Scenic Practice: Trees in Winter

So, a couple months ago I got into this intense yearning to practice misty scenes and eerie landscapes.  There were a lot of winter landscapes up here in the northeast, but not a lot of incentive to paint them plein air since it was too cold for my desert blood.  I snagged a couple of okay shots on my phone, but they weren't calling me to paint, and I deleted most of them.  Eventually I saw a glorious winter sunset as I was driving home one day, and while I did not get a photo of that sunset, the image stuck in my mind. I wanted to recreate it, so I went looking around on Unsplash and found this image to base it off of, and combined it with a shot I took of the parking lot the same week.

I practiced the image a few times, because I have trouble with misty scenes.  So I did it in oil pastels, and in watercolours but with different palettes for each one.  Except for the oil pastel piece, I used a limited palette of 3 paints for each one.

Version 1- Watercolour postcard

The first version I did.  Watercolours I used were Winsor & Newton cobalt blue (PB28), Sennelier lemon yellow (PY3), and Sennelier transparent brown (PBk7, PR101).  Khadi Papers rough 4x6 sheet.

For this first piece, I picked mostly paints I was not comfortable with.  Mixing the black was REALLY challenging, and I could not quite get it, but I did love the effect of the odd purples mixed with alizarin crimson and cobalt blue.  I can't remember now how I got those darker blacks.  I may have thrown in phthalo blue or pthalo green to achieve them, but I'm not sure.

Version 2- Oil pastels

Oil pastel version, again on Khadi Papers rough 4x6 sheet.

So I have not used oil pastels since high school, and the only colouring media I've used since high school are watercolour and watercolour pencils, and every now and then coloured pencils for touch ups.  I've been interested in trying them again, so I bought a Crayola set of water soluble oil pastels and tried that.  It was okay.  I'm glad I did not aim higher than Crayola for this because I do not love the medium and only see myself using it for artist prompts.

Versions 3 & 4- Sketchbook

Top palette: Sennelier orange (PO43, PY83), phthalo blue (PB15:3), and alizarin crimson (PR209, PY83, PR179).
Bottom palette:  Sennelier yello ochre (PY43), Winsor & Newton cobalt, and Sennelier alizarin crimson (PR209, PY83, PR179).

At this point I realized I should just turn it into a full-on study and did two more versions of the same landscape in a Strathmore 400 series watercolour sketchbook, 9x12 wire bound pad.  I chose different palettes for each piece and painted them in the same manner as the others.  Since this was cellulose paper it was a little easier to move paint around, but I had to me more delicate with my layering.  It was easier for me to get a misty glow, though.  I need to get into more of these studies, they challenge me in a way that was stimulating but not completely uncomfortable.  I found it to be a good exercise.

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World Watercolor Month 2018 Week 3 (July 16-21)

Continuing World Watercolour Month from my Week 1 post and my Week 2 post.  This is a little blog showing my progress per piece and inspiration - basically a more expanded version of what I've been posting over on Instagram.  Yeah, this is late, I know.  I had a beach day on Saturday so I had no scanner for my work and really, no inclination to take a break from a wonderful day.  I'm keeping this up for mostly personal reasons anyway, so I figured it could wait..

In all cases, clicking the image of the finished painting will take you to the full-size posting on deviantart.

July 16: More Maine coastline

Another photo from my Maine beach day two days before this.  It was a view from the parking lot of a wildlife refuge.  The houses are not accessible by car or on foot except during low tide.  I found the view quaint and vibrant enough to draw it.  Because I've been having problems capturing New England skies - so moody and gloomy compared to the vibrant Arizona skies I'm used to - I followed Scratchmade Journal's tutorial on painting skies and clouds.  Fortunately released that day!  I finally nailed that New England sky.

The paper, if you're wondering, is Khadi Papers paperback sketchbook (not the hardcover you've probably seeing all over watercolour instagram).  Paints soak in right away and colours spread all over if applied when it's not bone dry, so it's wonderful for these loose, wild experimental sketches and for more dry brush work.  I love it, but it's certainly not for everyone.

July 17: Plein Air - Great Bay again

I woke up very early, so I went back to the Great Bay Wildlife Refuge and painted some trees I saw on the path.  I also saw some birds, very close to me!  A white-breasted nuthatch, which I've only seen in pictures, two woodpeckers that may have been either the downy woodpecker or the hairy woodpecker, and a warbler that was so bright blue and yellow in colour I think it may have been a northern parula.

July 18: My friend's cat

A couple weeks ago my friend sent me a picture of her cat that I found highly amusing.  It looked like her cat was plotting world domination, so I asked her if I could (eventually) paint the scene.  And I did.  This was my first time using the Khadi Papers rough sheets, which I believe is the same as the paper in their hardcover sketchbooks that I keep seeing people rave about on instagram.

July 19: Seashell from the beach day

During the beach day last Saturday, my boyfriend found a cool, oddly textured shell and gave it to me.  It's probably from a purse or hat rather than something that would normally be found in Maine, but it was still cool-looking and I painted it.  I went for a different, tighter style than I normally do and this was the result.  I was not quite happy with it, so...

July 20: Seashell Re-do

...I redid it!  Went with my usual style, and I like it much better.

July 21: Goddess or Faerie

This, again, was loosely inspired by Eluveitie.  This time it was a combination of the songs "Rebirth", "Epona", and "A Rose for Epona".  This took a lot of glazing and patience, so I'm super proud of it.  I imagine she is is a fertility or nurturing goddess, coming out to a believer who called...whether or not they knew they called her, or were entirely sure of their belief. She may be the goddess of this place, this land, these people only, or she may showing a mere facet of herself in this form and place. I always envision some kind of goddess or otherworld spirit appearing like this when I hear the following lines from "Rebirth":
"In front of Antumnos' gate 
I beheld the mirror in the lake 
Recognize I did not 
Nor did I comprehend."

Of course, she could be aloof (as in the case of "A Rose for Epona"), and I imagine the person she is approaching right now may have that same skepticism of her.

So that's Week 3 of world watercolour month.  I'm still posting these day by day as I go on my Instagram profile, if you want to check that out!

Inspirations from Music - Eluveitie

It's not even funny.  For whatever reason, I keep being really inspired in my art by the music of Eluveitie.  Even the band that three of the founding members formed has inspired me to do a piece of artwork so similar to their debut album promo images that I called it fanart:

 

Left: My drawing.  Right: The promo images for Cellar Darling's This is the Sound album.

Quick process of that above piece.  It's not really that good, overall, but I'm super proud of it because it was my first full watercolour on actual watercolour paper in a long time, and I got to see all my improvement in one go:

Above: "This is the Sound" artwork process.
Below: One of the songs from Cellar Darlings This is the Sound album:

It was also my first full piece with my new, proper watercolours (Sennelier), and they were so vibrant and easy to work with.  The boots came out pretty good, and the poncho overlaying the dress did as well, particularly the transparent part! So I'm quite happy with it.  I would like to redo this someday in a less drawing-between-conference-breaks-in-my-hotel-room pressure, with figures representing Ivo and Merlin (the other Cellar Darling members) as well.  I love all the songs on that album, but I'm posting this particular one as indicative of my overall inspiration because it's the one that repeats the album title in the lyrics.

Well, that's the main one.  There's also a concept sketch and a watercolour doodle I did to practice folds in clothing and facial hair (horribly failed at the latter).  Both art pieces are inspired by album artwork, promo images, and overall feel of the album, but not really faithful presentations of the albums.  Thus I'm not calling them fanart.

 
Left: Inspiration from Eluveitie's album Slania (named for this song).  Right: Inspiration from their debut album. Example song. 

I also did a knit stitch based on a tutorial on how to encode words into knitted lace.  I didn't do anything fancy.  Rather than convert the word "Helvetios" into any number system, I just did a straightforward cipher and converted each letter in the word into its number in the alphabet, and did yarn overs according to the digits.  For zeroes, I just skipped a space whenever I had a 0 digit and began counting again- like 0 was a skip or a reset counter.  Because lazy.  That results in this loveliness:

 

I encoded the word "Helvetios" into this lace stitch, naming it after Eluveitie's album Helvetios, title song posted next to the stitch.  

Sloppily blocked, hence weird cropping on a phone snapshot, but I just wanted to visualize the stitch.  I did have to play around with decrease type and placement, but not as much as I thought I would have had to.  I still need to work out what I want to use the stitch in - thinking a bottom-up crop top.  I love how it came out!  Captures what I get out of this band's music.  Which is not for everyone, but hey...I love it, especially with all the added layers of old myth, spirituality, and history, in addition to great blends of folk and metal.

Back to the Art Grind

Recently I've gotten back into art.  Since January 2017 I determined to draw or paint at least one thing a day.  One of my closest, and oldest, friends back in high school and college (I only graduated in 2015) would constantly tell me I was better at drawing than I gave myself credit for.  I never believed her, but last year I began thinking- well, does it matter?  I'm never going to improve if I don't practice.  So I've been practicing.  A lot.  Almost every day.

   

Left: The first attempt in a blank paper journal I bought earlier in the year.  Watercolour pencil.  Lines are poor, but the colouring is better than anything I ever did before that. 
Right: Sketch from a couple months later, same journal, same media.  It's not good, but you can see the massive improvement from the left-hand sketch. 
Note: Image links lead to a larger posting and description of the respective image.

Returning to art was shocking.  I hadn't worked on an actual art piece since high school, just doodles in my notes during college.  Turns out, sneakily doodling the people and objects around me kept me practiced, and my basic drawing skills had improved significantly since high school.  I hit a lazy point for a couple months, but then something shocking happened - Kelly, the friend who had encouraged me, died.  She and her mom were hit by a drunk driver.  Her mom died at the site, and Kelly passed two weeks later.  This past Saturday I turned 25, one year older than she will ever turn.  I threw myself back into an art frenzy and continued the writing frenzy I began that June, to honour her.  She never doubted me in anything, even when I doubted myself.  Hell, she's the one who replanted the idea of study abroad in my head!  So where this began as simple stress relief from grad school, it's now a form of therapy and a way to honour her memory.

Left: A quick painting with cheap watercolours, June 2017.  

Right: Same cheap watercolours, January 2018.  I noticed they were opaque even on this different paper, and not super water-soluble.  I remembered that from doing the sketch on the right.  These convinved me to buy different watercolours.

I haven't stopped drawing and writing since, and this year I even went back to watercolour and bought real watercolour supplies, like sable and squirrel blend brushes to compare to each other, and have been using the high quality synthetic brushes my mom gave me from her days back in college for fashion design.  In January, someone from a journalling group on facebook even gave me some watercolour journals, which I've been using every day, sometimes more.  I've been homesick since last January, so there's a lot of desert and desert-influenced pieces, as well as my usual music-influenced pieces.

Above: Set A is the same as the woman and the canal, other cheap set B.  B is far more vibrant, translucent, and in general very watercolour-y.  This was the last of terrible paper, so I knew I needed a new, proper watercolour sketchbook. 

After many paintings with Watercolour Set B from set above including the one below with the girl in front of the palm trees, I decided I needed to properly learn watercolour.  So I went and bought an artbook from Jo-Ann's.  Took me a while to pick and finally picked out that, on flip through, looked the most informative and was actually trying to teach me watercolour (Beginning Watercolour by Maury Aaseng, if you're interested), some masking fluid, and went back home.  After a bit more research and the wonder of finding Parka Blogs, which gave me detailed information on watercolor sets for beginners, watercolour sketchbooks, and also had video reviews for multiple watercolour and other media (I'd also recognized him from fountain pen videos I'd watched before).  I work with pen and ink and do watercolour over the inked drawing, as does he, plus the way he writes and the way he films his YouTube videos works perfectly for me, and I've learned a lot.

When it came to paper,  I have a 9x12 inch Strathmore Visual Art Journal with 300 gsm watercolour paper I bought back in college and only had two paintings in, but I needed something a little smaller.  Someone from a journalling group I belong to on Facebook was super kind and, when I asked for their personal recommendations on budget-friendly watercolour sketchbooks, one of them offered to send me two. She actually sent me three! Two watercolour, one mixed media that is okay for a single watercolour wash but excellent for watercolour pencil.


Right: Watercolour set B in a Stilman & Birn beta series sketchbook. I've learned much. I'm not good, but I've learned. The awkward light portions on the face, neck, and part of the shirt were scrubbed out after I learned about scrubbing out pigment, a couple weeks after I had actually painted this.









Now I saw that, if I was going to keep at this watercolour thing, I needed better watercolours.  I kept doing my research on watercolour brands, and eventually bought a Sennelier La Petite Aquarrelle tube set.  It's the student version of Sennelier, figuring that I did know I liked watercolour, but wasn't committed or had enough free time to warrant a full quality set in any brand.  They came in just in time for me to pour the tubes into an empty tin and half-pans right before I went to New Orleans for a business trip.  So, the first use for them was in my hotel room during a conference break.  I immediately saw the different between them and any of the under $6 watercolours I had ever used in my life.

 
Left: The first painting I did with the new watercolours, between conference breaks in my New Orleans hotel room, in a Pentallic Aqua Journal I got from that awesome and very kind person!
Right: Similar intensity of pigment use in the same Stilman & Birn beta series sketchbook, from the same person, with the girl in front of the palm tree, with the Sennelier La Petite Aquarelle watercolours.  Excusing my lack of skill, the difference is amazing to my eyes.

So that's all for  now.  I haven't uploaded the last two images yet, but I will soon.  And I'll endeavour to post more often here, especially since I'm still knitting and crochet designing!

Evolution: Alpha Testing FiberyGoodness.com's New Feature Concept

Here's an evolution of sorts- from plain, rustic tools to spin an even, practical yarn to a wheelspun, still practical, but principally aesthetic yarn.  Yarn on left spun for S3 Module 1: Neolithic.

I am alpha testing- yes, ALPHA- testing something for Fibery Goodness!  I don't think beta testing begins for another few weeks- test for FiberyGoodness's new project/feature concept in testing: Evolution.  It's on their site, with the blurb that asked for alpha testers.  I believe they already set up a beta testing list as well, so any more adds to the waiting list will probably not receive anything until the project is officially rolled out. So far, us alpha testers have been split into groups and given a project theme and a finished item, and the rest is ours to be free with- it's up to the people in the group.  Thus far, it's been challenging, but it JUST got really fun.  I mean fun.  I haven't felt this excited about art since Ravelry sent me my acceptance email during their beta stage.  My group is Gondor- we're calling ourselves Team Gondor.  Or, we have a few times.  They (Arlene and Suzy) split the alpha testers into groups named after Tolkien regions, yes.  AWESOME, right?  I'm a Hobbit at heart myself, but that's not the point here!  I said it just got really fun because we just had our first group meeting through video chat.

Brainstorming sketches I took during the meeting.  All built around the Evolution project theme, which I won't give out yet.

 

My group is filled with fabulous, creative people, and we've got ideas for a fiber/yarn/materials swap to get on with our projects.  For now, the plan is centered on Gondor's history and taking that into the fiber arts as we see fit, with materials from our other members, and fitting that into the framework of the Tree of Gondor.  That may change of course.  It is, after all, named "Evolution" for a reason.  In less than an hour, I was bombarded with inspirations and ideas for my art that I became excited for the project itself, instead of just excited to alpha test.  We came up with it pretty quickly after meeting each other on video chat after Facebook chatting for a while.  It was fun and not at all daunting!  Before getting onto Fibery Goodness and spinning, and before having to present and give talks at conferences for undergrad, I likely would never have volunteered to test something that required me to meet strangers through video chat.  But Fibery Goodness spin-ins (group video chats where you art while you chat) and the like have returned the sense of community that is so elusive in art for me.  Before setting up the chat, we did have some hurdles- Pinterest didn't like our group board for sharing our inspirations, the Fibery Goodness forum kept confusing us (okay me), and Google Hangouts wasn't cooperating.   But we had our meeting, and we all came up with very good ideas.  Part of it was our own independent idea, part of it was the person had likely spent time thinking it up before our meeting.  But we settled on a couple of concepts involving Lord of the Rings imagery, where our group project will be individual and them assembled via photography.  

And these are three of my musical inspirations for this project.  These are mine, not the group's.  My personal playlist for the project is just that- personal.

If you're eager to learn more about Fibery Goodness and the Evolution project, it may be hard for now because as I said, it's in the alpha testing stage.  We are the lab rats for the lab rats, but it's going to be cool.  Roller coasters are fun, after all.  I do plan to blog more about my experience with this as it goes on.  I have asked Suzy (one of the site founders) if it is fine for me to blog about it, and she said yes.  I'll post enough details for it to be informative without giving Evolution away!  I did make a playlist for myself, but I'll link it here anyway.  If it has a video, that means that I find the song both musically and visually inspiring.  If it's just a lyrics video, then it's just the song's music and lyrics I'm using to work towards the theme.  The playlist is here, and is the same one linked in the caption above.  Inspirations here of course, may not make it into this particular final project, but I already have knitted and crocheted interpretations for most of these sources in my head.

If you're not familiar with Fibery Goodness, it is a site owned by Suzy Brown aka Wool Wench and Arlene Thayer of Spin Artiste magazine, built on a concept of bringing fiber artists together to explore and innovate the waters of the fiber arts, mainly through courses.  Quite robust courses, I might add.  Their courses have syllabi and homework builds, along with forums for each class, not unlike what I got in university until just last year!  And no, I am not being paid or reimbursed for this blog post.  Alpha testing is purely voluntary as well, so if I hated it I would be honest and provide constructive feedback to Fibery Goodness, without raving about how exciting the project is.

Steampunk Microphone Process

     So, here's process of a single-file walkthrough I uploaded to my deviantART a bit ago, for this drawing.

Inspiration:
     It was summer, about two weeks or so before my first year of college would start, and I was pretty much just watching random videos on YouTube. Ran into this one:

      Steampunk? I decided to watch just for the fashions, typical me (I had also spent a bit watching the runway sections of Project Runway), when up goes that microphone, and again, and AGAIN.  First glance at it, I realized...it was BEAUTIFUL. Steampunk, but classic microphone, but at the same time something...Greek? Seafaring? No clue, but I managed to pause the video at several instances and screenshot as much of the mic as possible, then got to sketching.  After 10 minutes or so, I had this baby:

 

     I confess that at this point, I put it away and then forgot about it until months later- shortly before my spring break. Well, once spring break started I got to fine-tuning the overall design of the sketch and messing with it, had a better look at the video, and finally went and inked it. I used my usual mixture of ink and coffee- 1/4 coffee to 3/4 ink for the darker spots,and wa-la! A couple hours later, I had my inked sketch:

     You can see where my inking went wrong with the smudging, but I wasn't about to start over or give up. So I ploughed on to base colouring with coffee and paint+coffee.      

     As you can see, there's a couple things that went somewhat awry, but it was decent enough overall for me to go on with my coloured pencils, Sharpie oil paint pen, and more watercolours and coffee. 

     I went for a burnished, antique look- I originally wanted a Hellenistic-style  compass, which is why there's a theta in place of an o.  Yes, I could have used an omega, but it didn't really say "ancient Greek navigation" to me. The lack of accuracy does bother me, of course, but the drawing is done and I'm still happy with it!

First photo

     Rummaging through my computer earlier, I was finding all sorts of photos, sketches, and drawings I'd forgotten about or had abandoned. Most were works that required labour, but then I ran across this baby:

      This was the first photograph I took with my digital camera when I got it. I bought it after years of saving, got home, opened it, and made this quick set up to take a snap of. It came out quite nice, but then it languished on my computer until today. Since the aesthetics, to me, still hold, I decided to give it a go uploading it to my dA and blogging about it. Why? Well, do you remember the first photos or sets of photos you took with your first camera, digital or otherwise? It'd be interesting to see that! I myself got worse, but...meh.