Brown Drawing Paper, Part Two

About three years ago I posted about working on brown paper, and to this day that's the most-clicked post on my blog. It seems a LOT of people are looking for information about it.

I still like Rives BFK Tan (technically, it's printmaking paper) more than any other paper I use. But these days I use a lot more watercolor on my Rives paper. Also, in the time since I wrote that previous post, I've discovered Micron pens.

The fine black lines you see in these three pieces are all Micron pen. Lightfast, waterproof, great for mixed media work.

If you make art you may have found that, when you scan a thing you created in watercolor, your scanner kills the colors deader than a doornail. Your greens and yellows turn brown, your oranges get burnt, it all goes sideways, and there's not much your photo-editing program can do to fix any of it.

For reasons I do not understand, this problem is much less pronounced with watercolors on tan paper. You'll still have some shifting but for the most part your art will look like your art. And the shifts that do happen are things that you can at least somewhat improve in Photoshop.

French Paper, Fine Watercolors, and ... Crayolas?

 

Last night I did Monster Drawing Rally with Midway Contemporary Art. The challenge is knowing I have only an hour to do whatever I'm doing. So if it's fast and loose, I'll give it a shot, and this year I added Crayolas to my supply kit. 

Sparrow in pastel pencil, watercolor, pen, white Crayola, and white acrylic. I did a quick loose sketch with pastel pencil (erasable); followed that with the pen; used white crayon on the areas I knew I wanted to be lightest/sunlit; added watercolor; then put white acrylic touches on the very brightest spots, because white crayon on tan paper = lighter tan, not actual white.

Yep, that wax-resist thing with crayons and watercolors is still just as much fun as it was when you were eight. I recommend it! The goldfish painting is the same technique as the sparrow, just with some orange crayon added for the smaller fish. Oh, and the paper is Rives BFK Tan, my favorite thing ever to draw and paint on. It's made of pure cotton fiber and is heavy, velvety and not prone to buckle much when wet.

If you couldn't make it to last night's event or weren't quite fast enough to snap up one of my four pieces (they went fast!), you can follow me on Facebook where I'll be posting several small works like this over the next week or two, at the $35 Monster prices.

The Drawing Board

Or in this case, the drawing coffee table. This was yesterday afternoon as I was getting started. Click to enlarge the photo.

And several hours later, I had this:

Wrong Side of the Door, 8 x 10". I've emailed this to the kitty's owners, who will have first choice if they'd like to own it. Either way, it's going to become a greeting card and print.

Did Not Go as Planned

When you make art, it's common for the thing to miss that left turn at Albuquerque -- and take you somewhere you didn't know you were going.

Sometimes, that's a disaster. Sometimes it's not. It's what happened here ...

Kings of the Goldenrod City, set of three oil paintings on canvas, each 20 x 20"

First of all, these were supposed to be abstract, and they were supposed to be a continuation of my Cracked Concrete series, and there were supposed to be four of them.

If you look closely, you'll see the cracked concrete pattern in the lower parts, peeking through. It also gave me the basic division of space that I used between the lighter "ground" and the red "sky" areas. But once I got those lines and divisions in place, it all just stalled. Totally. These canvases sulked on the wall of my studio for something like six months, and might be there still if I hadn't had a DEADLINE OMG DEADLINE looming.

The first thing I did was recognize that the red paint I had already applied -- which up until then was a diseased patchwork of blotches -- had been a real mistake. I decided, if I was going to make a mistake, I ought to make a BIG MISTAKE, and I put a ton more red in.

Those odd, gourd-like "houses" are based on dry goldenrod stems I'd collected a while back. Something makes homes in these things while they grow, and then drills out, leaving neat little doors behind in the fall. I loved them, but the paintings needed something alive and in motion, and then I was playing around online and found a documentary about crows. I paused it repeatedly, took screen shots, and off I went.

By then I was running out of time, so I pulled the fourth canvas, the one I had the least idea what to do with. It'll reappear soon enough, not as part of this set but as its own thing. Not what I'd planned, but what happens.

Workshop in Door County, WI, July 8 - 10

When I'm not painting in oil, I work in mixed media by default. This began in 2008 when I wanted to improve my painting, so I went back to drawing, using dramatic light and shadow to sharpen my sense of composition.

The problem was, I hated shading in all those shadows. So I started toning my paper with acrylic matte medium and some paint, and then working over that in charcoal, pastels, chalk, whatever I had on hand. The results were magical, and I've been happily mixing up media ever since. Acrylic and Prismacolor pencils? Sure! Watercolors, pencils and pastel? Absolutely; that's what the horse in this post is.

These techniques have attracted some attention. The Peninsula School of Art in Door County, WI, invited me to put on a three-day workshop there. I am honored and very excited. Click the link above for their site, where you can find more information and register.

If you're feeling stuck or bored, mixed media can break you out of that and make art fun again.

If you've been drawing, and wondering how to transition into painting, the light/dark layering approach I use is a very good bridge to help you get there.

If you're still learning to draw, that same approach can help build your confidence in a way that will surprise you.

Here's the Mystery Horse!

Bold Brigadier, watercolor, pencils and pastel with touches of white acrylic, on cotton rag paper. I used a deeper tan instead of my usual Rives BFK, because I felt this horse would look best on a slightly darker ground -- the better to make that beautiful blaze stand out. He may be the only one for whom I chose to leave the backdrop blank.  Oh, and there is a lot of violet, blue, brown/red, and even touches of green in the big black stallion. 

 

Center photo above, the portrait in progress. This was with the first layers of carbon pencil and watercolor. Last, my reference photo. Brigadier is no longer with us, sadly, and while I loved his sweet expression here, the photo ... you really can't see a lot of detail, and if you look at his ears you'll notice the camera distortion that made one of them much too large. I corrected that right away. The other thing I altered, you can't even tell: I made his neck thicker and more arched than it actually is in the photo. 

Yes, I know it looks exactly the same. But in order to get it to look exactly the same, I had to change it. I think it was another perspective/distortion problem, but when I drew it accurately to the photo it looked far too skinny. This kind of thing is pretty common when translating photos into art; the thing that looks fine in a photo can look very wrong as a drawing or painting. So artists learn not to let the photo be a tyrant, and to trust ourselves instead. 

Beauty the Knabstrupper, Pony #21

Beauty, about 9 x 11". I used watercolor, pastel pencils, NuPastels, carbon pencil, and white acrylic paint. This kind of coat pattern is so lovely -- and takes a lot of work to capture well. What you see here is the result of layering light and dark  over one another to get the look of real texture rather than blotches of color stuck onto the surface.

Above, the portrait in an earlier stage, when I had just put down washes of watercolor to establish the base color of Beauty's coat. Below is last night, essentially finished but in need of a few touches; look closely and you'll see that it's missing the texture on the mane-braids and some of the coat pattern on the neck, which I added just after taking this shot.

Learn-to-Draw Tool: How to Use a Grid

After a bit of searching online, I found a good video on how to draw using a grid. This is a method I use a lot in order to enlarge photos or prep sketches, such as this one, which had to go from 7 x 6 inches, to 7 x 6 feet:

This tutorial shows how the small drawing above becomes the wall you see below. The painter in the video uses a 1:1 scale, since he's creating a small portrait, but the principle is the same.

If you want to try drawing and don't know where to start, using your snapshots and a grid can help. It's a good confidence-builder because it lets you draw in small, manageable bits, instead of plunging in over your head.

I still use this method when I need super-accuracy in an animal portrait or when I need to enlarge a source image.

Clydesdale on the Easel

His Majesty's Nose Itches

 This is a big canvas -- 40 x 30"-- not one of the Christmas Ponies, though certainly adorable enough. Oil paint, wax medium, and a lot of solvent to create the fun washes of color in the background. I just finished it, like half an hour ago, and at the top of his leg you can see the glare of very wet paint! Update 1/6: Now that he's dry I have a better photo, taken at Frameworks Gallery where he'll be hanging for the month. I've got a couple progress shots and the source photo for this, so I thought I'd share.

My source photo, above. This is a big friendly Clydesdale who is out in the pasture with my Twilight, and makes her look like a petite little thing. He is HUGE. Thankfully, he is also a sweet, gentle goofball. I find him really attractive as an art subject, so I started snapping photos and caught this great one when he had an itchy nose.

My original drawing on the canvas, done in thin sienna paint. You can see how I'm already thinking about light and shadow as I start.

Earlier today. This is what my friend Jennifer Lowery calls "dangerously close to done." Lots of elements I love love love, but not finished, and it would be SO EASY to kill the painting at this point by doing too much more to it. A painting only needs so much work, and no more; the amount of work will be different for each painting, and the trick is to know 1. when to stop and 2. what to do if you realize you missed #1.

Let's play Spot the Lens Distortion

So, hi. Happy New Year, everyone!

I spent yesterday & the day prior getting my new website started and switching email providers (same address, more reliable service) and the good news is, my computer has no viruses.

Bad news:  I do. :-P

So I'm home, and I've got another black horse and another (mostly) white one that were put on hold while I dealt with technical stuff, and meanwhile this adorable photo just came in, for a drawing I'll be doing once the Pony Project is complete.

This is a pretty nice photo for art-making purposes. I'll have to undo the striped light from the blinds, yes, and there are some details I'll have to improvise around the nose and mouth, but the pose and expression are perfect and I can see the eyes really well.

Oh, and one particular thing got distorted by the camera. We're conditioned to looking at photos and so we fail to see this most of the time. It looks fine! But if you make a drawing that looks just like it, it'll look wrong.

Can you spot the problem I'll be correcting here?

How to Color a Black or White Horse

Today on Ride of the Christmas Ponies, we have #17, Rohan, above, and #16, Rhio, below. Very very different horses, but what they have in common is that, being black and white, they require me to use a lot more colors than they would if they were some variety of brown/red/buckskin/whatever. No, really.

If you've ever tried to paint something that was entirely black or white, you probably realized that just using black or white paint didn't work very well. This is because light bounces all around, all the time, and other colors are always reflected everywhere. Those reflections get most obvious on objects (or animals) whose colors are really neutral in themselves -- black or white. In order to make them feel vibrant and alive, I have to use purples, greens, browns, blues, all kinds of things you'd never expect. 

Fixing a Stretchy-Faced Horse

This is a really common thing in horse photos: the dreaded Lens Distortion. This is Honey, the Christmas Pony I'm working on today. I love her expression in the reference photo at top, but I could tell the camera had made her nose too long! I have to correct that, and here's how I do it. 

 I printed two photos of her and measured both, from the poll behind the ears to the bottom point of her eye, and then from that point to the top edge of her nostril. Those distances were close to identical in the side (un-distorted) view, but in the close-up they differed by 50%!

A bit of quick math: 1.45 divided by 1.25, from the side print, gave me 1.16. On my distorted print, the ear-to-eye length is 2", and 2 x 1.16 was 2.32. I have to guess a little here, but I made the dark line at around 2 and 1/3" -- that's where the top of the nostril would be if the lens hadn't distorted Honey's face.

I measure other things, often less precisely; I will also have to account for her muzzle being too wide, for example, and pare that down as I create the sketch.  The side view won't help a lot with that, but I'm experienced enough to figure it out. 

I already did a post of simple tips for better amateur dog photos, and all of those apply to horses, but if I can find a horse-photography tutorial I'll link it here.

Friendly Stuff for Beginner Artists

 

This is one of my favorite books for beginners. I use it in my classes a lot.  Most of the exercises and principles are the same ones you'd get out of a book like Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain (another favorite of mine), but I've found this one easier reading and more confidence-building for a lot of my students, with a very welcoming and soothing quality. 

If you've always wondered whether you could learn to draw, this book believably shows how you can. Highly recommended. It's on Amazon here.

Making a Dog Portrait Drawing

Here's what's on the easel right now. Hannah, a lovely German Shepherd Dog. She is IN PROGRESS, here -- not finished, and in fact no longer looks quite like the photo below:

Hannah in progress. 14 x 11" mixed media on paper.

This photo was done after I added watercolor washes to much of Hannah's fur. I've already gone back in with my pencils and given a lot more depth and detail to the right side of her ear-base and face (the left side of the picture). But the sun has gone down and I don't like to take photos at night, for reasons you'll see in a moment.

Above, the pre-watercolor stage. At this point what I had was her basic form and some of the darkest dark areas, drawn in with a Wolff's Carbon Pencil (my favorite for detailed black line and shading).

Below, an earlier shot, done at night with a flash. THIS is why I hate taking photos at night, and incidentally, why I try to get my clients to photograph their animals in daylight and without a flash. It's the harsh light from the flash that turns everything icy blue.

Lousy color notwithstanding, if you click this photo to zoom in on it, you'll see what I was up to in the very beginning stages of this drawing. I had worked out the proportions of my image, and printed it at 9 x 7" so that I could translate it easily to 14 x 11" in the drawing. The lines I drew on the print are grid lines which I replicated, to scale (and very lightly) on my drawing paper. The grid is a centuries-old artist tool for ensuring accurate proportions, and while I don't always use it, it can really help reduce the time I spend correcting and re-correcting.

You can also see two other lines if you look closely. One goes from the left to right ear-tips, and the other down the middle of the head in front. Those are directional lines I sketch in to ensure that I'm seeing the correct angle of the head and that my ears aren't wandering off from where they ought to be. It's so easy to get caught up in the intricate details of eyes and ears, and miss seeing (until later) that their size or placement is wrong!

What's That Brown Drawing Paper?

Lately I've had several people ask about the paper I use -- the brown stuff. What it is and where I get it.

So I figured I'd post some links, and encourage y'all to play because I've found brown paper SO much more fun than stark white.

The dog portrait, above, is on a cotton-rag printmaking paper called Rives BFK Tan. I love this paper so much it might not even be moral. You can get it at Blick or at Wet Paint. It comes in big sheets and you tear it to whatever size you need. This is heavy, velvety, and holds up to ink washes, watercolor, paint -- pretty much anything you throw at it, it won't buckle, and that's a tough thing to find.

The Greyhound drawings, and a lot of the sketches I've posted recently, are in my Cachet Earthbound Sketch books. The only place I know that carries them locally is Wet Paint, but even they are hit or miss. Easier to get these online. They come in a variety of sizes. The paper has a lovely speckly quality and a really nice tooth for drawing. I love it, but for dry media only; it is lightweight and will buckle badly if you use washes on it.

Some of the bolder things, like this toy horse drawing (Uncle Oscar's Appaloosa, mixed media, 13 x 10", sold but if you love it I'd love to make one for you) are on textured brown paper I prepare myself. If you click and enlarge it you'll see the brush-stroke texture that permeates the drawing, and that's from the prepped paper.  It's a fun and simple process and I'll share it in another post if anyone's interested.