light copy

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An attempt to copy the lighting in Phil Couture’s beautiful painting “Maiko Satohana“, using acrylics in a sketchbook. I went straight in with the paints as this was more about reproducing the lighting than getting accurate proportions (the face is skewed and distorted).

I’d like to know how he made his painting: Did he work from a model or a photograph? How did he decide on the background colours, the composition? It’s always interesting to hear about what is going through an artist’s head as they make these choices.

Tea break

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Painted in acrylic from an old magazine cutting taken from an article about Tibet. It looked like such a satisfying moment.

The photo in the cutting was so dark that the figure was just a silhouette. I had to take it into Photoshop to bring out enough detail to paint. In some ways this made it easier as the noise-filled image was already broken down into large blocks of colour, the digital equivalent of squinting – another example of how a poor reproduction can make a good practice subject.

 

Roots

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Lexington Gray ink in a Pilot 78G ‘F’ fountain pen, with a light watercolour wash, copied from a photo. After a while I started seeing double, trying to keeping track of which root was which.

This was drawn in a Daler Rowney Ebony A6 sketchbook which has 150gsm acid free cartridge paper. The fine ‘F’ nib on the fountain pen did start to break up the paper a little in the overworked darker areas, but this wasn’t really a problem. In fact the paper can take a light watercolour wash without bleeding through or buckling too much.

Rose hips

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Painted with water soluble oils on paper from a photo taken in the garden. A top tip from Anna Mason’s site is to put a sheet of white card behind the subject when taking the photo. This enables you to assess the composition straight away, and there is no need to do any complicated masking in Photoshop.

The paper is from a 7×5 inch canvas-textured 300gsm acrylic pad (Galeria by Winsor & Newton). I added and extra layer of acrylic gesso with a wide flat house painting brush to further protect the paper from the oils. The texture gives a satisfying resistance to the brush.

Space is a problem where I paint, so by mounting the paper on a board it can be easily propped up on a bookshelf out of the way in between sessions or when waiting for the oils to dry. In this case, the paper was attached to a hardback Tintin book (Explorers on the Moon, since you ask) using masking tape. The masking tape can sometimes rip the surface when removed if pulled off too quickly. I don’t know if this is because I’m using masking tape bought from a DIY shop (is there a low-tack version?) or because the applications of gesso and paint somehow bind the tape to the paper.

The layers of paint on these small sketches are quite thin. In summer it took a few days to be touch dry. I don’t know how long it takes to be fully dry (or should I say ‘cured’), but as I’m not going to be varnishing these, it doesn’t really matter. I’ve read that its best to mount unvarnished paintings behind glass to protect them from dust. Most of my pictures up to now have been drawn in sketch books, but now I need to read up the best way to store these individual paintings.

 

Fire hazard

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Sometimes you’ve got to give in to that urge to get the paints out and mix them all together, just for the joy of it. Compared to acrylics, the water-soluble oils make the blending process very satisfying.

The face was copied from the Katie Sims painting Featherweight, which impressed me greatly when I saw it at a local gallery. I think the face she painted was inspired by another painting in the gallery’s permanent collection.

Insert bridge pun here

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This was an attempt to speed up my from-life sketching. I’m not sure exactly how long it took as I lost track of time, but by the time I finished the sun was going down and my legs had gone numb, so more practice needed.

Dilute Lexington Gray ink in a waterbrush made the shading very satisfying to apply. Each application builds up the tone, making it quite versatile.

Chives

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Painted in acrylics, from a photo. I wanted the flower tips to be glowing bright, and relied on the titanium white paint to create the highlights instead of letting the paper show through as with watercolour.

Scanning and displaying onscreen makes them glow even more. These paintings often look better on screen than they do held in the hand. The luminous glow of the screen can boost the highlights and hide the imperfections. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.

 

Turning over a new leaf

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You’d have thought I would have learnt from a previous sketch that using heavy applications of a drawing ink that contains shellac could end up with the ink bleeding through the paper, glueing a number of pages together. My ink experiments on the other side of this gouache leaf sketch involved running together big blobs of ink in an attempt to get some interesting colour blends and ink effects (which didn’t really work).

I thought I would get away with it this time as I was using good quality watercolour paper (Fabriano Artistico HP 200gsm) in this homemade sketchbook. However, the large quantities of pooled ink I was using resulted in it soaking through the paper and glueing the leaf to the opposite page.

Of course I couldn’t use water to help separate the pages, so I carefully prised them apart with a plastic ruler, but the paper still ripped slightly and had to be glued back down. I tried to cover the ink stain with white gouache with only limited success; it was impossible to restore the natural tone of the untouched paper.

The pictures above, both painted in gouache from life instead of the usual photo, were taken before the ink farce.

foliage

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This buddha statue was partially overgrown by the box hedge, which led to the problem of how to represent the foliage without describing every leaf or drawing attention away from the main subject.

Following advice given in Barrington Barber’s The Complete Book of Drawing, only the leaves overlapping the shoulder were drawn with any detail, the others being abstracted into areas of light and shade. The theory is that one area of detail is enough to trick the brain into filling in the rest.