My Art Workshop

Doodling in watercolor turned into this pattern thing.

Merry Sheepmas!

Watercolor and a bit of digital editing to fix minor errors. Reference: My own photo. Living goat: In a field about a kilometer from my house. Bell: Created with inspiration from a few different reference photos found on Google.

Getting the right light grey woolly feel was hard to do in watercolor. But using a white gel pen to scribble lightly over the base watercolor painting brought out the effect I wanted.

A while back I joined a watercolor class on Reddit. I finished first exercise with the painting of the rum bottle, which by the way, now live happily with friends.

Today as the power was out for hours anyway, I decided I’d give watercolor exercise II a try. Combining the work in monochromatic with a technique I had watched on Youtube, by a very skilled watercolor artist, Iraville.

Plus, since today’s theme on Sketchdaily on Reddit was “tuxedo cat” I decided the subject had to be a still life with a cat then.

The family cat who seemed to have a bright future as model, cooperated for a grand total of about 5 seconds. Then he went hunting my brushes and then he was off, distracted by the kids left over chicken dinner. So in the end, this exercise is mostly painting from memory and imagination.

I had lots of fun playing with the fluffy technique and keeping the exercise limits of using only one color. As it turned out I hated the color I had chosen though. In the scan it turned out mostly bright yellow, even though it started out as brown on the paper. Its official name is “Raw Umber”. To fix it I desaturated the scanned picture till it was just black, grey and white with a slight warm tint left. I like it a lot more this way and it is still monochromatic as the exercise dictated.

So I learned a bunch from this exercise. The new painting technique turned out extremely hard to control and of course working in monochromatic you need to have good control of the small differences in hue. All in all I think it worked out. I like the little fluffy grey cat a lot.

I found a new Reddit challenge. A new watercolor exercise is given each week. First theme was “Still life”, so I decided to try to paint a bottle of rum without putting too much time in it. So this is around 2 hours work including time to have the different stages of it dry.

So many years I had this one photograph from when I went to Budapest in 2002. It’s dreamy and foggy and a bit magic. My digital camera at the time was fairly good but compared to modern digital photograph standards it’s crap. So I tried to paint the motif. It turned out so very far from what I had hoped, but after a few months of consideration and finally finishing it. I still like it with all its imperfections. So here it is after all.

Larger resolution

February in Colors 6. I had drawn the lady years ago while on vacation. She was the result of me reading Andrew Loomis drawing book with lots of advice on how to draw the human figure. I tested the tricks out while drawing this lady. She is not a living human, but rather someone who apparently was living in my imagination 🙂

For February in Colors I used her as the base for the style I have decided on in this challenge. Using masking fluid to keep areas clean; I used a very loose watercolor style. I feel good about having given life to a person, who has rested in my imagination for a long time.

Today I wanted to play with water colors again. I also wanted to get back to doing Artist Trading Cards. I combined the two, doing ATC cards for two Sketchdaily themes: “Plein Air” and “Repoussoir”.

For the Plein Air I decided on one of my old digital photos from Auckland skyline. My husband and I had gone for an evening trip to the viewpoint at Mnt. Victoria at Devonport. The city looked almost magic as its reflections stretched over the water.

It was a beautiful evening and it was fun to paint it now, even though it was difficult to fit Auckland into a piece of paper the size of 6.4 x 8.9 cm!
I also had a photo from when we went to Rotoroa. It was another beautiful evening. Framed by a giant willow tree the sun was setting over Rotoroa lake after a chilly, but calm Winter day.

Again I went for the ATC format, so I did not have much room to try capture the atmosphere from the old photograph. I find it tricky using masking fluid with water color for such a small format. But a white gel pen helps with adding the last crucial details to turn such a tiny painting interesting.

Today I made this water color mouflon skull. I wasn’t sure if I liked it for a very long time, while I worked on it. Colors flowed together in ways I had a hard time controlling. Textures I attempted to make did not turn out as expected.

But I think I am slowly learning to never give up on a piece. If it looks bad it’s often just a matter of pushing through that phase. Keep working on it, seeing where to add a bit of light or shadow or contrast to find what it was missing.

On this piece the background really tricked me. On my reference photo, that I shot once at a viking fair, there were thick bushes and trees in the background with quite strong light and shadows.

But all that greenery just looked flat in my painting, until I dared add very dark tones, even black. Then it all looked like mud. I tried adding droplets of water on the dried green surface, lifting off some color and creating a flowery effect in the background. That did help create some interesting textures and add some life to it.

Somehow in the end, when the skull was done too, and I added a bit of white gel pen and black ink, it somehow all came together. Now it’s one of my favorite paintings 🙂

Roe deer in Winter Wonderland, painted in water color with my own photos as references.

Back from Thailand I’ll do a bit of an art dump of some of the drawings I did while on vacation. I took 2500+ photographs. Many of them turned out great, but it’s impossible to choose so I’ll stick to my drawings here.

I managed to draw or paint every day while we were away. I am so happy I brought my watercolors. I won’t put it all here, some drawings were not exactly brilliant, but a few of them I am happy with.

Beautiful Gung, one of the staff at Jungle Village, Ao Nang, where we stayed in Thailand. We ended up feeling like family there.
Beautiful Jaep, another menber of the staff who danced for us one beautiful evening. We were being so spoiled by those wonderful people. Thank you so much Jungle Village!

Hrm, this is supposed to be Beyonce. She was featured as theme on Sketchdaily on Reddit. It’s not really looking like her, but I’ll give myself credit for the work anyway, since this was my first time ever trying to do a real portrait in watercolor. My watercolor paper for this trip was the smallest I could bring – 12×18 cm. It’s hard getting really fine details when the painting is that small. Good thing I brought thin and tiny brushes too 🙂
10 baht – pencil and colored pencils.
Si Island – one of the many exotic wild islands we passed a few kilometers off the coast at Ao Nang, Thailand.
After I got back I have been doing hard core drawing exercises like “Draw the same book 20 times from different angles” or “draw a straight line…then draw it again 8 times. Then repeat with 20 other straight lines” or “draw 100 plain boxes”.

It’s not really drawing practice, that suits being exhibited here. I have to admit it’s about as exciting work as doing the dishes or folding socks.

But that’s kinda the point. I am working with muscle memory practice – crucial for improving hand-eye coordination, sense of proportion and form, and also gaining line confidence. But there’s not much entertainment for my conscious mind in it, and no pretty product to be proud to showcase either.

I think I am seeing results after a few days of this actually. The internet’s drawing experts, who advocate for doing this on a regular basis, if you are serious about drawing, might be right.

I am following a system I found at “Draw A Box”. The lessons and challenges are killers! However they are super effective.