Days 67 and 68 – Finally learning to paint faith and love…

Quite a while ago I tried to paint how I feel about my Christian faith.  Because it means so much to me I found that it was just too difficult to do.

(Here’s a link to those first attempts: Faith and Love Attempt One)

Then a week or so ago I sketched a picture of a shepherd with a lamb on his shoulders which kind of said what I wanted to say.

So I re-sketched this out onto proper cold-pressed watercolour paper…

 

 

Then I had a go at painting it with Winsor and Newton Artists Watercolours..

 

At first it looked really wishywashy and pale and I felt all fed up and annoyed with myself for doing a bad job – again.  But then the next day I decided that I had nothing to lose if I painted more layers over the top.  So I did – lots and lots of layers.  Here’s the final painting…

 

It’s not perfect at all but it does touch my heart in the way I wanted it to.  It just has, for me, that feeling of being loved and cared for which I get from my faith.

 

Because of the autism I have a lot of difficulty accurately communicating what I really feel with words which I find very frustrating especially when people start getting upset with me and I’ve done the very best I can do.  My language skills are pretty good generally but I don’t have the usual social context in which most people seem to operate – I’m always misunderstanding the effects which my language has and not getting the whole social aspect of communication.  For me, saying “A, B and C”, just means, “A, B and C”.  There is no social context, no what they call ‘side’ no ‘reading between the lines’ (which means understanding that there is a subtext in some communication)  because I am basically blind to all of this.  I can’t ‘see’ social context or non-straight-forward communication.  But with pictures I feel that I have a genuine way I could potentially communicate well and accurately in a way which isn’t constantly misunderstood.  I have a fighting chance.

I feel really pleased about this picture because it does, for me, finally say what I want to say.    🙂

 

Days 51 and 52 – An Experiment with Watercolour in Manga

So today I had a go at painting a couple of manga ink sketches I’d done in my notebook with watercolour.  The sketches were based on one of Mark Crilley’s Manga books.

The paper really struggled to take the watercolour especially when I was trying to do a wet on wet wash.

Here are the images…

 

Then I took an old discarded manga ink drawing I’d done before.  I’d not bothered with it because I’d drawn the girl with her face turned away and mostly hidden by hair and I don’t think the way I did that worked very well – it made her face look odd.

Then, since it was on a stronger paper, I had a quick go at colouring it with watercolour.  I started out laying down gradients of colour, wet on wet as a kind of background for each part of the drawing.  Then I painted wet on dry to get some clearer details and cell shading type shadows.

 

Although the initial drawing is a bit faulty I’m happy with this attempt at using watercolour.  It will take some work but I think I could learn to using this medium well for colouring comics / manga if I dedicate myself to it.  I think it looks better than digital colour – has more interest and texture.

 

Days 47 and 48 – A bit of Orcish Fun

I watched the DVD of the new Warcraft film yesterday.  It was brilliant.  There was, of course, a lot of CGI in it but they didn’t use it to show off the CGI but to tell the story.  I really loved it.  My favourite part of the story is when the Mage Novice Khadgar researches the Fel and makes loads of papers and drawings and notes in his room.  I love the feeling of that room so much.  My second favourite part of the film is the depiction of the Orcs – they are completely fabulous.

So I had a play at inking an Orc using cross-hatching.  Here’s the ink…

 

Then I started to work on it digitally – putting in some grey tones…

I think the greys do help to give better shape to the face than the crosshatching alone.

Then for no particular reason I decided to try to paint the orc traditionally with watercolour.  I would prefer to do it in marker pen but copics are too expensive so I need to find an alternative.

Here’s the finished painting…

It doesn’t particularly grab me but it did show me that I can get quite bright fun colours with watercolour.  I’m going to research using watercolour with ink manga / comic art.  It might make a good combination.  When I do eventually write my own Manga story I want the final thing to be a good well-told story with beautiful artwork.  I want the art to be able to stand alone as art as well as tell the story.  Hmmm, nothing like aiming high!  Never mind, I’ve got years to get there.  🙂

 

The Phoenix and the New Job

Well,  I got the job I went for a few weeks back and today I passed the health screening from the County Council Occupational Health Department, so come September I’m going to be working again!  I feel really lucky because it’s a really super school and the job fits what I’m able to do at the moment really well.

In celebration I thought I’d paint something.  I’ve just finished listening to the audiobook of J.K. Rowling’s Chamber of Secrets again and, since I go off to sleep listening to these stories, my dreams have been full of phoenix’s.  So here’s what I dreamed…

 

I painted this in watercolour.  It was a new experience of the medium for me.  Although I was aware of the fact that I was working in watercolour I continued to paint as if I were using gouache which really changed how things went.  I build the pcture up in layers – a background colour and then firey feathers over the top.  Finally I wanted just a little more definition at the end and  used ink to add some harder lines.  It’s not a typical watercolour type subject but it was kind of fun to do.

 

Grisaille Underpainting of a Chameleon

I decided with this Chameleon picture to use a grisaille underpainting technique.  This basically means I paint the shadows on first in whatever my chosen shadow colour is.  Since my chameleon is going to be green with yellow and cyan I thought a dark greenish/blue /grey would be good.  I also underpainted the branch she is sitting on but since this will be painted in warmer browns and used a dark brown underpaint colour for this bit.

 

It was really fun to use the gouache paint like this.  When I use it thin enough it behaves exactly like a watercolour which gives lots of nice effects.  Sadly I’ll lose most of those when I paint the main colour on top but it’s nice to see them and experience them as I can use the same technique again another time on another painting.

My set up for painting has pretty much settled down now into a standard workspace.  It looks like this:

 

Note the emergency Oreos – essential kit for painting.  I wonder if the Mona Lisa would have had a proper smile on her face if Leonardo Da Vinci had had a pack?  Maybe that’s why her smile is supposed to be a bit odd – maybe he only had boring biscuits.

I’ve left the picture taped down to my drawing board becuase I’m going to carry on and do the overpainting when I next get a chance (I’m still not physically very well).  So here’s a photo of it on the board:

 

And here’s a close up:

Buddy

I have a friend who’s recently had to rehome her dog for health reasons.  She loved him to bits and taught him a lot about how to be a really good boy.  He’s now gone to another family and is very happy but this has left my friend feeling understandably really very sad.  So I offerred to paint her a picture of him, as a gift.  She sent me some photos by email and I had a  go.

 

This was my first sketch of him:

 

Then I had a go in watercolour.  I sholuld have gone straight for gouache but I was still feeling a bit unwell and I thought watercolour would be quicker if I could make it work…

Well, it turns out I couldn’t make it work.  🙂  Somehow, although my sketch was ok during the process of painting I lost something of how this little fella really looks.  I guess the painting looks something like a dog, but it’s not Buddy.  So I had another go.  This time I used gouache as my medium.  I laid down an undercolour which was a kind of average colour of Buddy’s coat and then layered it with all the colours I could see in him.

This is how it turned out:

Now although this picture’s not perfect it does have a certain “Buddy-ness” to it, which is the most important thing.  It’s the look he has when he’s concentrating on a treat which is being offerred to him.  I hope my friend will like it.  I mounted it and I will give it to her on Sunday if I am well enough for church.

(I’m still not great – I have had what the nurse thinks was chicken pox but I’ve had chicken pox three times before this time so I’m not sure of the diagnosis.  They said that they thought my immune system was just a bit low and my ability to fight this particular illness might be less than normal.  To be fair to them I did have a rash which looked a lot like chicken pox and the timings seemed to fit with that idea.  Anyway, I’m on the mend now I think although I’m still feel a bit unwell – with a headache and sore-throat.  I wonder if it’s some kind of virus.)

Here’s the final package all wrapped up and ready to go:

The Blue Fish – Shadow exercise.

To help me really consolidate my new understanding of painting shadows I painted a blue fish today as an exercise.  The idea is to really make use of this new way I’ve learned to reduce the strength of a colour as it get’s darker.  When I first tried this I was using orange to drop the strength (saturation) of the blue colour (since orange is the opposite to blue).  However, orange has a very bright natural tone and it kept lightening my tone too much so I used an orangy brown to drop the colour strength of the blue and that worked really well giving me a bluey-black colour.

I used a strong midtone background to my fish so that I would have to work to get the fish to show – creating much lighter areas and much darker areas.

It was a fun little exercise.   🙂

Here’s the felt-tip doodle I based this exercise on:

This is my plain mid-tone background:

And here’s the competed exercise:

It was painted in gouach but I tried to use the colour a bit more like watercolour, especially near the top.  I could have got a similar effect using white gouach but I though that the interesting mottled watercolour effects suited a watery subject.  What I was aiming for was to have a fish which looks like it’s local colour is the same as teh background, so that it’s shape is picked out only by shadows and highlights.  I think it’s almost there.

Practicing Shadow Colours…

I did a quick exercise on shadow colours today.  I used red, yellow, green, blue, purple and pink and then worked out how to make a suitable shadow colour for each.  Rather than just painting blocks of colour I make it into a little owl.

Here’s a table of how I made my shadow colours:

It worked reasonably well.  I found that, with the yellow shadow, I needed to use blue as much as purple to reduce the saturation.  I think this is because the darker shade of yellow is a brown and this has some red in it so having blue in the mix counteracts the red.

The bit that worked teh best is in the greens:

I can see in this one that the midtones have a higher saturation than the darker tones – this is what I’m trying to do.

I’m going to do one more shadow colour exercise tomorrow and then I think I’ll have cracked it in terms of understanding how it works.  I’ll still have a long way to go with actually putting this into practice, but at least I will know what I’m aiming for.

🙂

Owlets and Shadows – Part 2 of 2

Here is me second little owlet painting (A6) where I’m using the advice on how to paint shadows from my painting tutorial book.

I realised when I painted my first owlet (last Friday’s post) what adding a complementary colour is doing to my shadows – it’s reducing the strength of the colour and making it more grey.  I really understood this when I looked for that effect in real life.  Here is a picture of some curtains:

I can see in this how as the colour gets put into more shadow it gets darker but it also looses strength (the colour washes out of it and it looks more grey).  Looking at the shadows in the material above they are going more grey and right down to a greyish brownish black.  If chroma didn’t reduce when light was lower then the dark sections of these curtains would be a very rich strong dark brown.

Thinking about this it makes sense.  In our eyes we have two types of light sensing cells – rods – which are very sensitive but only pick up greyscale images – and cones – which pick up colour.  Now our cones are less sensitive than our rods so as something gets darker they pick up less colour because they are functioning less well.  This must be why this effect happens with shadows.  It all makes sense.

🙂

So I made a quick (10 minute) painting of a couple of owlets:

For the shadows here I used a darker brown and then added a little blue (of the same dark shade) to drop down the strength of the colour.  I think it works OK.

Because it’s taken me ages to really understand this shadow colour method, I’m going to do a few more little paintings over the next few days to really make sure I keep hold of this new understanding I’ve got.

PS:  It’s been really interesting over the last week or so while I’ve been struggling with this shadow colour issue to see from both the perspective of a teacher (which I am) and from the perpective of a student who’s simply not understanding (which I also was).  I found I had to use the teacher part of myself to help the stuck-student part of myself.  First I just kept getting myself to try again until I realised that it really wasn’t working.  Then I found out and removed the obstacle I had to learning which was that I was still too interested in how the gouache works to focus on the problem.  And then by isolating the actual part I found difficult, I finally understood it.  Now I’m just going to push that understanding in with some practice.  🙂  It’s been a really interesting journey.