This week I focused mainly on my portrait of Jim, but I also created another tonal painting. Meet Ollie (the Octopus) and Olga (the fish). They were very briefly the best of friends – until, very unfortunately, Ollie got hungry!
Here are some process photos…
I began by sketching the two aquatic friends (and doing my best to keep track of all eight of Ollie’s legs).
After that I added ink to the drawing, using darker thicker lines on the shadow sides of each object and then stippling a gradient from full black to the half tone grey of the paper. I used this to begin to render the shapes in three dimensions.
Then I deepened the shape rendering effects by adding some darker tonal areas using black watercolour paint and feathering the edges.
Finally I added similar gradients to the lighter sides of the shapes using titanium white gouache to add highlights.
Here’s the finished picture…
I really enjoy using this simply method to create black and white (and buff) paintings. I think it might work really well as a basic approach for making independent comic art. It’s not too onerous to do but gives well rendered results which I think would read and reproduce quite well in a comic format. I might produce a comic page like this when I have time and see how it looks.
I think there is a strong link between curiosity, creativity and play. Obviously I’ve seen this in the classroom for many years, but I also see it in adults, in artists, furniture restorers, sculptors and metal workers, but also in surgeons and scientists and especially mathematicians. It seems to be a universal correlation that curious, playful people are also creative.
I’d like to say that I noticed this association and, to keep my creativity up as an artist, I make sure I play with art regularly – purely as an academic exercise(!) But that would be complete hokum. I play because it’s fun and relaxing and part of me is just a big kid. 😁
So this week I have the results of some play…
I began by just sketching some patterns in my sketchbook. One was a tree-like pattern the other was a spiral pattern, like this…
Once I had these scanned in I seperated them and began to play around with them in Autodesk Sketchbook. I’m afraid I didn’t take any process shots because I was just playing around.
Here are the final images I made from the simple drawings above…
I prefer the tree drawing most of all. It reminds me of a play my class went to see when we were 7/8 years old at our local secondary school. It was all about Jack Frost.
Most of the time I like to draw and paint images which are restful, uplifting or have positive associations with them. I often give my art to friends, family and sometimes put images which mean something special to me up at home. Having challenging art up on my walls though can be quite problematic so I don’t go in that direction very often.
However, I think art can be about more than good feelings. It can be a way to communicate more difficult and uncomfortable subjects and emotions. While these things are not always something you want to look at they do have their place and can be very powerful when used in the right way. (Obviously art is subjective, this is just how I see things.)
The Use of Darker Imagery to Highlight Social Justice Issues
I particularly like the work of Käthe Kollwitz, most especially her earlier realism-based drawings which seem equivalent to the work of news photographers today – highlighting and communicating the difficulties and troubles people go through. I could easily see this etching (below) as the equivalent of a Reuters photograph of an area of social injustice in our modern world. Below is a linked image of the last etching plate in the cycle of seven in her Peasant’s War Series…
‘The Prisoners’ (‘Die Gefangenen’), (1908), etching. Plate seven of seven from the cycle Peasants’ War (Bauernkrieg), (1903-08)
“The Prisoners” is undeniably a powerful image which carries a lot of emotion. Her themes, in her earlier career were all centred around social justice. I really love this particular etching (above) even though it’s quite disturbing. In it she wanted to express her empathy and show the courage, difficulty and struggles of poorer people at the time.
Another place where darker and more difficult images can be really helpful is in doing what therapist’s call “Shadow Work” – looking at the hidden and half hidden darker side to humanity, particularly inside ourselves. It’s another part of Art Therapy.
The image I worked on this week is, I think, to do with fear. It began as a pencil doodle of a monster drawn for fun, for halloween, but became more serious as I got into it…
I used my grey-toned sketchbook again for this. Once I had the pencils down I decided to use black and white pastels to shade and highlight the picture.
This is what that looked like…
This came out quite well in real life but the tonal differences weren’t strong enough for photographic reproduction to really capture the image properly. So I sprayed the paper with a fixative (Conté á Paris) and began to ink the drawing.
My original plan was to darken my darks with ink and then to add some white gel pen to add white highlights in the same manner. However the gel pen I own doesn’t write very well. It’s great for textural work but doesn’t produce a clean line. So I smoothed out what I’d already done with the gel pen using water and a fine brush and then went on to use white gouache to add my highlights. This is what that looked like…
I then felt that I needed to balance the white with some strong watercolour shadows. I painted them in using Winsor and Newton lamp black with a touch of burnt sienna to make the lamp black less blue and was finally satisfied with the image. Here is the finished monster…
Although it’s actually about fear, I think I could equally call it The hangover or maybe Teachers near the end of term!
This week’s art is a line and wash painting of a wolf howling out her song. I painted it for a friend.
I began with a quick sketch…
Next I refined my sketch and changed the shape of the howl in the air…
Once I was happy with my basic forms I moved on to ink. I used to simply redo my pencils in pen at this stage, but now I use this stage as a place where I can further refine the drawing. Here are the inks completed…
Once I had my ink drawing complete I then had to come up with my colours. So I photographed my ink drawing and then added colour digitally in Autodesk Sketchbook.
Once I had a solid idea of where I wanted to go colour-wise I finally began to add watercolour washes to my drawing. As usual I began with lighter washes and then developed my shadows. I pushed the colours I’d initially decided on digitally to bring more contrast into the image.
jo fox - adventures in art 