Cha Cha the Chihuahua

 

Following on from last week, where I discovered that repurposed cardboard envelopes can make an excellent painting surface for gouache I made a small painting (approx 6.5″ x 6″) of a little Chihuahua puppy and her ball.  I called her Cha Cha, because little ones like this have a tendancy to dance and skip around when they are happy!

The cardboard performed beautifully as a painting surface and worked better than any other surface I have tried with gouache, including the expensive Arches Hot Pressed Watercolour Paper.

As usual I began with a sketch…

 

Then I laid down some basic background colour…

After that I began to paint in earnest…

 

Here is my finished painting…

 

I also really love the way this surface has a beautiful texture when painted on.  Here’s a close up…

 

NB:  Apologies – I’m not very well at the moment, so I may take some time to get back to you.  All of the posts for the next few weeks were completed in the summer holidays and scheduled so I’m just going to let them run.  (It’s not Covid and the doctors have a good handle on it but it might take a while to get better.)

Reusing Envelopes and Jars as Art Materials

Art materials can be expensive. Sometimes this expense is really worth it. For me, good quality paint brushes and good quality paint are worth the extra money – control and water holding is better with good brushes and paints are more densley pigmented and less fugitive with good paints. However, it’s always great to find some art resources that can be found for free.

Envelopes

This summer I spent some time experimenting with this. It began when I was watching Star Trek Voyager and felt like doodling. I grabbed a cardboard Amazon envelope and my palette which had a range of paints left over from a picture I had worked on the day before. Then I just began to play with it. I was really happy to find that the gouache paint went on to this surface beautifully and, because the surface was a mid range tone rather than dark or light, it was really super to work with tonally.

This was my first adventure into envelope painting…

The next day I tried the same thing with an insurance envelope. This was a thin, low quality paper and it really showed. The paper couldn’t take any water without becoming wrinkled and discoloured making it hard to work on…

So I decided to only do this with cardboard. I grabbed some old envelopes and used my trimmer to make some small postcard sized canvases. Here’s my current pile…

 

This time I found the painting was even better because I had only reused parts of the card which were clear of printing and belimishes. It really was a fabulous surface to work on – and totally free!

Here’s a close up of my third foray into reusing envelopes for painting…

…and my forth…

I then went on to make a fully painted, small sized painting of a tiny chihuahua on the same reused card the next day. (More of that in next week’s post!)

Jars

Another new learning for me this summer has been that my kitty cat doesn’t care if the water I am using for painting is green, or blue or pink, she will still drink out of it! This is despite her having a cat fountain and two fresh bowls of water in different places! So I did a bit more recycling and reusing. I tipped away the last bit of coffee from a jar, cleaned it out and now I use this for painting. It still holds about a pint of water, but I can screw the lid on if I get up from the table so she can’t get to it. I’m using my trusty old pint glass to hold brushes now instead.

She looks so cute and fluffy but she can be quite a pickle!

A Rural Landscape in Ink

 

This week I worked on developing texture in ink.

I began with a basic sketch of a landscape which you might find in the north of England…

 

Normally I would just dive into inking this but I wanted to take some time to think about the textural effects I would use.  So I looked at the landscape and picked out eight different areas where a texture might work well.  Then I experimented with the textures for each of these areas.

I found that I needed more space for some of these areas, so I went onto another page…

Once I’d decided on the marks I would use to represent each texture I began to ink my drawing.

This week I switched over to using Rotring Rapidograph pens which are lovely to use and reliably produce the same line weight all the time.

I mus admit I thought they were superb.  They worked well as soon as I had set them up and never waivered.

I began inking the basic outline…

And then slowly and steadily worked my way through the whole drawing.  Working on this picture was a very restful meditative activity.  Time flew by as I drew and before long it was finished.  Here’s my final drawing…

 

Deeper into Art – The Whole Creative Process Part 2 of 2

Following on from last week where I documented the first four stages of my creative process. This week I’m going to look at the second half of that process. In all I have 7 steps I usually take to make a piece of art:

1. Intention
2. Inspiration and Reference
3. Exploring
4. Preparing
5. Creating
6. Assessment and Review
7. Sharing

So I’ll be focussing on Creating, Assessment and Review, and Sharing.

Creating

I began drawing with pencil and then hard pastel pencils. Once that was done I layered on my pastel pigment. Here are my process photos…

It seemed to go well until I took a step back and really looked at my final picture…

Assessment and review

The final image had the wrong feel to it. So I began to look carefully at what I had done.

Here is my digital plan and my final image side by side…

I think the “Plan” worked because the reddish colour of the background is pushed towards brown which is really just a dark orange yellow and so just looked like a different tone of the same basic colour as the Buddha’s skin. This made it more restful. There was a small amount of blue in his hair which, being an ultramarine blue/ violet, added an accent of complemetary colour to the picture which I liked too.

However in my actual drawing the blue was more prominent and not as violet, and in my background I’d picked up on the red of the paper directly with my pastel colour choices so I had three colours, giving my pastel picture the wrong feel all together. Red, blue and yellow are a triadic colour combination which is a high energy variation of a split complementary colour scheme. This gave it a youthful, playful feel which just didn’t work for my intentions with this image at all.

Back to the Drawing Board

So I literally went back to the drawing board and decided to try again and rework the whole thing with a different colour scheme.  However I now had about half the time to get it done!

I felt that using the burgundy paper I already had was really working against my intentions at this stage so I made the decision not to frame the picture under glass but to use a fixative on it instead.  I thought I would present it on a backing board in a clear plastic sleeve. That way it would still make a good present and I had time to order some more supplies. I bought some fixative and some creamy grey pastel paper.

I chose this time to use a blue background with cool blue light as that would make it more serene and tie it into the Buddha resting at night. I kept the golden yellows of my Buddha’s skin and the darker blues of his hair.

Here are my process pictures as I remade the image…

And this is the finished picture…

I am much happier with the result this time. 🙂 The portrait answers the question which my heart was asking when I decided to work on this.

Once it was finished I fixed it outside with a professional artist’s fixative using my home made spraying bay…

I made this out of an old vacuum cleaner box. It works really well to hold the picture at a good angle for spraying and doesn’t let the fixative go all over the ground. (I use this for varnishing gouache sometimes too.)

Assessment and Review Take Two!

I am pleased with the warm golden feeling of the Resting Buddha’s skin and the calm night-time feel of the background. I wish I could add the smell of an open wild place, like our local common, and the sound of summer insects to the scene somehow.

The final image which I gave to my friend was slightly more muted in colour due to the fixative, but that added to the gentle restful feeling of the picture.  (I pushed the saturation and contrast in the pastels so that it would still look good when the fixative muted everything.)

Here’s the picture after using fixative…

One criticism I have of this piece is that I drew the buddha’s neck muscles for a man sitting up or standing and then turned the image sideways as I found the kind of composition I wanted for my potrait. So the muslces at either side of his neck (sternocleidomastoid muscles if memory serves) are drawn as if they were active in supporting the head. However when he is laying on his side these muscles would most likely be at rest which would change the shape of his neck. If I went back and remade the picture a third time (!) I would find reference for the neck region of a man lying on his side so I could get this right.

It’s only a small detail but I have found that the more small details are correct in a picture, the more the viewer is able to see what I have in my heart as I paint it. It is the viewer who is, in many ways, almost a collaborator in each picture in the end.

Sharing

Well my friend really liked her picture and I was very happy to have done this for her.

Generally speaking I share my art mostly in person and on WordPress.

On the technical side of sharing art, I use tags on each page so that search engines can index my pages appropriately. This results in about half of my views coming from search engines and half from within WordPress.

I am also careful when sharing my work to keep the resolution of images down to something that displays well on the web but is too low for print as this prevents various automatic image stealing sites from grabbing my images. You’ll often see the suffix “_web” on my filenames as this helps me know when I have reduced the resolution appropriately. I keep all of the finished full-size files with a big suffix “_FULLSIZE” so that I can identify this file easily and make sure not to bin it when I clean up extraneous images stored on my PC. Keeping the resolution down to only what you need also has the effect of making file sizes small which means I don’t run into issues with running out of storage space on my WP plan even after quite a few years.

In terms of websites used to share, I’m not on facebook or twitter. I chose WordPress because it seemed more mature as a blogging site than places like Tumbler, and appeared to be more focussed on sharing projects, skills and hobbies rather just general information about a person’s day to day activities which you get on Facebook. I love to both share my work and see other people’s art, thoughts and ideas on WordPress. I value the fact that WordPress is such a supportive, friendly community. I’ve learned a great deal from connecting to other people here and I realy value the friendships I have found here.

I am also going to bite the bullet and start up an Instagram Account. Its really slow going though because Instagram can only be viewed in a portrait orientation which makes it very very difficult to use the physical keyboard on my tablet as I have to read what I’m writing sideways! Good grief! Anyway, I will find a way to get this new account set up at some point.

So that’s it, my full process! I hope it’s been interesting or perhaps useful to someone. 🙂