Emu and Hollyhocks

Emu - 7" square Pentel Brush Pen and watercolor 

Hollyhocks

7" x 9" Color Conte on black Canson Touch sanded pastel paper

Two for today, the Emu was something I conceived yesterday but didn't sketch till this morning. Minor breakthrough with that Pentel Pocket Brush Pen, I didn't pencil it first. Reference by hugashrimp for the WetCanvas.com October Watermedia Challenge. Watercolor is my Daniel Smith palette. 

Hollyhocks was the October Pastel Spotlight challenge and I expect to do a third or fourth piece today. Will be going out to the clinic this afternoon and depending on how I feel, go for some plein air sketching or photos or both. That and I'm going to have a go at a cat gargoyle from imagination.

Pears, Cat and Istanbul Mosque Spires

Two Pears from Life 

Today was the grand finale of my 3 in 5 Challenge on Facebook. That's #artchallenge 3 in 5. It's a good thing I had so many artist friends on Facebook, since the challenge is so popular some of them might get nominated more than once. But I have done it! Four out of the five days I actually produced three new artworks too. 

Today's are all done with Winsor & Newton Watercolour Markers on my Stillman & Birn Zeta journal, which has 180lb hot press white watercolour paper. I love spelling it that way, sorry to the spelling nuts, but I generally prefer British spelling and it feels like typing with a British accent. Mildly pretentious but it started off as their language so we Americans are spelling it wrong anyway.

I reviewed these markers already, but I am still experimenting with techniques and different papers. I've also got seven new colours to play with, thanks to a friend who bought them and didn't like them. I was stunned and thrilled that she offered them to me and gratefully accepted. So now I've got double or triple on all the colours in my original set plus seven new ones I dearly wanted. 

I'd dithered on getting the 8 color travel set or 12 color tin (lost my British typing accent, whoops!) and she sent me the tin! Also nine other markers some of them duplicating the tin colors. So I now have Raw Umber, Burnt Sienna, Raw Sienna from open stock plus Cadmium Red Hue, Cerulean Blue Hue, Lemon Yellow Hue and Hookers Green Deep to work with! 

I used all of the new colors in the two pears. Lemon Yellow is so pale it vanishes under my warm indoor light or photography, but it blends other colors great. Raw Sienna is oddly lighter than Yellow Ochre but with Burnt Sienna and Raw Umber it really helped add to the progression of warm colors. Then I used a touch of the orange cast Cadmium Red Hue in them too. Ah, right, the green I touched in was Sap Green so yeah, that's just one new color I didn't use in the painting. But Cerulean Blue Hue got into the background with Cadmium Red Hue and a dash of Raw Sienna to make striped wallpaper from imagination.

 Ari Cat Relaxing

This of course is my beautiful fourteen year old Color Point Longhair, aka Shaggy Siamese, Ari. I caught a photo of him in this pose and meant to see if I could get his eyes better with Cerulean Blue. Most of all his fur color better with Raw Umber, which isn't as reddish as Burnt Umber. Wow. A total success. Cadmium Red Hue made a slightly warmer pink inside his lovely black ears, but the black cooled it again. His pose is a bit foreshortened. I added his tail twitching up because I've seen it do that so many times and wanted his tail visible, since I love his tail and wanted to capture the particular dark tail hue as well as his fluffy paws. 

Mixing colors in these is tricky. It takes putting down lines and marks, then sometimes washing them out completely and other times accepting there will still be a pen mark, a bit like pen and wash that way. So I tend to plan as if the marks will stay and then wash out of them into lighter areas. This worked really well on my cat portrait. He has a lot of areas where his brown hair shades grayer and smokier, especially on his paws, and has a nice soft sheen to it. 

The big white spots on his temples are odd - they really are very pale, his skin under them is dead white and they have very fine pale hairs coming up off them but the skin shows in between. Scritching him, he's soft there and fluffy. Some cats have a thin patch there and some black cats have bare skin showing to make a pale area, but his has got pale hairs coming out of the sparse temples. It's mostly Oriental Shorthair black cats that get the lighter balding spot in front of ears look. Makes sense, they're black cats related to Siamese.

Today is a special day for Ari, because every month when we get a new sealed bag of cat food he gets so thrilled. Little things make him so very happy! I used to get the giant bags for economy, but spending a little more to give him New Bag Day every month is more like buying him a treat than anything else.

Istanbul Mosque Spires

Photo reference by jlloren for 1-30-2015 WDE

This is another photo from the same online "sketch my photos" Weekend Drawing Event as the two cats from Istanbul. There were so many beautiful photos of historic architecture and beautiful scenes but I noticed this one the first time I saw the photo, loved the spires and domes going off into the distance and the loose clouds. I did it near-monochrome for a feel of it being a twilight or dawn scene, but got the gold spire in with Yellow Ochre and Prussian Blue Hue.

Again, experiments, mostly with strokes and values and washing. I liked how I got the two domes with bold strokes flicking up from the base. I got a little looser in the rendering and still kept to the general shapes of the scene but broke up the precise symmetry. It came out better than I expected!

So my experimental paintings with Winsor & Newton Watercolour Markers continue. I have yet to use them in a pastel underpainting but decided today wasn't the day for it if I wanted to do three - an underpainted pastel painting is likely to take a day or two in itself, especially if I put sanded primer over it. 

More to come! I feel a great sense of completion. Five days, twelve pieces... that's a big step up from daily sketching. I had fallen into a habit of putting it all away once I did anything, be that a good painting or a quick cat gesture. Now it's easier to think of filling a page with sketches or doing several pages in a day if the day is at all good. Like breaking a meniscus.

Digital Skyscape from Memory

Digital Skyscape from Memory

Sketchbook Mobile App

I bought this app for my iPhone back when I first moved here and played with it a bit, got quite a few images done. But I forget its iconic commands fast if I don't use it for a while and once I got it onto my Kindle Fire with its larger screen making digital sketching easier, I could not fumble through getting the images saved and exported in a way I could offload them to my computer.

Tonight I figured it out. Today was a miserable sick day. I didn't do 3 in 5 with new art, just posted the three pieces I had up in the Vantage Points exhibition at Openhouse that were so inspiring to me. They really are my current best anyway. But just when I thought I wouldn't get anything in, not so much as a cat sketch, I decided to have a go one more time with Sketchbook Mobile.

Now that I can do more with the images than just store them on the Kindle and maybe lose them if I have to go back to factory settings, I'm more likely to keep playing with it and experimenting. I bought a Sensu Brush on sale from Dick Blick a couple of months ago and hadn't really tried it. That's the next experiment, that and finding the right brush tool that works with it for a gouache-like effect.

Pen and Watercolor Flowers, Life Sketches

Pen & Watercolor Flowers

Stillman & Birn 7" square Zeta journal

I had still more time after working on the pastel landscape and changed mediums to get some distance from its problems. So I opened up my photo collection in my Kindle and found lots of flowers from the SFGH memory garden. Picked out three that I have no idea what they are. "Daisyish" is not a proper species name or common name, it's just the lower left one is in that category. Then there's "red and yellow long trumpetish ones" and "weird shaped one with the two big petals like butterfly wings and a nozzle." Such scientific nomenclature. Anyone who knows what any of them are, comment and tell me!

Then after I went out, I sketched several San Francisco residents just hanging out in the Tenderloin and some beautiful old houses visible from the fifth floor family health center Gold Team clinic. The nurse took a look at it and recognized which buildings they were, so I'm very happy I got the likeness! No pigeons have commented to tell me if I got their likeness though.

San Francisco Residents and Housing

Pigma Micron Pen, Moleskine Pocket Sketchbook (plain)

No, that's not a silhouette, one of the pigeons was black and the other two were different shades of gray or blue/gray. I've seen many different colors of pigeons and even the birds in my city have diversity. Everyone flocks together. There was a pretty shine on the sun side of the black one that I may actually develop later in pastels from memory - he was pretty as a grackle, very iridescent neck, blue sky highlights on his sun side and rich darkness on the shadow side. I watched him walk around quite a bit before I finally got settled and had the sketchbook out. 

So today's been very productive, much more sketching and drawing and painting than usual. I'm feeling good but very tired.

Colourful Beefsteak Tomato

Colourful Beefsteak Tomato

From Memory

Pastel on paper

I was inspired again by Charlotte Herczfeld's wonderful video demo "Pastel Brands Matter" on YouTube. She used a 12 color set of Cretacolor Pastels Carre' and a dozen Unisons and Giraults to match the colors testing hard and soft pastels on three different types of paper. I've been fascinated by that demo ever since she posted it. 

Today, I followed some of her color choices and drew a beefsteak tomato from memory. My grandmother used to grow them, wide bulbous tomatoes almost like peppers for having an asymmetrical shape, rich and red and tasty. I used the other half of the orange Mi-Tientes sheet I did Sunset II on and started with Cretacolor Pastels Carre' for the first two layers. The background upper area is still just Cretacolor, the rest has Unisons as additional layers to put on more color and softer, broader strokes. At the very end I used a pale Terry Ludwig cream to do the "White" highlights that give it shine. 

I love how this simple study looks. That's half of why I did one - I loved her tomatoes and wanted something like that on my wall! Love the colors!

Sunset II

Sunset II

pastel on paper, 5" x 7"

Started early today so I might add more later on. I liked the sunset reference I used for the Pearlescent Pan Pastels dawn, so I used it again. It's by DAK723 posted for the October 2014 Pastel Spotlight challenge, which has a theme of Orange. Don's been doing color themes for a while, the only two left are red and violet, wonder what he'll come up with for them? Of course he could also do white, black, gray, brown as themes. I'll just have to see.

One of the things that intrigued me was the frosty field with its clumps of weeds and the lavender field, which I think is actual lavender. It was in the reference and I included it in both paintings but it's more obvious here. I think I managed to get the feel of the frost in this one. I also loved the receding trees and their numerous sky holes, something I succeeded in capturing this time.

Life Sketches in Pen-Watercolor Again

Life Studies 

Pen & Watercolor on Stillman & Birn Zeta Journal

Worth a second entry today! I had fun doing four more objects for my Scavenger Hunt list on what's nearly the last day of it. Tomorrow is the Overlap Day - mine's still active but a new one goes up with a friend's list. I thought I'd try to do all the list but didn't really get much more than usual. Still, it's a good challenge and every time I do it, I get that much more experience at life sketching.

This page isn't as perfect as the last one but I'm happy with the layout and don't think it's so bad that it drags the book down. Small imperfections are what shows it's real art instead of some kind of mechanical reproduction.

Everything was penciled freehand, then inked with the Pigma Micron pens and painted with Yarka St. Petersburg watercolors. I'm beginning to really enjoy this set, especially the unusual new colors. The pencil tip's in Glauconite and the Sofft tool in Shakhnazarskaya Red, a beautiful warm earth color that's lighter and more transparent than English Red. Oddly the pan actually looks darker, it's just an effect of the pigment. Could just be the opacity of English Red.

I might eventually get the full range of these watercolors. Oddly it'd be less expensive to get both other sets than to get one other set and 12 open stock colors to add to one, but I'm not worried about that. Each has a complete range in itself and could be used alone for painting outdoors. The palette box isn't that large and stacks nicely with my Zeta journal.

Life Sketches in Pen and Watercolor

Life Sketches in Pen and Watercolor

7" square Stillman & Birn Zeta journal

Pigma Micron pen size 01

Yarka St. Petersburg "Extended" watercolors set

I love my Zeta journal. All my life, as far back as I can remember, I've done pen drawing and wanted it to come out like these. I started getting there with certain small subjects from life even as a child because my dad taught me to pencil carefully first before inking. I did a lot of pen sketches of my pet white rat, Puck.

So this week I'm the host for the regular Scavenger Hunt challenge on "Artwork from Life" forum at WetCanvas.com. The host comes up with a list of 26 items to sketch from life, substitutions okay if you really don't have a cat or a figurine of a cat or a cat themed anything to draw. I suggested "Computer, because a CAT file in Windows is catalog," or "Person named Cat" since I know at least one. Several actually if I think back, but that's people not here at the moment. Of course my cat's very handy to draw and he's already in this one. He'll get in again under Animal and maybe under Matte since he's not shiny, and certainly if I do an eye from life it'd be more fun doing his than mine!

As luck would have it, I actually came up with a list that was hard for me. Usually that's other people's lists with items like "Something from your dining room" or "lawn mower" or something like that. I live in one room and the bathroom is separate from the loo, both shared with other tenants on my floor. Not in a suburban house with a car, driveway, living room, dining room, basement, attic, den, bedroom separate from studio, kitchen... it sort of boggles me sometimes how much space people have. No wonder most housemates are always bickering about cleaning up. 

So I did the list and I'm cherry picking the easy ones I have handy in my room. I'm sure I'll find more by the 22nd.

Love the 16 pen cube of Pigma Microns, All Sizes/Tips that I got from Blick recently. I use those a lot, actually use up these long lasting pens. They're perfectly waterproof so it's easy to pencil first and then ink, then start painting over it with a Niji waterbrush and any watercolor set I've got handy. Currently this is my new Yarka St. Petersburg Extended set. Extended has Rose in it and Rose Violet, two very useful colors, plus my favorite Russian (Hookers) Green and Ultramarine and Bright Blue (which I think is a Pthalo). Hansa Yellow. Raw Sienna and a redder earth that I really like, Shakhnazarskaya Red. Lovely earth red a bit softer and more transparent than English Red, which is also in it.

Yarka watercolors are particularly intense too. Very strong color and it dries nearly as bright as it looks wet. The lovely deep brown that predominates in the feather and rock is Voronezhskaya Black, actually more of a grayed brown sepia-ish color that I really love. The set has a warm and cold black. 

I might get the full range of these Yarka watercolors someday. Odd thing is, the cheapest way would be getting three full sets. Getting the two least overlapping sets and 12 extra colors would be more compact, but I'd pay $60 or so for the open stock pans instead of $40 for a third set. So I might just get the other sets in time and keep them stacked together. This was the best one for what I'm doing, though others have other favorites like Paynes Grey. 

Blick's doing a Zorn Palette Contest so I need to think about what I can paint in yellow ochre, Cadmium Red, Ivory Black and Chinese White. Could win $400 in watercolor supplies including 4 big tubes of those colors but also Kolinsky brushes and Arches watercolor block and pad. Very cool. Might go for something inspired by cave paintings since that's so much a cave painter's palette actually...

Winter Pines

Winter Pines

5" x 7"

Rembrandt pastels on Bee Bogus Recycled Rough sketch paper

Photo reference by PaintBoss on WetCanvas.com

A third painting for the September 2014 Pastel Spotlight challenge, "Blue." This photo reference was posted as part of the lesson showing a variety of hues, the surface of the snow was distinctly lighter and more purplish than the somewhat green-cast blue sky. I enhanced those differences a bit but the camera really pushed it farther. Light patches on the snow field were fun, the shadows of other trees were making that foreground area interesting. 

I'd worked out how to do snow laden pines years and years ago while playing with colored pencils, distinctly remembered doing a Christmas card design with them as my first successful snow covered pines. This time I got much more colorful working with pastels and sketched just the darks in the pines in with charcoal, then got at the rest entirely with pastels. As usual on unsanded paper I did some finger blending in early layers, then finished by rough layers of side strokes and heavier strokes over it.

Shimmering Male Mallard

Shimmering Male Mallard
5" x 7"
Pan Pastels on Maize color ClaireFontaine PastelMat
Photo reference by DAK720 on WetCanvas.com in the December Pastel Spotlight challenge.

Painted for my review of Metallic Pan Pastels on my other blog, thought I'd share him here too since he came out so sparkling well. Metallic Pans mixed with other Pans colors like Pthalo Green produce a shimmering iridescence - and I've always been fascinated by iridescent feathers. Mallards intrigued me all my life and I got to see them in person as a small child, so naturally this is the outgrowth of a long study.

Enjoy! I expect to be painting more often now that the weather's getting better and the days longer again.

Bridge Scene and Cat from Life

 Bridge landscape painted in acrylics on Sunday, May 20th during Johannes Vloothuis online Paint-Along hosted by WetCanvas Live! I simplified the source photo drastically and used stronger colors than Johannes did, also made other changes. This is one of the best landscapes I've ever done in my journal, perhaps the best. Both this painting and the next are in my Stillman & Birn Beta journal, which has 180lb rough bright white watercolor paper. I love that paper. It stands up to everything I throw at it. The paper never bleeds through either, it's very easy to paint on both sides of a page.

I've been out of it dealing with medical issues and resting up from appointments. Chronic fatigue can get rough when I have to go out immediately after having gone out the day before, then it takes longer to rest up to the point I can do anything. Very frustrating, so this month's "as can" is a very slow daily painting attempt. However, I'm approaching 20 small paintings and already happy with my progress!

Below is today's watercolor life painting of Ari, my longhaired colorpoint cat. He's a "street Siamese" with no official papers but clearly has the markings. I did a quick gesture in pencil while he more or less stayed in that pose. He turned his head, but not till I'd gotten his face sketched. I decided the sketch was too light and so painted in watercolor.

I don't usually do pencil sketches under watercolor, preferring a purist look without guidelines showing. This time I just let it show and painted anyway. The final embellishment is white whiskers sketched in with a white gel pen because this is in my art journal and I don't need to be purist in a journal.