Plein air watercolour painting - 16/07/2016

I finally had the time and the weather to go and paint outside again. It's been a long time since I painted anything at all but it's been years since I painted outside. I either have the time or I have the weather, never both. I had no idea what to take with me, so I took everything that I could think of. In hindsight I could have survived with a lot less.

I chose a spot on the grass (the tide was almost in, so no point setting up on the beach. All the sand was covered already) in a kind-of park/gardens (if it has a name, I forgot it) and set myself up. I looked around for a bit before deciding what to start with. The initial plan was to do quick and separate sketches of the plants I could see, not a scene, but then I started drawing the bench and that plan went out the window. Plenty of people walked past, but apart from two curious dogs, nobody bothered me.

Unfortunately, although it was the hottest day of the year so far, it clouded over after I'd been there for a while. I had my picnic, started my painting, and then the cloud came. It changed the light: I suddenly had no strong shadows, which is why they're absent from the finished painting. The bench looks a little weird without them, given that I painted a sunny scene, but I didn't want to make a mess of it by guessing. I'll take a photo of the scene before I start next time.

It wasn't too long before the absence of the sun got to me and I got a bit cold. I hadn't brought anything warm with me to wear. The cloud was making everything look darker and I felt that, since I was a bit of a walk away from home, I should go before it got too late. I finished up the painting when I got in, while it was still fresh in my mind. 

The bench - and the scene in general - is such a huge improvement on the last plein air I tried that I'm delighted with it even though I know there's loads of mistakes. The sky was a total accident and shouldn't be there. I'm still not really used to the strength of professional quality pigments, so my light wash in the top corner was much darker and it wouldn't blend out, so I had to paint sky everywhere in an attempt to get it to blend in. Because I was only planning on doing quick sketches of the plants, I didn't use watercolour paper and my sketchbook paper warped a bit. It's only 170gsm: I usually paint on 300gsm paper. But that's not the end of the world. It was much easier to paint on this paper with professional quality paints than it was to try it with Cotman paints. I think that may account for some of the difference in quality between this painting and the last plein air I did as I wasn't struggling to get vibrant colours with tonnes of layering. Although as I mentioned already, that was a blessing and a curse.

It was nice to be able to get out and play with my paints again - hopefully it won't be years before I can do it again! 

ACEOs 11-15

My laptop died (major compatibility issues) and then was recently resurrected, so I'm quite late posting this batch.

11.

02/11/2015

Cotman watercolour and white gouache.

I used the Mini Plus palette for this painting. Colours were fine, mixing space was fine. It's not as detailed as I'd like but for a quick sketch, I'm fairly happy with it. 

12.

04/12/2015

Cotman watercolour and white gouache.

Note to self: next time, mask the jellyfish. Or don't bother with a background. One or the other. This was complete hell and I ended up just giving up trying to get it to look the way I wanted. I even have a masking fluid pen for fine details, it just never occurred to me to actually use it.

13.

16/01/2016

Winsor and Newton professional watercolour (with the tiniest amount of white gouache).

Again, didn't think I'd need to mask so I  had a bit of fun with the blue leaking into everything. Was unintentional to do two paintings one after the other with a blue background and dominant red subject. This was actually an abandoned professional paints test that I decided to finish up while waiting for number 15 to dry. Professional paints are a whole new world compared to the Cotman range when it comes to mixing colours, so I'm going to need a lot of practice before I'm comfortable using them. 

14.

17/01/2016

Schmincke Horadam watercolours, Copic Multiliner SP, white gouache and white gel pen.

The latter two materials are purely to correct my monumental inking fuck-up, so while the water container does have a brass-coloured lid, it's never going to have one in this sketch. It was only a quick sketch but most of it was a salvage operation. I really like pen and watercolour though and it's definitely something I want to work on improving. This is the first time I've tried it and I don't even care that it's super wonky, I still like it! Also yes, I have Schmincke paints now. So far I like them more than Winsor and Newton's professional range. 

15.

19/01/2016

Winsor and Newton professional watercolour and white gouache. 

Another eye. I really struggled with the professional pigments on this painting. I just could not get the colours the way I wanted them. In the end I quit messing with the skin before I made it into a bigger disaster and then finished up the rest of it. I know I could probably mix some gouache in to try and salvage it, but at this point I'd rather just leave it. It's better than the last eye painting I did for ACEO 5 and I didn't use a reference this time. It's nice to be able to see improvement as I keep doing these, even though I know I can still do better. Practice practice practice!

ACEOs 6-10

More ACEOs! 

There's a huge gap between paintings here (and a big silence on this blog): I had a family tragedy in June and I lost my motivation to do anything. I tried to carry on as "normal" and it didn't feel right. I needed some time to just be a human blanket pile in my spare time, so I had it. 

I bought a Deck Box during the course of this batch of paintings because I couldn't deal with the mini paintings scattered everywhere, so now they have their own little white box to live in. I'd highly recommend them to anyone who does ACEOs. They're the perfect storage containers for them, and it'll be a long while before I've filled mine up. 

6.

11/06/2015

Cotman watercolours. I decided to try the waterbrush again with something a bit more sketch-like, and this was the result! It blotted an area of the fence without my permission, but otherwise was fine to use. I'm much happier with this than I am with the last waterbrush test.

7.

12/06/2015

Cotman watercolours. More of the waterbrush, and I used the exact same colours for this as I did for the previous one. I still had mixes leftover on the palette and the colours were so beautiful that I didn't want to waste them. I'm less happy with this one, but I think I've found my favourite bright green mix (sap and cobalt). 

8.

07/07/2015

Cotman watercolours, white gouache, Copic multiliner and clear wax crayon. This was a test for using a wax crayon on a water painting. It doesn't really work so well when the painting is this tiny. The wax was a bit overpowering, but it was certainly fun to try and I'd rather have tried it for the first time on an ACEO than a large piece that had taken ages to prepare for paint. Using the ACEOs like this was one of the reasons I bought them, after all. I used the waterbrush again for this one. 

9.

18/07/2015

Cotman watercolours. The tree went wrong pretty early on, but this was a very quick scribble done while another was drying, so it was never going to be all that great. I didn't have anything planned, I just wanted to play.

10.

01/11/2015

Cotman watercolours and white gouache. This is my first try at painting something like this. Apart from the too-large blobs (let the initial spatter dry before reworking some of the dots!), I quite like how it turned out. It was a lot of fun to do. It could do with more contrast in the lighter areas, but for a first go I'm fairly happy with it. It's the first time I've tried using white gouache with a toothbrush and the effect is perfect for things like this. Adding the gouache is a bit scary; if it goes wrong, like it did, it's usually impossible to fix. I thought it would be better to leave it as it is than to try and amend the blobs.

Fun with ACEOs (1-5).

I bought a hefty amount of ACEOs a little while ago for me to play with. I wanted to have a go at little paintings again - I guess I've missed working on small and quick things after all. I also thought that they'd be great for testing new art materials and practising techniques or new subjects (or old subjects that I'm still crap at). If it goes wrong, I haven't wasted much as the cards are really cheap to buy. Basically, they're for me to play around with. Some will be "finished", some won't. Most are probably just going to be the result of "I want to play with something art-related but I'm not sure what".

1.

05/05/2015

Cotman watercolours. Intentionally unnatural colours (that don't come across at all in the photo - that grass is NOT that shade of green). I couldn't be bothered with mixing, I just wanted to play with my new cards. 

2.

22/05/2015

Cotman watercolours and Copic Multiliner in Sepia. No sketch lines, no idea what I was doing, done freehand while the next one was taking ages to dry. Turned out to be my favourite so far. 

3.

26/05/2015

Cotman watercolour. Playing with more muted tones for a landscape scribble but I didn't really like them. I think I prefer the brighter ones I'm used to. Landscapes remain one of my art nemeses. 

4. 

06/06/2015

Cotman watercolour. Wanted to play with drawing pansies but then decided to turn this into a waterbrush test. I've never painted with a waterbrush before. Conclusion: detail is impossible, water water everywhere. I had to work with water when I didn't want water, which meant it had to be done in lots of layers (something I don't like doing with watercolour anymore) and the paint ended up thick and flat. For work like this, the waterbrush isn't ideal. I imagine it's more suited to sketching, which is what people use them for, so I'll try it for that soon.

5.

10/06/2015

This turned out a lot better than the last eye I tried to paint (and wasted a much smaller piece of paper, too) but I still have so much I need to improve. Eyelashes and eyebrows are really hard to do with the brushes that I have - I may have to dig my sable rigger out when I try these in future.

The only one I signed with paint and a brush is the third one, the rest were done with a Copic Multiliner. I'm not good at signing my name in miniature: 2.5"x3.5" doesn't give you much to work with! They're all a bit warped, as you can see. I did tape them all down, but there's only so much tape you can put on a card that tiny and still have a surface left to paint on.

I'm going to blog these like I did (and should still be doing but shhh) the Instagram photos. Every five ACEOs will be a blog. I have around 200 cards: I'm hoping to see an improvement as I work through them. 

Art from January.

I figure it's probably going to be easier if I split the monster art dump post up into sections. Plus, that way it's easier for me to know what's been posted and what hasn't. I don't have much for January, but it's a start.

This was the first art thing done in 2014. It's a scribble in the A6 sketchbook (which is totally unsuitable for watercolours, but it's what came in the set), referenced from a photo I took of some flowers my mom was given. I used watercolours and white gouache.

The next two are the traditional art tutorial piece that was done for the January goals. I followed a tutorial by Wendy Jelbert, and apparently I only bothered to take one photo of the process. Mine is 10"x7" and landscape and I'm pretty sure the one in the book was bigger and portrait, so I struggled a little with that because I didn't have the same space to work with. The tutorial used artist's watercolours as well, something that REALLY REALLY ANNOYS ME, so I had to improvise with my own colour mixes in places. I flatly refused to use masking fluid because all it seems to do is fuck whatever I'm doing up for me, and I figure that I do an excellent job of that by myself, so I ignored all the steps involving masking fluid. I still can't paint foliage, even with the help of Wendy Jelbert. I kinda like the end result though.

The tutorial was finished on the 10th January - I didn't want to scar the front with the date, because it was one of the few things I've done that ended up looking "finished", so I wrote the date on the back instead. This was (I think) the first time I used a watercolour block.

I did do another A6 painting in January of a fish, but it's awful and my blog is really better off without it. Sometimes I do a quick watercolour sketch and I'm happy with the result, and then sometimes I do a quick watercolour sketch and it ends up looking like that fish.

Art Challenge 1 - 15th-28th January - "Music"

Art challenge 1 COMPLETE!

Painted on 10"x7" Cotman watercolour block with Cotman watercolours (because I'm still too scared to use my artist quality stuff).

Because working on one thing at a time is boring.

News - I've added a contact email to the "About" page.

First of all, some finished scribbles from ages ago.

And now for more WIPs to add to the WIP collection (if anyone is keeping track, please don't tell me how many there are).

This is the third sheet of watercolours that I keep talking about. It's progressed quite a bit since this photo, but it's still in progress. Convincing purple and green to blend together can be quite soul-destroying.

This is part of the latest thing to be added to the WIP pile. I finished the skirt and her hands, plus it's had a few light washes since this photo. I'm using this book as inspiration.

Then there's also a male character design that I haven't photographed, but I might scan that and try doing it digitally. I can't get the level of detail that I want into the drawing so I'm having to draw details enlarged at the side with arrows pointing to where they go (his necklace for instance). Digital painting is proving very difficult without a desk, though, so if I did do that then I'm pretty sure it'd never get done. How people do traditional character designs on A4 I will never know.

EDIT EDIT EDIT I almost forgot: the little A6 sketchbook that I was using for horrendous plein air paintings and ONLY horrendous plein air paintings has had a change of purpose, starting today. It just isn't possible for me to do plein air paintings here - I don't have a car to drive myself places or to shelter in and paint out of during horrible weather (like it will be until summer, pretty much) so if I leave that book as wanderings-only it'll never get used. It's going to be for daily disasters instead, of whatever the hell I like. I may or may not post them here: I've never posted the plein air ones, so don't hold your breath. Plein air was a brilliant exercise and I wish I could do more of it but it just isn't going to be possible while I'm staying here. I'm hoping that regular little paintings and sketches will help me to improve

Art Dump plus one WIP

I was going to make separate posts for all of these, but then I decided that I couldn't really be bothered to.

First up is the sheet of flowers done with Copic markers. I put a preview of this on Instagram with just the lines drawn, so here's the "finished" version. The first one I couldn't really be bothered with. For its size, it was too detailed. The second one is probably my favourite: I like the colours and I like the way they blended together. The third one is too dark but I used the lightest colours so there's not much I can do about that. The fourth one needs Copic white and I don't have any, so that isn't quite finished, and the fifth one looked perfectly blended until it dried, otherwise that would've been my favourite instead. I could probably have played with it more but I didn't want to go back to it. These were completed ages ago - the date is written on the sheet.

Next is the watercolour sunset I previewed on Twitter. It was completed the day after the painting in the last post but I haven't had the chance to upload it before now. This is one of the most relaxing things I've ever painted - I loved every minute of it. I'm definitely going to do more skies!

Then there's a Copic multiliner brush pen scribble of Wish from one of the photos I took of him years ago. I couldn't be bothered to do his markings, especially with a brush pen (he's an Appaloosa) and I didn't want to ruin what I'd done as I was happy with it like this. It practically matches the photo and I couldn't erase anything because it was pen, so I was very happy to get the anatomy done. It's in an A5 sketchbook that I have solely for use with pen and ink and it's the third drawing in there.

The fourth drawing in the pen and ink sketchbook is this one of a (sort of) Rainbow Cobweb Delta Guppy. I bought a dip pen and drawing inks and this is my first try at using colours and doing a "proper" drawing with them. I got a bit carried away with it but the paper held up quite well and I'm pleased with how it turned out. I'd rather not know how many times I had to dip the pen.

Last but not least is a watercolour WIP with horses and stuff. I don't know if I'll ever get around to finishing it. It's been quite boring to do so far, if I'm being honest. I am extremely sick of seeing and mixing the colour green and the masking fluid tore the paper in several places so it looks a mess anyway. I don't know. Maybe I will, maybe I won't.

I'm going to return to the other watercolour flower soon so I can get that other sheet posted, then I'm going to try a few watercolours of people. No green there!

Watercolour Wednesday

(Although by the time the paint has dried and the internet has stopped being a bitch, it's Thursday.)

I've been following @charlesevansart on Twitter for a little while now and his paintings made me want to destroy more of my paper collection, so I did.

I ended up using different brushes and the whole-pan studio set because it's a bit stupid of me to waste travelling supplies when I'm sitting in my room. I struggled with them a little because there are lots of colours I'm not used to using and none of the colours are labelled. My half-pans have the colours written on the side of the pans but these don't. I'd guess the blue that I made so much use of was cobalt blue. Larger pans, larger brushes and larger paper was quite nice, though.

The paper has buckled a bit but it's had a LOT of water thrown at it. I can definitely tell it's better quality than the ancient paper I'm using for the practice sheets (I still haven't posted the last one, gulp). It didn't dissolve under pressure either, so that's good. I'm going to use the pad as a watercolour sketchbook of sorts. There's eleven sheets left for me to ruin/play with.

It's quite the landscape disaster, but I don't think I care that much. I used my own photos for reference and the location is one of my favourites.

WIP Wednesday - Watercolour

 

This is the third watercolour sheet - one finished painting and the lines for the next one, which I'll hopefully be able to start painting at the end of this week. 

Watercolour Disasters - Volume 2

Nearly a year after the last four, here's the next four! This involved introducing my scanner to the new laptop for the first time, so this blog post has been fairly traumatic.

I started the horse in May 2012 and then went back to stay with family for summer and didn't take the reference with me, so I had to leave it alone. Prior to continuing with it, it looked like this:

The dappling was purely accidental. After I'd left it for so long, I didn't really want to go back to it, in case this version ended up looking better, and I wasn't 100% sure about this no-black rule, because mixing dark colours was a bitch to do. I really wish I'd just left it now. The "finished" version resembles a peat bog on legs. Oh well. The "black" is burnt umber and ultramarine, as usual. I suppose I could do a burnt umber wash over the pale grey parts, but I honestly never want to touch this again.

The beach I painted while back home in summer 2012 - it was the only bit of art I did the entire time I was there, which is never good - and it was just supposed to be a stupidly simple picture that took less than ten minutes to do. It looks like one, so I guess that wasn't a total failure.

The flowers were both done recently using my own photo references. The purple one just would not do what I wanted it to do. I also learned, perhaps a little late, that you can't really paint veins on petals when you're only using one brush. A bigger selection of brushes would probably have served this one better. Still, it's a marked improvement on the flower painting from the first sheet I think. I left it alone before I killed it, but I'm not sure I'd say it was finished. Still, I'm not going to go near it ever again.

The tulips I just did because I quite like flowers - I know I said I was going to do other things for this sheet so I suppose doing two flower paintings was cheating. I also cheated on colours for this one - I used a colour that isn't in the palette of 12. I took it from the full set of 45 and then put it back when I was done with it. Mixing pink just isn't something I can do though, so without it they would have been red. I used Rose Madder Hue. In the photo, the flower on the right is in focus while the one on the left is completely blurred and the one in the middle is, well, in the middle. This didn't come across too well (or at all) in the painting. I actually like the middle flower the best, possibly the best out of all eight watercolour disasters so far.

The original plan was to do the two sheets of four and then move on to sheets of two, to give myself more space and practice with larger paintings. I'm not sure whether to stick with this plan or not though, because I think I still need more practice with the A6 sizes. I suppose only two paintings per sheet might inspire me to actually put more time into them - a large problem has been rushing - but I'm still undecided. I won't say what I'll be painting because I didn't stick to it last time.

Here's the obligatory beauty shot of the paints, after the second sheet. It's a fairly shitty photo, but there's a huge crater in the ultramarine and smaller craters in some of the others - my paint is looking used at last. I can't dig the paint blocks out of the pans anymore.

A note though, the brush is starting to look very used. The bristles are starting to lose their shape and I have a feeling that the paint box will outlive the brush I have for it, which is a slight problem because W&N don't seem to sell the tiny brushes for these boxes separately. I could probably take a brush from a different box when this one dies - I think I have a box with a brush that's the same - but then that box won't have a brush either, so I don't know. I have a mini artist quality brush, but I think it's too thick to fit in these boxes. Hmm. Points for the paints, minus points for the shitty brush.

Here's to the next sheet of watercolours kicking my ass :)

Starting with watercolours.

I figured that if I tried to improve with so many mediums at once I'd end up not improving with any of them, so I decided to focus on painting with watercolours. I bought more paper in different sizes, a lot of paint - far more than I need at the moment, I must admit - and a selection of tutorial books. So far, so good. I bought small pads of paper and small paint boxes in the hope that this would reduce how much time it'd take to set up, paint and then clean up, so I'd be able to do it more often. In theory.

I had some paper left over from when I made messes as a kid, so I'm using that up first. I figured I could do four paintings on the first two sheets, two on the third sheet and one larger one on the final sheet. So, here's the first sheet of four:

I'm not scanning them individually because I don't think they deserve it. I've fondly dubbed them "watercolour disasters". The numbers on the first three are page numbers from the books I got the references from - all three of them are DK encyclopaedias/handbooks. The fourth was painted without a reference (hence the scrawl next to it).

To paint them, I used the smallest paint set that I had - a Winsor & Newton Cotman one - and a little water bottle/tray that I got with a watercolour pencil set from WHSmith years and years ago. I took photos of them with a ruler so you can see how big they aren't. The water bottle is quite awkward to fill up but the tray is the perfect size for the paint set. I can get two little paintings out of it without needing to change the water. The photo of the paints was taken after all four paintings were done and I haven't used them for anything else. I'm not sure how well they've held up.

The first one taught me that watercolours like to do whatever they want, and it's not my place to interfere. It looked absolutely fine until I tried to overwork it. Lesson learned, sort of. From starting the drawing to finishing the painting it only took about fifteen minutes, so I didn't waste too much of my time.

For the second I used masking fluid for the first time to do the green around the flower. The paper didn't like the masking fluid very much and sort of fell apart in places. I expected that because the paper is quite old and I have no idea what I'm doing. While working, the green outline looked quite like the blue in number three - vibrant. When it dried it became kinda invisible. This one went wrong really quickly. It was taking a lot longer than I could be bothered to spend on it and when I realised it'd be another disaster anyway, I just rushed the rest so I could move on.

The third one is a disabled goldfish. I forgot to draw the little side fins and I did the blue first, so by the time I realised that I'd given the poor thing a handicap, it was too late to do anything about it. Like the bird, this was done in about fifteen minutes, including drawing. I used masking fluid for the blue again, but the fish still ended up with a blue smudge on it. Still, I like masking fluid. It adds a lot to the time spent working though. And it smells horrible.

The fourth one was done without reference. The field needs to be darker because it looks like it's on the same level as the hill, and I have no idea what happened to that roof. It had colour on it, and then when it dried there was this colour-free circle. I couldn't be bothered to fix it.

Onto the next sheet of disasters! I think for the next four I'll do a horse, another flower (just because that was SUCH a disaster), a butterfly and maybe something more human. My acrylics and oils (I finally got some oils, by the way) are going to have to wait until I get better with these :)

This was a scheduled post - I am busy with university. Back soon! :)