Still having fun with pears. I don’t know if you remember the “apple” ATC’s I created last year but I wanted to do a simple, realistic painting of my fat little pear in the ATC format. Nothing super jazzy here but realistic and I continue to learn about my Caran d’Ache crayons.
A Pear – ATC
I am still creating color studies using my new watercolor crayons. I wanted to work with purple and its analogous colors. Both pieces are on Arches CP paper and are 9″ X 12″.
Purple Study
After I completed this, I decided to add purple’s complementary color to see what sort of exciting things would happen.
Purple Study with yellow
We got almost 10 inches of snow yesterday. To me this looked a little like sun shining a snow storm…some areas even had thunder snow. Oh My!!!
More drawing with my watercolor crayons…for this piece I used warm and cool versions of the primary colors and wound up with a warm patchwork of earthtones.
Primary Colors Study 1
When I saw the results I immediately thought of the hills, trees and rocky ravines in southern Indiana. I have sanguine and sepia drawing pens so I decided to do an ink drawing over my study. Indiana is a state that has very flat farm country in the north and hills and deep ravines in the south. During the last ice age a glacier stopped its southern movement in the southern part of the state. This (again) is on my 5″ X 7″ Liquid paper.
Primary Color Study – Landscape
I have been playing with my watercolor crayons. I have been doing studies to see how the colors mix and behave when wet. I always have trouble working with green because its hard to get a range of values. I did not get a wide range of values but this was just FUN to do. It is on 5″ X 5″ Liquid watercolor paper. This one has multiple layers of crayon and I learned that each new layer can wash out the vibrant layer below and you loose texture with each new layer.
Green Study using Caran d’ Ache Crayons
Next I tried a study using analogous colors of blue. I love the results. The first layer was done by spraying the drawn on colors and using shrink-wrap to give texture. After this was dry I floated a small pour of paint over the center area. When I saw the results it spoke to me of a frosty winter morning. This is on 5″ X 7″ Liquid watercolor paper. Learning – don’t forget to leave some white!
Blue Study – Frosty Morning
Finally, I decided to work with reds and pinks and oranges and yellows. I’ve had difficulty capturing the vibrant, glowing Indiana autumn so that’s what I wanted to do with this one. I worked on 9″ X 12″ Arches CP paper. Here are the results.
Red Study – Indiana Autumn
So, I am learning and playing and enjoying and going back to my childhood, crayons in hand! What fun!
It is 18 degrees with a wind chill of 6 degrees. Boy do I long for Spring…oh my! It’s here. In tribute I decided to start painting my 2013 ATC (Artist Trading Card) collection to send to my family at Christmas. I bought a bouquet of orange tulips at the grocery this week so I used three tulips from the bunch. Does anything say Spring more than flowers?
Tribute to Spring
Remember that ATC’s are only 2 1/2 inckes by 3 1/2 inches. My photos really magnify the imperfections and give a splotchy look. This looks much better in person.
Hope you are having sunshine and warm breezes.
I enjoyed working with the Caran d’Ache crayons so much that I decided to do an actual painting. I just bought four pears at the market and thought “perfect subject”.
One Pear
This Bartlett pear had beautiful color but an odd, squat, rounded shape…but color was the thing and the shape didn’t matter. I got the texture by using the crayons, spraying with a squirt bottle and then letting it dry with plastic wrap on top. I was learning how to control the process a little by the time I did my second little painting (added a Red Bartlett pear). Both are on Liquid watercolor paper and the square one is 5″ X 5″ and the rectangle is 5″ X 7″. This was fun and the Caran d’Ache colors just seem to bloom when sprayed with water becoming very vibrant.
Two Pears
I have started a new round of color stability testing. It includes a retest of the results that were questionable when I did my review this week. I also added 40 Caran d’Ache watercolor crayons that I bought after my Warren Taylor workshop. I really like working with them. They give a rich, creamy feel and look. Very soft and deep. I just added the new samples to the study that I had in process and intend to keep the both studies in bright sunlight. Now I wait….
Mew Color Stability Study started 03132013
Good news! Yesterday evening I finished shredding the last materials from the two big boxes Ken had in storage. I still have to work on the files in the office but that can wait for a week or two. Having this finished just might impprove my mood.
This morning I finished a second project that has been nagging at me. At the end of September, 2011 I made color swatches of all of my watercolor materials – tubes, pans, pencils, crayons, even my Yarka kid’s set. This morning I finally did my comparisons and was generally very pleased with the results.
Color stability testing
I had two blues from a set of Pebeo pan watercolors that looked borderline but my big surprise was that all three of my sets of watercolor pencils had colors that failed. Cretacolor had a red and a green that had slight fading. Reeves had two blues, one with substantial fading.
A blue that faded
Inktense also had several colors with slight fading (Inktense colors were generally brighter and more saturated.)
I plan to mark all of the colors that are suspect with tape so I don’t use them. I also plan to put all of them into a second color test. As I mentioned some of the fading was very slight and I don’t want to eliminate colors when something else might have contributed. Anyway, This was a very good activity and has relieved some concerns that I had.
Wow! January 24th to March 8th, something like six weeks, what happened Linda? To make a long story short; four tax returns, two large boxes of files to sort and make decisions about, and (so far) six feet of files to be shredded. And I’m still not done…
Two weeks OK I was so unfocused and brain fuzzy from sorting and shredding that I made myself get back to art. I started working on a second Indiana Autumn painting. Unfortunately (or fortunately?) I decided to paint on a surface I was unexperienced with using. I had purchased plate surface illustration board for the Cheng Khee Chee workshop and decided to give it a try. I understood that the surface was hard and slick and that the paint would not be absorbed so I worked on small sections and allowed the paint to dry thoroughly between painting sessions. My usual style of abstract painting allows me to work with a high degree of freedom and spontaneity. It allows my colors to merge and to play together and that is part of my inspiration. It took me two weeks of working on this painting to get finished and the painting has some good stuff and some bad.
Indiana Autumn
One of the things I struggled with while painting the Indiana Autumn paintings is that Indiana autumns are all red and gold – there is not a lot of diversity in the values you see. I was really unhappy with the darker sections at the bottom of the painting where I tried to introduce some deeper values. Anyway, I am currently thinking about cropping the painting to save some of the good parts and discard some of the bad. I am playing with cropping on iPhoto and here is one possibility.
Indiana Autumn – Cropped
I don’t know how much more time I will spend on this. I still have lots of files and shredding to deal with. And I want to get back to Barry’s lessons. I did make the improvements he suggested and I did start some compositional drawings before I got distracted by my administrative responsibilities. I guess that’s LIFE!
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