Chore Day Sep 7, 2019 -- Arteza Gouache Color Swatches

Besides my usual chores (cooking for my furry friends), I went to the Coop for onions, garlic, kale, and vegetable broth. There are times when I feel disbelief that I now eat only plants. But, I do, and I’m happy with what I eat.

Besides thinking about food I made some color swatches for the Arteza gouache kit I bought a few weeks ago. There are 60 colors, most of them are convenience colors. Here are the first 20. There’s no telling when I’ll do the other 40 — I find doing the color swatches to be tedious and frustrating. I usually screw them up with misspellings, putting the wrong label on a color, irregular lettering, and so on. When I see Youtubers with Youtube smiles on their face doing elaborate and perfect color swatches, I assume they couldn’t think of anything important to talk about, so, hey!, why not do another set of color swatches using some gouache/watercolors they would never use in their own art.

Here’s my contribution to color swatches. You can see that some of the colors are transparent or semi-transparent. The Peach Red is a neon color and difficult to capture in a photograph or scan. The “Pearl” colors are mica-based to give them a shimmer, which also cannot be captured in a photo or scan.

A Steller's Jay in Gouache

In my children’s book the protagonist is a young Steller’s Jay. I plan to use one of my end matter blank pages for a painting of an actual Steller’s Jay. If you live on the West Coast of the United States, you’re probably noticed these noisy, playful birds that might be called Blue Jays. I always called them that, but when I was doing research for the book, I thought it would be a good idea to double check. I found out that Blue Jays are East Coast birds. What I’ve been calling Blue Jays are actually Steller’s Jays.

I’ve been drawing the comic version of a Steller’s Jay so often that I was unsure whether I could paint a real Jay. I decided to use gouache because I really need the practice.

Here’s my effort today. It’s a work in progress. I’m going to add a few details tomorrow. The top page shows my Wikipedia reference photo and a practice sketch. I used a water soluble graphite pencil for the sketching and M Graham and Creta gouache for the painting. I’m intimidated by gouache, but I love it. When I’m painting I feel the same excitement I felt as a kid doing a really messy finger painting.

Al Fresco Art Club, September 1, 2019 -- 30 Days Without Digital Art

Today the Al Fresco Art Club posed this challenge: to do all drawing and painting using only traditional media for the next 30 days. If your work requires using digital tools, you can use them. However, for personal art, we can use only traditional media. I’m going to focus on learning the basics of painting with gouache. Today I turned my gaze to one of my favorite paintings, Cézanne’s Farmhouses near Bellevue (1892-1895). When I did a search to find more information about this painting, I found that it’s also know by the name Fields at Bellevue. I suspect that names is an incorrect translation, but I can’t prove it.

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Al Fresco Art Club Aug 25, 2019 -- Gouache Painting of the Siskyou Mountains from Memory

Today’s art club challenge was to paint anything using gouache. I’ve been shying away from gouache for years, but now the look has great appeal, and I find that I can’t get the look digitally. I want to give gouache a try in my future children’s books and I know the most reasonable way to get the look is to use the real stuff.

I bought scant palette of seven colors: cadmium red and red light, cobalt blue, cadmium yellow, yellow ochre, and cadmium orange, as well as some titanium white and zinc white. I painted the view of the Siskiyou Mountains, as I see them from my back yard, from memory. I was going for a purple haze for the atmospheric perspective, but I wasn’t able to mix the color I wanted. I see now that I was on the right track, but I could have mixed in more white.

When the painting hour was over, I felt that I’d broken some long standing ice. I liked my painting. My dread of real painting with real paint was lifted. I could see that my fear of creating an ugly painting had kept me from taking the plunge. Fear is such a waste of time.

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Concept drawings, over and over

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I’m still struggling to create the look for Jimmy Jay. I’m frustrated that every time I draw him, he looks different. I’m hoping that if I draw him a 100 or 200 times that I’ll eventually work out how to draw him. Here are some of today’s renditions of Jimmy Jay, hero of The Jay Who Fell Down the Chimney.

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Instead of a fireplace, what about a potbelly stove?

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While I was researching fireplaces for my children’s book, I came across pictures of potbelly stoves. My grandmother actually had one of these, and a terrifying wood-fired kitchen stove. I’ve been wrestling with the complications of explaining how to open a chimney flue to let my errant jay bird escape — flues aren’t a big topic in books for 5-year olds. Serendipitously, the potbelly stove solves my problem — it’s obvious that you only have to open the top door and Jimmy Jay would simply fly out the door. No explanation required.

This gouache painting uses the Zorn palette (yellow ochre, vermillion, lunar black, and white). No photoshopping for this one.

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The villain enters the story

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The fireplace and its chimney are the villains of my story. I needed a model for this character, so I talked my fireplace into posing. My fireplace is actually used for storing my overflow books, but for simplicity’s sake I decided to leave them out.

I’ve been painting for the last week using only the Zorn palette and I like the restrictions it places on me. Since I’m just learning about color mixing, working with only three colors and black and white is actually liberating. These few colors have become almost comforting, whereas my bigger palette with 32 colors is scary.

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Character concept: little boy alarmed

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My goal for this painting was to practice using the least number of brush strokes possible to apply the color to my sketch. My gouache and watercolor paintings suffer from my tendency to use too many faint-hearted little strokes but today I really piled on the gouache in a series of single, heavy strokes. I gave myself a pat on the back.

I did all of the line work in Photoshop and also touched up the stray paint and other marks. This character is the little boy who lives in the house with the chimney that animals like to fall down into every year. In this picture, the boy, who doesn’t have a name yet, is pointing to the chimney and yelling to his grandmother that there’s something inside the fireplace. I’d like to get more feeling into this gesture, and more alarm into his face. It looks like I’ll have to photograph myself yelling with a little fear in the eyes, or maybe Muybridge can help out.

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Jimmy Jay and Topaz make eye contact

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I spent my painting time putting together the sketch and color layers I created yesterday. I thought it would take about an hour, but it took much longer. I spent more time on the digital compositing than on the actual drawing and painting. Photoshop is an awesome and seductive time sink. Still, I like what I can do with PS. I’m happy working in a hybrid way, using traditional media to create and digital to get it ready for publication.

The final image of two day’s labor… One of the problems with animal characters is what to do with their tails. Notice that Jimmy doesn’t have a tail, but Topaz does.

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Hmmm. It looks like I’ve mislaid Topaz’ eyepatch.

Sketching, painting, and compositing

Today I started a painting that I couldn’t finish in one hour. It was a somewhat complex painting of two of my characters passing each other on the street, Jimmy Jay and Topaz the feral cat. So far I’ve got a sketch and some colors. My contract says that if I don’t finish in one hour, I have to post the work in progress.

I scanned the sketch before I started painting. Too many times I’ve been lazy and didn’t take the 2 minutes to scan and have regretted it.

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Off to a good start. Gotta work on the extended arm perspective.

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And the colors.