Working on the Lighthouse

My good friend Dottie asked me recently to paint a lighthouse for her. In the past I had done some work in her daugther's room and she wanted something to spice up her sea-themed bathroom. After doing a quick search on Google images on lighthouses (only 7.9 million of them), I mocked up a few quick drawings with my watercolor pencils to get a feel for what she's looking for.

She liked the layout of #1 but wanted more rocks. She also went with the lighthouse design of #2. Grabbing my craft acrylics and brushes, I set off to work.

The first night I got a good start on things. I liked how the lighthouse started to come together and the blue-green of the water complimented the red of the lighthouse.

The next night I dropped in a light grey sky and put in the sun and it's reflections on the waves. I think that I should have dropped in the sky background first instead of doing all the foreground work, but that's a lesson for the next time. The rocks also didn't have enough contrast to make them pop, so I put in more shadows and highlights.

The final night I put in more details and added the cloud cover. Dottie really enjoys it and want's me to do more in the coming year. Overall, it took me about 7-8 hours of work.

Practicing with Two Colors

I picked up a few true oil colors after doing a lot of reading on how best to use the solvents needed for cleaning. I found that Turpenoid Natural is a pretty safe and very low odor brush cleaning medium, and did a pretty good job of both cleaning my brushes and not making the kids run in fear of the smells coming from the dining room table.

For this painting I used just french ultramarine, burnt sienna and white, which is slightly different from my last two color work here, where I used phthalo blue instead of the ultramarine. As you can see, the 'greens' here are a bit darker as ultramarine leans towards the redder side of the blues.

Peppers

Last week I was sitting in Connie's kitchen waiting for her kids to get home from school. Sitting on the countertop by the window was a bowl of fruits and vegetables with the sunlight dropping down on them. Grabbing my watercolor pencils, I got to work. I didn't finish in time as the bus soon pulled up.

As I had started with the orange pepper first and worked my way to the left, the whole composition definately leans to the left. I think it looks better this way than had I done it more level. I also like the brightness of the colors but I need to work on generating deeper contrasts with the watercolor pencils. What you think is dark enough really fades once you bring on the water.

Doodle Bird

I just recently got a new Wacom Pen tablet and here is a quick doodle I did using the supplied Corel Painter Essentials program. I'm still learning the program, but it's been delightful to use (I do recommend it as an inexpensive digitizing device) and the kids have had a blast making drawings for the refridgerator.

Bird and Berries

I really do enjoy working with my watercolor pencils. Just watching the color blossom as the brush goes on is a thrill for me.

Matt on the River

A few weeks ago I got a chance to head down to part of the Wisconsin River with my friend Matt. He wanted to fish and I wanted to do some 'plein air' painting (painting outdoors). So while he was catching bluegills, I had my folding chair and sat in the shade painting away. I was glad I had made those swatches of color I've posted about earlier. They were a great help in helping determine what colors the background trees were and which shade of blue the sky. It was a good exercise for me, as a lot of my drawing and painting I do from my imagination and this helped me work on seeing the colors as they actually are.

Matt caught eight fish.

Working on textures

My latest project has me practicing the layering of color. I'm attempting to get smooth gradients from lighter to darker shades, with only occasional success, by layering successive washes of color onto the previous ones.

My palette probably has too many colors for this painting, but I wanted to get a good diversity of color for the rock wall. The viridian tree on the right doesn't seem to match the intensity of the rest of the painting. I think I'll need to work on the shadows more and increase the contrast to make the lighter parts pop more.

Tale of Two Ceruleans

One of the more interesting things I've learned while getting back into painting is the concept of pigments instead of colors. As you can see from the color swatches I made from two Cerulean Blue paints - the one on the left from M. Graham and the one on the right from Winsor & Newton - that they're not quite the same.

Investigating this more, I find that the pigments that make up the paints are different. The paint from Winsor and Newton uses pigment PB35 which is actual Cerulean Blue. The paint on the left from M.Graham is pigment PB36 which is Cobalt Chromite Blue Green Spinel! The difference is that true Cerulean Blue pigment is very granular and you can see the rough surface it creates on the paper on the right. This granularity was 'solved' by M. Graham by using a different material all together.

Though I have to wonder why they used the Cerulean Blue name, perhaps because it's much more recognizable!

More flowers

Here are some flowers I've been drawing with the watercolor pencils during my lunch time. I had the idea to make the background flowers lower in the distance to make it seem like you were looking up at the iris.

The scanner is still making the colors too light, I need to find the right settings to save to a profile for these types of images.

Swatches

I've ben working recently on making swatches of my watercolor paints. In my reading of different painting books and articles, they all mention learning the properties of the paints you have. Which ones are more transparent, which ones are more granulating and how they change with the ratio of water to paint. So I drew up 1" x 6" strips and got painting. Starting with the outside and working in, I doubled the amount of water for each square.

It was interesting to learn how much water is needed for the different pigments to make them the brightest. If you look and see the Quinacridone Gold on the right, you can see that it goes from a very mottled dark gold to a very pretty creamy gold with just the addtion one drop of water! The Lamp black shows to be a very strong pigment as well, needing a lot of water to bring it down into the neutral gray area. The Viridian shows how granulating some of the paints can be even with a lot of water.

This was a lot of fun to paint. I punched holes at the ends and looped them all into an old keychain for easy management.

Blue and Purple

I put this one together for Connie's birthday a few weeks ago. I'm still trying to get a feel for different paint strengths and how to overlay washes of color. In watercolors you can get a lot of different effects depending on how dry the lower levels of paint are and how loaded with paint your brush is. I'm having trouble spotting the difference between slightly damp and almost dry and really dry. I think it'll come to me eventually with practice and patience.

I came across a new paper that I wanted to try for this. It's a very thick poster board material with a watercolor paper surface. It didn't buckle like unstretched watercolor paper normally does, but it did have a slight bow when I was done that I needed to flatten. I used Cerulean blue, Pthalo blue and Dioxazine purple paint.

I think I want to do some color charts next. I feel like I need to play with the paints to see what each paint does with different amounts of water.

Dragon Tattoo 8.6

I've made more progess on the tattoo design so far. I really like how the head and wings have turned out. I'm finding that I may need to go back and adjust the lower body to keep a more consistant line width. Nick's name is far too bold, leaving Kyra's name to look out of place. I am happy that I was able to be fairly consistant in my letter styles, making an A and an N that fit well either in a wing or to fill up a body was quite the challenge.

Next is to perhaps add a lower claw and to add some 'fire' coming out of the mouth. I want to add a few more names and that might be the best way to do that.

I also should get this down to a tattoo shop to have them critique it, I should find out if my lines are too thick or thin before making too many more revisions. Overall, I'm happy with the design and we should be able to get it done soon.

Snowy Sunset

I've subscribed to several online art newsletters and one this last week had a tutorial on painting winter sunsets. I liked the colors and thought this would be a good quick project to work on. The most interesting part was trying to put the sun in. The article mentioned painting the deep yellow and then taking an almost dry brush and sucking up the paint where the sun would be. This would leave behind the lighter yellow. Well, that didn't work at all. Inspiration came when I took the sheet of paper towel I keep for wiping off my brush and pressed it onto the paint with my finger tip. I counted to five and lifted it out and it looked great! I think I could have made the shadows of the foliage darker as there's not enough contrast with the snow.

I'm having trouble getting our scanner to pick up the colors correctly. On the first pass it missed picking up the faint shadows of the trees in the foreground so I'll need to tweak the scanner settings more.

I think next on the list is making a color wheel or two. It was hard to come up with a decent dark green for the conifer trees as well as getting good leaf brown colors.

Flowers for Mother's Day

I've been working on my watercolor techniques recently. It's been tough to get a feel for how much water to have on the brush or on the paper. This painting deals with wet on wet painting and how to fade color in a wash. I also wanted to see how the cool colors (the Alizarin Crimson at the top) worked with the warmer Permanent Rose at the bottom. I think it helps give the illusion of distance for the upper flowers.

My photo is a little on the fuzzy side since I had matted this up for a frame for Ticia's Mother's Day gift. I was all about to assemble things before I remembered that I wanted to scan it first!

Tattoo Design 8.1

I've been working for many years on a tattoo design for Ticia and I. The idea is to lay the kid's names out in a dragon shape. I've lost count of the drawings I done for this. I'm looking for the perfect design and I'm liking how Rebecca's name is in this design. Now to tweak Nick's and add the others!

Keyon's Bench

I painted this for my good friend Keyon. He's a big fan of sea turtles and originally wanted this on his bedroom wall. We thought this would be a good compromise. It was a lot of fun to paint this, but it took much longer than I expected. Now his sister wants ponies on her walls!

Two Color Composition

In one of the watercolor painting books I have, they suggest trying a painting using just Burnt Sienna and Winsor (Phthalo) Blue. It was interesting to me to see the different shades of blue, green and brown I could generate. It also showed me that I'll need a lot more practice in controlling how the water hits the page.

Sea Turtle

Just a quick sea turtle drawing for Connie. I like how the front fins turned out.

Drawn with watercolor pencils on 200lb watercolor paper.

Color of the Week: Alizarin Crimson

As part of my study about painting, I've been interested in learning more about color. What's the difference between 'cool' and 'warm' colors? What does 'transparent', 'semi-transparent' and 'opaque' mean for a color. What does 'fugative' mean? What are pigments and how do they relate to the paints I use?

I thought I would also make cards of the colors for my reference using several of the different mediums that I dabble in. What you see above is my first attempt using the color   Alizarin Crimson  .

Alizarin Crimson is a 'cool' red, meaning that the color leans more to the blue side of the color wheel than the yellow. This is a good color for making clean purples. Mixing it with yellow will give a muddy brownish orange.

It's color originally comes from the roots of the Madder plant and this color has been used for centuries. It was the colorant for the British army's "redcoat" during colonial times as well as dye for Egyptian pharaohs. Chemists in the 1800's were able to artifically reproduce the color, causing the collapse of the madder growing industry.

Alizarin is a 'fugative' colorant, meaning that it will lose it's color over time due to sunlight. This has caused paint companies to come up with replacement pigments that are more stable. If you look at the swatch above, the Permanent version of the watercolors is actually Quinacridone Pyrrolidine Red instead of Alizarin. Quinacridone was invented for use as an automobile paint in the 1950s.

I know I won't be posting these every week, but I don't think "Color of whenever I get around to posting again" sounds as clever. If you have a better name for this feature, let me know!

Bucket of Kittens

I found a photo of three kittens in a bucket in one of my daughter's calendars that I liked, so I dug out my watercolors and got to work. I had forgotten how much more intense the watercolor paints are versus the watercolor pencils I've been using for the past month or two. My plan is to do this image with the watercolor pencils as well, so I can contrast the different effects that I can create.

I still need to add some shading to the bucket and finish up the kitten faces, but I'm happy with how this is turning out. I'm using my Winsor & Newton Artist watercolors on 200lb. paper. This is the first time I've used a paper this heavy and I like that I haven't needed to stretch it first.

Back to Watercolors

I was at a local bookstore going through the art section when I came across a book from Steven Hanks titled Moving On. I was knocked out of my socks when I started going through the book. He's able to be paint very realistic paintings using watercolor and that's something I've wanted to work towards. (You can view his art here.)

I've always leaned more towards the realistic side of painting. Impressionistic and abstract work just never seemed to impress me that much. I think part of this was from my parents, they were heavily into the art of Aaron Bohrod who was a resident artist here at the UW Madison. Bohrod painted incredibly detailed works of art where you felt like you could actually pick off the items off the canvas.

So this brought me back to thinking about watercolor painting again. I went through my daughter's kitten calendars looking for a good subject to work from and I found something worth trying out. I'm going to do this image twice, once with my watercolor pencils and another with actual watercolor paints. I'm curious as to just how they compare.

Time for Fruit

I've been really enjoying my watercolor pencils. I need to work on overlaying and layering the colors to get smoother tones. Here's another still life!

Lots of Leaves

I've finally finished my watercolor pencil drawing. I really do like how these pencils handle and I'll probably need to order some more online.

Enjoy!

Acrylic flowers in progress

I'm trying the Open acrylics again, working on getting a feel for how they mix and their drying time. With the colors I have, I thought I'd go for making more flowers. Anyway, here's the current state.

More thoughts on Watercolor pencils

After trying out the new Albrecht Durer watercolor pencils I'm finding that I like them a LOT. The color goes on smoother and dissolves more completely than their student-grade sibling Aquarelles. I'll post later a photo of a test I did between several of the matching colors between the two sets. You can see the difference on how the pencils dissolve.

I've learned that if you are serious (or even semi-serious) about a new medium, it's worth it to buy the 'Artist's Grade' version of that medium. It's better to spend your money on a few excellent quality paints/pencils/whatever than to buy a bunch of something that you'll regret purchasing once you try the good stuff.

Now would anyone like a bunch of Aquarelles?

Test driving the Albrecht Durer watercolor pencils

One of my first art projects when I started getting back in to things was to draw portraits of our kids as an anniversary gift for my wife. I bought a bunch of Faber-Castell Aquarelle watercolor pencils for this and they worked fairly well. Watercolor pencils are like colored pencils except that instead of colored graphite, you get actual watercolor paint in the pencil. You draw like you would normally and by adding a wash of water you get a beautiful watercolor effect.

I love working in watercolor and this is an easy way to do it. The pencils that I had did have some frustrating qualities. They were a bit too hard and would leave gouges in my paper. They also didn't dissolve completely when you ran your wet brush over the pencil marks. While browsing through the art supply stores online I came across the high-end version of the pencils I had.

I had mentioned to Connie that I was looking at these Albrecht Durer pencils and soon she said, "Surprise! They're on their way." I was soon to be the proud owner of a set of twelve off of eBay.

When I got them I knew the first thing to do was to make up a color chart as it's impossible (or at least really hard for me) to remember what color pencil does what exact color.


From here I started to draw. Since this was the Nature set of pencils I thought an autumn leaf pile was a good place to start. Here's the work in progress.


And I'll post the finished version soon.

Test driving Golden's OPEN Acrylics

For the past few paintings I've been using a new type of oil paints that clean up with water. This leaves out all the bad smells and chemicals while still leaving the slow drying times and ability to make nice blends that is the hallmark of oil painting. My paintings were going fairly well, but I noticed that the paint dries much more slowly than I was expecting. I'd come back to a painting weeks later to find spots still wet. (I now know that other oil painters expect this and work on multiple paintings at the same time to interleave the drying time!)

Well, I had come across a new art supply store (new for me at least) Lynn's on Odana Road. While browsing through there, I came across a large display for Golden brand acrylic paint. Golden's paints are some of the best acrylics out there and I was interested in this new subsection called "OPEN" paint. After grabbing a brochure or two and a lot of quick digging on the web, I found a paint that I wanted to try.

Normal acrylics dry very quickly. Like in 5 minutes. Not enough time for me to get what I want done especially with all the interruptions that happen in our busy house. Well, the "OPEN" in the name means that these paints will still be workable for a longer period of time, or more 'open' for use.

I went back to Lynn's and bought the starter set of 6 tubes of paint and brought them home to try. I dabbled with these paints for over an hour with stops to put kids to bed, get Mom her juice and let the dog out and back in again. The paint still was workable on the palette and I could still make my blends on the leaves and cube. This is perfect for the situation I'm in. I'm a very happy camper now and I'll set up the next painting very soon. My only issue now is I want more tubes!



Painted with Golden OPEN Acrylics, Alizarin Crimson, Sap Green, Ultramarine Blue, Hansa Yellow Opaque, Burnt Sienna and Titanium White on canvas paper.

A quick Confusion logo

Once a year our family travels to Door County for a long weekend getaway with our friends. This year the theme of the weekend is the Indiana Jones movies. We were discussing whether we should have monkey brains for the main dinner gathering and that gave me the idea for this sketch for a logo for the Con.

Done in pen & ink using Faber-Castell india ink pens on plain graph paper.

A place for my art

Hi!

I've been often asked to share the art work I've been working on and I thought a blog would do the trick. I can post the photos and talk about what I used and what I was trying to do. Please feel free to give me feedback, good or bad.

Thanks for reading,
-Mark