleat
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Urban Sketching

I’ve had a recent obsession with fountain pens, dip pens, pen and ink, and watercolor sketching. I’ll probably post my thoughts on fountain pen paper later. But all this led me to the world of Urban sketching – which I like because it leans into some of my strengths, namely, playing with ink, being impatient, and accuracy not mattering as much as mood and gesture.

I’ve talked to some friends and we are planning to check out some local Urban Sketch clubs but in the meantime I thought I’d see if my current mixed media sketchbook could handle a little ink/watercolor. This was fun! I decided I liked purple. All the linework is done with purple india ink (although I know it looks black). Paper is Canson XL Mixed Media 160g. It buckled under the wash but dried flat enough again.

A street scene from a tutorial
My friend’s horses this winter
Sunrise before kayaking on New Years Day 2024
From a photo of our trip to France in 2018

I’m also taking a composition class online from an artist I admire. I may post those images here as well eventually. So far we’ve been focusing on ‘going slow’ and ‘being careful’ – my weakness!

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Daily Art – color!

Using paint is intimidating but I know I’m not comfortable with a brush yet and I’m also not comfortable picking colors so I need the practice. Here’s the last two months. Most of these are very small.

Set 1: pen and ink sketches with watercolor.

Set two – oil sketches on paper

still life
madrone bark
sunlit trees
Deer Lake
Mushrooms

I purchased two tutorials by Tim Packer on how to draw the sun shining through trees.

Tutorial 1
Tutorial 2
My own painting using the method in the tutorial
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Daily Art – Black and White

In September I decided to restart doing one sketch or painting a day, every day. I get thrown off by life or, specifically, camping sometimes but I’ve been overall good about it and I feel like it’s getting easier with less effort. Half of these are from my own photos, about half from photos on Unsplash and one is a copy of a Georgia O’Keeffe.

Part of what I mean when I say it’s getting easier is that I have fewer obvious failures. This is not everything I did in the month but I didn’t take photos of the stuff that really didn’t work at all – the rate of failure like that has gone down.

From a Georgia O'Keeffe painting.
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Oil Sketches

Going even smaller than a study, I have some Arches oil paper and I tried making very small (less than 4″ paintings on it to test colors or techniques.

I think the winter scene needs a bit more of a focal point. The kelp & fish: I brushed my hand over it while it was wet and blurred the lower left corner. Violet tree: I like it. I’m not sure if I’ll have trouble adding detail if I make it bigger, but probably not. Lower right: not happy with this at all, but that’s why it’s a sketchbook.

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Still Painting

I’ve been spending a lot of time doing quick sketches and practicing monsters. Monday I’m going to swoop through the thrift store to look for oil paintings that look like they need to have monsters added to them, failing that I’ll look for inexpensive frames to use for other paintings. These are all very small. they still take me longer than just one day, but I’m working on it.

Maribel – the Fjord Horse. 6×6 oil on board
Glass cup. 6×6 oil on board
value study: for a future oil painting
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Sunflower

More attempts at ‘daily painting’ although this took me more than 1 day. I tried it because I think of flowers as being very difficult and I guess I wasn’t wrong, this gave me some trouble.

8×10 oil on panel

I got my brother in law to spend a couple hours cutting down new panels into tiny sizes and I hope this will encourage me to paint more often without worrying so much about ‘what if I botch it?’. Wish me luck.

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Mari Lwyd

This horse skull wants to rap battle you for beer.

I haven’t got the knack for getting enough paint to stick ‘wet into wet’ or ‘alla prima’ so I’m having to let it dry a bit before I go in to refine. I’ll keep working on it.

This was fun because it used so little color.

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Sketching summer of 2022

I have it in mind that I want to oil paint, that that is my primary medium and that I don’t want to get too invested in watercolor or acrylic because I should focus on one thing at a time. I’ve also realized that I have some trouble with value and composition and I should probably work out those problems in sketches BEFORE I start investing weeks to months of time working on an oil painting. As a result I started doing a lot in my sketchbook. Then I realized that sometimes I need to add color to the sketches to see how the colors will work. This is how I learned that I’m not really a fan of pencil because I don’t feel like I can get a rich enough color without spending too much time on it and I don’t like graphite pencil because it smudges too easily.

Result: I’ve started adding watercolor to my ink sketches to the point where I seem to be making tiny watercolor paintings now. What I like about them is that because I still consider them ‘sketches’ or ‘studies’ I don’t get too hung up about them having flaws. I also don’t really consider them ‘paintings’ in my own head because that would imply that I was studying watercolor technique, which I haven’t really done yet but it may happen by accident. In any case, these feel low stress and I don’t mind sharing them even when they have flaws or are unfinished.

Ian’s house
Ian’s favorite tree
an otter
My friend’s dog

This first one of these is of Ian-from-Canada’s house and we sent it to him along with a gift package as a ‘thank you’ for his hospitality.