Animation Style Fun with Gouache

 

This week I played around with some animation style art using pure gouache in my sketchbook.

I work pretty hard at school each day so when I come home I have a nice routine to follow to sort myself, and my son, out for the evening.  Although I can break this routine, being on the Spectrum, I am much more comfortable if I follow it.  First I get a cup of tea and drink it while I go through the post for the day and sort out any issues that arise from that post, along with any other things I need to do in terms of general housekeeping.  Then I check and water my plants.  I grow a lot of plants from seed and have a hydroponic spinach set up in the kitchen which produces about two harvests for two people each week.  Then, I either meditate or read.  At five o’clock I start cooking tea for me and my son.  I usually serve it between 17:45 and 18:15.  Once that’s done and we’ve had pudding I get ready for bed and feed and check the fish.  By this stage my pain is quite bad so bed is the best place for me to relax during the evening.  While in bed I usually read or watch DVD’s and I sometimes paint.

So this particular artistic adventure began when I watched the last episode of the long running animation series Avatar the Last Airbender on DVD.  One of the best things about being a teacher is that I have a perfect excuse for watching what is essentially kids TV.  “Oh yes, it keeps me in touch with the children,”  – and has nothing to do with the fact that I really enjoy animation for it’s own sake!  My favourite character from this series is Appa, an Air Bison who can fly.  I was thinking about the series and wishing the live action film had been better when I began to sketch Appa.  Like all animated characters he’s dead easy to draw because his shape is very basic.  Then I decided to get my gouache paints out and give my sketch a little paint job.

Here’s the finished painting…

 

The next evening I embarked on watching a complete run through of the Star Wars The Clone Wars animated series which lasts for six seasons!  After a few episodes I stopped for the evening (if I watch too much Clone Wars I can’t sleep.)  Then I mooched about on the internet looking at Star Wars stuff for a while.  Somewhere I saw a picture of a Dark Lord of the Sith wandering about on what I guess might have been the ancient planet of Korriban (not Morriban – what an awful retcon that really is!)  Although I went on with my wanderings this picture stuck in my mind and the next day I tried to find it again but couldn’t.  So I had a go at sketching it…

 

Then, as with Appa, I grabbed my gouache paints and made it into a little painting in my sketchbook…

 

While no-one could call this high-art it was, for me, very enjoyable art!    🙂

 

 

 

 

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The Moonlit Sea

I found another Shin Hanga print I really like. It’s by an artist called Koho Shoda. It really only has one colour and black and white. Here’s the original Japanese woodblock print…

I wanted to create something along the same lines but with a well known English boat as the main subject and in watercolour and gouache. I don’t live very far from Maldon where some traditional Thames Sailing Barges have their moorings. I think there’s also a repair yard in Maldon for these beautiful boats. I spent some time in my teens sailing on the Blackwater, very occasionally alongside these wonderful boats. They are so big that they’re a little scary to be near when you’re in a small sailing dingy, but they still retain the grace and beauty of a sailing vessel. Maybe coots feel the same way about swimming near swans!

(Wikipedia Photo of two Thames Sailing Barges going East on the Blackwater near Bradwell Power Station. By Terry Joyce)

I began with a wash using a mixture of French Ultramarine and Phthalo blue…

Then I painted on more details with gouache…

I did quite like the picture at this stage. It had an open feel. But I went ahead and added the foreground reeds…

Reviewing my picture at this stage I quite liked the contrast and the reflections but I very much disliked the ultramarine sky – it felt too warm and too saturated for the sea below it. To give you an idea what it might look like with the hue shifted towards green and away from red and the saturation dropped a bit I manipulated it in Photoshop. This is how I wish I had painted it…

I think this looked closer to what I wanted but it wasn’t there yet.

I was painting this in the last week of the Spring Term and was really tired so I was temped to leave it there, but every time I looked at the original, still taped to my board, it annoyed me. In the end, on the Thursday before the end of term I decided to do something drastic. I got a big paint brush I had bought for my son to use in painting the bathroom and used it to add a phthalo blue / ultramarine glaze over the top of everything. Then I worked the paper with water to blur much of what I had already painted. The gouache which I had used mixed with the watercolour and helped the paint to move and it really changed. In fact it really looked like a big dark mess, so much so that I went to bed in disgust!

However, today, the first day of the Easter Holiday, I saw it dry and still taped to my board. It’s amazing what eyes which have had 12 hours of sleep can do! I repainted all of the details and followed my heart’s feeling for the picture. Finally I had a painting I like!

Here is the finished picture…

Meru, mountains and mobility

 

So last night I was kicking back watching a film on Netflix.  It’s called ‘Meru’ and is about a legendary Himalayan climb on a mountain who’s top is called ‘The Shark’s Fin’

 

 

As a young adult, and right through my twenties, I loved walking and climbing in the mountains.  I did some walking in the Alps with family when I was 16 and then some tougher climbing routes in Scotland, North Wales and the Breacon Beacons through my twenties with friends.  From the very beginning I just adored the simplicity of the thing.

Anyway at 31 I got injured internally while giving birth to my son.  It was a neurological injury and consequentially took years and many operations to figure out.  Then in my early 40’s I developed a infection which lasted months and gave rise to post infective fibromyalgia.  When I had the pelvic problems alone my walking was restricted and I could no longer climb.  Once the chronic pain thing happened I began struggling to walk even short distances.

I don’t really miss the climbing nowadays at all – it seems to be too much like hard work(!)  but I still have a lot of sympathy for folk who feel driven to get themselves up these tremendous peaks.  I was drawn to it by the sensation of climbing itself, the burning of your muscles, the percussive kicking into the ice and the wild isolation, all of which gave me a sense of euphoria.  What I do miss now though is walking, the joy of just gambolling about wherever you want.

So this week I painted a picture of a place I visited in the Alps when I was 16.  It’s a valley called Val d’Anniviers in Switzerland.  (One of my God-Parents was Swiss and lived just outside Geneva with her English husband. I’ve known them all my life.  We have holiday’d with them, over there, a few times and they’ve holiday’d over here with us.  Very sadly we lost them suddenly in a plane crash in 2011 while they were on holiday in Botswanna.)  That holiday in Val d’Anniviers with both our families is my strongest memory of them.  I can’t think of the Alps without thinking of them.  So this is for them and their surviving daughters who were mine and my sister’s friends growing up.

Here’s the Swiss Tourist Board picture from that valley which I used as a reference (NB: Not my own photography.)

 

Many tourist type pictures are heavily doctored to make the places look pristine.  But this valley really is exactly like that photo.  It’s like walking through a real wonderland.  What the photo doesn’t show is the freshness of the air up there and the sound of the local cattle and goats with bells around their necks.  It’s was a real priviledge to have a go at painting this place.

I sketched out the main forms first (and changed them a bit to give me the feel and shape I wanted)…

Then I made a detailed ink drawing…

After that I played around in Photoshop for a while trying out different colour combinations.  My favourite two were these…

 

I couldn’t decided between them so I painted my final colours as a mix of the two.  I painted on different watercolour paper this week as I had some real issues with the paper last week.  It seemed to pay off as I had no further problems.

Here’s the final painting…

In loving memory of Nadine and Stuart. xxx

The Magic Fox at Musashi Plain – a Modern Watercolour

Having learned a lot last week about the value of having a vision for a painting, I did quite a lot of careful preparation work on this one.  My inspiration came from Tsukioka Yoshitoshi‘s beautiful work “Magic Fox at Musashi Plain” which was painted in 1891, in Japan.  Here’s a digital copy of the original…

 

I wanted to create a modern interpretation of this.  So I began with a quick sketch in my sketchbook…

Then I scanned this sketch into my computer and began to plan the tonal layout and then the colours…

Digital Tone Plan (Made in Photoshop)

 

Digital Colour Plan (Made in Photoshop)

 

Then, when I had a clear idea of what I wanted I made the final pencil drawing…

 

I put some masking fluid on the fox and her reflection and then painted a variegated wash with ultramarine, payne’s grey and black over the whole picture.

Then I removed the masking fluid and ran into my first real problem.  While I do aim to get some 100% cotton paper soon, I can’t afford it until next month. So I’m still working with the medium quality paper I have at home at the moment.  When I removed the masking fluid I got this…

 

It ripped up the surface layer of the paper.   I’ve been using the same masking fluid for a couple of years now and this has never happened before.  It was a real problem because any watercolour on this patch would soak in deeply and make the tear show up even more.  So, to save the picture, my only option was to move to gouache.  As it turns out this reduced the paper problem and gave me some lovely bright contrasting colours for the final painting.

Here it is finished…

 

One thing that really helped with this picture is that I finally worked out the physics of reflections and used the main learnings from this in the painting:

• Reflections have less saturation than real objects.
• Reflections are usually either lighter or darker than real objects depending on the surface lighting of the water.
• Reflections are distorted by the surface changes in the water.
• They are also broken up by ripples.
• The angle of objects in reflections doesn’t show all features especially near the edge.

I think, when I have some good cotton paper, I might paint this again.

Here’s a final comparison of Yoshitoshi’s original (left) and my modern take on it (right)…

A Shin Hanga Heron

I had another go at trying to create a Shin Hanga styled painting this week.  It taught me a lot about how I need to find the vision of a piece of art before I start to paint.

As before I began with a quick sketch in my sketchbook and then planned how I would paint it.  I chose only one reference for the shape of the heron, but used six for the colours.  I worked out what colour I needed where and then made a plan to get that to happen.  Here’s my plan…

Then I started painting.  I began with a variegated wash in paynes grey and ultramarine with a little cerulean blue added towards to the top half of the paper…

Then I painted it according to my plan.

Here’s the final painting…

I’m not overly keen on this painting.  I think what is wrong is that I didn’t quite have a fully formed vision for the painting before I painted it.  I went straight into the ‘how’ questions before I was really clear on what exactly I wanted in my final picture.  I also made assumptions about the colours and didn’t think out the perspective I wanted with the shapes I have in the water.   In the Shin Hanga tradition an awful lot of thought is put into colour and tonal choices as well as careful work on perspective and reflections.  So if I want to make Shin Hanga styled watercolours I need to put in the same work, I need to find the vision for the piece and see it in my mind and heart before I start the technical side of the venture in actually painting the picture.  So that’s what I’m going to do next time.

The Wild Self, Autism and the Kinship of Stories

The wolf

I have been re-reading Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ book “Women Who Run with the Wolves” recently and listening to some of her audio stories. It’s been a really good learning experience in terms of life and art. In honour of this I decided to try to paint a wolf. Again I tried to paint it in a way which could have been printed with a set of woodblocks, using flat washes of colour and simple gradients.

I began with a sketch…

Then covered my whites with masking fluid and ran a variegated wash over it very lightly.

Then I began laying down the flat washes, colour by colour just as a printer might.

This is my final painting…

I wasn’t sure how to imitate the line work of Ukiyo-e prints. Here I just left it with the pencil showing but I think a slightly darker tone would be better. That said I don’t think black would work so well, it might make it look like a cartoon. I might try getting some really thin 0.3 or 0.2 dark sepia pens which could give me the kind of tone I’m after.

A small difficulty I had with this picture is that the paper was marked with oil, probably just from handling, (it was from an older batch) so in places the paint was absorbed more giving darker tones in what was supposed to be a very flat wash. I could handle this by using gouache paint but watercolour looks more similar to the inks in the original Ukiyo-e prints. My other option is to buy some cotton rich paper which has better absorption qualities and then make sure I only use clean untouched sheets for this kind of work. I’ve never worked with a good cotton paper before so that might be fun to try.

Here’s the book which inspired this painting…

The Wild Self, Autism and the Kinship of Stories

I think I have a strong tendency to be too “tame”, to follow rules without thinking and do as I’m told. I think this comes from being Autistic, and having a systems view of the world. I just find out how things work and then follow the pattern, just like a good AI robot. I am really happy being told what to do and then getting on with it. The difficulty I come up against is that this approach only works well when the systems are effective and no-one is giving false or inaccurate information. I find it really difficult when I’ve done what I’ve been told is the right thing to do only to find that I’ve been lied to or accidentally mislead or when I’ve misunderstood. When this happens people rarely allow me to explain and often I can’t because one of the unwritten rules of social functioning is that you mustn’t expose other people’s wrong doing or mistakes. So I get blamed for things which are not my fault really often.

This book, “Women who run with the wolves”, gives me some really good guidance about all of this. It teaches me how to know when to question something and how to go about it in a natural and intelligent way using the archetype of the wild woman. Best of all Estes uses traditional stories from all over the world to teach this wisdom.

Now I have always had a strong kinship with stories. I expect this just comes from being lucky enough to have parents who read to me and encouraged books when I was young. I also had a younger sister who was, and is, a stronger person than me in so many ways. She used to demand that I made up a story for her after we were put to bed. I found sleep very difficult as a child so I was mostly happy to do this although I sometimes tried to refuse (my teddy Rusty was then threatened and she usually got a short and rather unsatisfactory story from me that night). Even nowadays, at work, I still make up stories on the spot for the children, often putting them into the tale or letting them choose various facts in the story. So stories have always been a language I understand. (In fact I often wonder if stories are not a primary programming language for human beings.) Anyway, I think this is why Ms. Estes’ book is so helpful for me. She uses stories to help people.

She also distinguishes between being tame, being feral and being truly wild. Being tame is how I tend to function, following rules and letting others tell me what to do. Being feral is kind of what happens when people are too tame for too long – it’s an inappropriate explosion of the wild nature which isn’t balanced or particularly helpful. It happens when people “go off the rails”. The real wild nature is different. Although it can be savage at times, it is only like that when necessary. Mostly it is balanced, wise and centred, doing whatever is needed for the person and those around them at the time. What I like best is that it gives me a way of managing things which doesn’t leave me so open to difficulties.

I will have to practice this to get it right but I think it will be worth it.

Shin Hanga – Kawase Tribute in Watercolour

The Shin Hanga, or “New Print” movement in Japanese woodblock printing is something I find to be absolutely stunning.  I especially love the work of Kawase Hasui and Tsuchiya Koitsu.  This week I worked on drawing and painting a tribute to Kawase and then a piece in which I tried to follow these marvellous print makers in spirit.

The print I wanted to use to make the tribute to Kawase’s work is his “Nagahama Beach in Mito“.  Here is a digital version of Kawase’s original work…

 

I found the initial drawing quite exacting as I wanted to draw the painting as if the image were going to be carved.  Although I’m by no means an expert I have carved a few things before so I have a very basic idea of what I can and can’t be done.  Here’s my initial drawing…

 

 

Then I wanted to paint this picture with watercolours but try to get similar effects to Japanese woodblock printing.  So my washes had to be either smooth gradients or really careful flat washes.  I found this quite demanding but also quite enjoyable because I was dealing with one colour at a time and one section of the painting at a time.  Trying to think like a print artist seemed to give me this sense of focus and quietness which I really enjoyed.

This is the final painting…

 

Next I wanted to paint something local and original but I also wanted to try to use some of what I’d learned in the tribute piece.  I decided on a view of our local common.

Here’s the sketch…

 

I tried to reduce the scene, which was quite complex, to simple layers which could be printed.

Then I went on to paint the picture with watercolours but in a restricted way so that the end result might look as if it could be printed.  Again I had to think about simple sections of colour and smooth gradients.  Mostly I got there but I may have used too many colours in the background row of trees for a woodblock print.  I think it could be done but it would take a lot of blocks.

 

 

 

Japanology, Prints and Paintings

 

Although this post will be published in Mid March, I am actually writing it during the half term holidays in the middle of February.  This half term I have been recovering from an illness which took me to hospital last week and looking after my son who has had an operation a few days ago.  So, rather than being out and about, I have spent a lot of time relaxing indoors and looking after my lad who is doing very well.  While surfing the web I stumbled across a series of Japanese woodblock prints.  I have always loved The Great Wave off Kanagawa by Japanese ukiyo-e artist Katsushika Hokusai.

Here is a link from Wikipedia:

Great Wave of Kangawa by Hokusai

But I have never made a serious study of the art-form – until now!  I have been blown away by the simplicity and beauty of this kind of art.

Woodblock printing originally came to Japan from China in the 8th century CE and for a long time was only used for printing the written word – mainly Buddhist texts.  Then in 1765, right in the middle of the Edo period, a new style of polychromatic woodblock printing was invented called Nishiki-e.  At first they printed beautiful calendars with this method but the technique was soon taken up by ‘Floating World’ artists and so Ukiyo-e was born.  Ukiyo-e is printed art which centres on the fleeting and ephemeral nature of ordinary life.  It began featuring the goings on in the urban pleasure districts during the Edo period – beautiful women, geishas and teahouse mistresses, kabuki theatre, warriors and sumo wrestlers.  Later the subject matter broadened out to include landscapes, travel scenes, scenes involving people doing ordinary jobs, natural scenes of animals and plants and much more.  I have only really touched upon the surface of the subject so far but here are my favourites at this stage:

 

• Hiroshige, who made The Fifty-three Stations of Tokaido and One Hundred Famous Views of Edo

 

• Hokusai who made Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji

 

• Kawase, a more modern artist, who specialised in landscapes of tranquil and obscure places.  Here is a selection of his work from the Ronin Gallery

 

• Koitsu, another more modern artist who also does a lot of landscapes.  Here is some of his work.

 

The last two of these artists are from the Shin Hanga movement which began in about 1910.  It was really a revival of the original woodblock printing with some modern influences.  (Shin Hanga means “New Prints”.)

Of course, having been blown away by this artwork I wanted to have a go myself.  My aim was not to make my own woodblock prints but to create watercolour and gouache paintings which have a similar look and feel.  I suspect this is something that I will have to learn as I work on it.

The first painting I had a try at was a natural scene of a bird with some cherry blossom by a late 19th century / early 20th century artist called Ohara Koson…

Orange Bird and Cherry Blossom by Ohara Koson

 

I made this painting as a present for a family member’s birthday…

 

I made a graded wash going from the centre outwards with more cadmium yellow deep as I got towards the edge.  Then I painted the bird and the flowers on with watercolours.  I wasn’t sure from the original what bird species it was so my interpretation is a little fanciful  (sort of a red version of a blue tit).

 

While I was at the hospital waiting for my son to be discharged I made a sketch in pencil of the next subject I wanted to have a go at.  Here’s the original art by Kawase…

Moon at Matsushima by Hasui Kawase

 

Here’s my interpretation as a sketch…

 

And here is my watercolour impression of Kawase’s work…

I used a basic graded wash over my pencil outline and then painted the features on with gouache.  I am pleased with how both of these paintings turned out as initial studies, but I would like to work some more on this to see how far I can take it and what that ends up looking like.

 

 

Rendering Clouds and Rhinos

(N.B. I create and schedule all my posts ahead of time in the school holidays and then just make minor adjustments before they are posted by the WP system. Unfortunately I am quite unwell at the moment and waiting to see if I need surgery so I can’t do this right now. Instead, I’ve decided to just let the system publish my posts automatically without the extra editing I usually do just before they go out. I apologise for any errors and for any problems I have getting back to people who comment while this is going on.)

My Quirky Friend

This week I played around a lot more with gouache. When I first tried this medium, a year or so ago, I found it quite tricky but I don’t think it’s actually difficult, it’s just quirky and idiosyncratic. Once you get to know it, it reveals it’s fun side. I guess it’s a bit like having a quirky friend. They might seem a bit odd at times but once you know them you see how lovely they really are. I really love friends like that!

The Joy of Totoro

So I began this week looking again at how different painters render clouds. I should really have gone straight for Monet’s The Seine at Argenteuil but I’ve recently been re-watching a lot of Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli films and I was really caught by the background artwork in My Neighbour Totoro. I wasn’t really doing a serious study but just sketching in my regular sketchbook. I was just full up with the joy and beauty of the film itself. This is what that sketching turned into…

I didn’t really get the cloud colours right, or the shapes for that matter but it was so much fun playing with the paint and re-experiencing the joy of the film through sketching! I worked from back to front in the picture so I could put the next layer I was working on over the edge of the previous layer.

Rhino Studies

Later on in the week I began thinking about Rhino’s and how they’re heading towards extinction. They’re magnificent, strong animals but can be unpredictable and cantankerous. Although I wouldn’t want to go down to the pub with a rhino, I kind of admire their fierce “sod-you” attitude. So I painted a couple.

I began with this one…

Which looked like this painted…

I liked the deep colours. Gouache gives a painter such a range of strong colours it’s tempting to use really saturated hues all the time just because you can. On reflection I thought my rendering here made the skin look more like that of a hippo, sort of rounded and slimy, especially up near the ears. So I had another go and this time I went for more realistic colours so I could concentrate on more subtle shades and hues.

Here’s the sketch…

I used an under-painting on this to get my eyes around the main darks and lights…

Then I went for the final picture…

I was using this study to practice rendering 3D shapes with paint and to learn to use more muted colours and shades. I am happy with some of it and would like to work on other bits a bit more next time. I like the shape just behind and under the animal’s eye, where the face has a concave look because of the bone structure. I was also pleased with the hints here and there in the shadows of the range of violet and blue shadows I was using in addition to the shaded local colour. On the other hand I’m not that keen on the ears or the bottom of the front horn. Neither of these parts of the image scan as well as I had hoped.

Learning Curves (Caution: maths fun ahead)

I’ve been painting for most of my adult life now. I wonder if I will always have things I would like to change next time in the work I produce? I’m aiming to get each picture just how it is in my mind, but they’re always a bit different. Wanting to paint a perfect picture feels a bit like trying to approach the speed of light. It’s fairly easy to make progress when you’re a beginner but the better you get the more energy it takes to improve. It’s like the graph of 1/x. As x goes up, y gets closer and closer to zero but never gets there, like this…

In fact I think with art it’s more like this brilliant graph of a curvilinear asymptote…

How cool is that!

I really hope the learning never stops, I love the ride on this mad slope.