Today’s art challenge was to do whatever we want. I wanted to work on drawing faces from different angles. I have trouble with the low-to-high perspective. I started this picture with a rough pencil sketch, then used a fountain pen to ink the lines, and applied some gray with Tombow watercolor markers. Getting the eyes to look right is the hardest part. My usual error is to draw them too close together. The ear may look too big, but my ears are big!
With the return of freezing weather, the Al Fresco Art Club met in the comfort of our warm kitchen. I chose to copy another Moebius masterpiece from his awesome The World of Edena. In this image Stel and Atan are being sucked into a what looks like an energy star. The original image looks simple, but getting the textured gradient looking good is not simple as I thought it would be. What a fun challenge!
I paint with gouache one day a week for about one terrifying hour. My pulse quickens and I feel a guttural trembling as I unpack my gear. I’m afraid that what I paint will look dreary and dull. I choose a simple subject — a coffee cup, a simple cylinder — because I think I may be able to paint it easily. But when I start to look at the cup closely to determine the colors I’ll use, I notice a thousand shades of gray. I notice that the shadow inside the cup is slightly brighter than the shadow outside the cup. It’s the reflected light inside the cup that makes it brighter.
At this point I think, it’s all getting too complicated. I surrender and just start painting the dark shapes, then the slightly less dark shapes, then the light shapes, and then the highlights. All of sudden the painting starts to look awesome. I like it. I’m amazed that I could actually paint a cup.
This week the Al Fresco Art Club continued on the path of learning how to paint with gouache. I chose to paint my kitchen timer. I tried some of the new brushes I bought yesterday, in particular a size 2 flat. I love flat brushes and use them whenever possible, even when I should be using a pointy round brush for details.
Here’s my kitchen timer.
At today’s Al Fresco Art Club meeting I proposed that we all paint a common object using basic shapes — all in one hour. In previous challenges attempting to replicate masterpieces was instructive, and fun. Those challenges taught me that I should really learn the basics first if I want to develop confident brush strokes. As it is, I usually worry the poor paper to death with a thousand tiny pecks of the brush.
I chose to paint my Holga 120 N film camera atop an Artbin craft box. I assert that the black blob does resemble a camera, and the plastic bin definitely look something like an Artbin bin. In this exercise I learned that it’s a good idea to paint in the background first. I didn’t this time but I wish I had. This is called learning from experience.
