Category: Gouache

Categories
Art supplies Flower Art Glass Gouache Sketchbook Pages Still Life

Experimenting with Gouache & Rotring Art Pen

Last roses, ink and gouache
Last roses, ink and gouache

I  saved two rose buds to paint when I pruned my roses last week (in case winter ever comes to the San Francisco Bay Area—it’s been ridiculously hot and sunny). By the time I could get back in the studio, one bud had opened and my order of M. Graham and Schmincke gouache arrived. Although I planned to test the new gouache by making color charts first, I knew the roses wouldn’t hold up much longer. Also included in my art supply order was a new Rotring Art Pen.

I tried out the gouache and pen in the sketch above. I also wrote a quickie review of the Rotring Art Pen and offer some technical information about gouache by experts on the subject. If you’d like to know more about gouache or the pen, please click the “Continue reading” link below.

Continue reading “Experimenting with Gouache & Rotring Art Pen”
Categories
Drawing Flower Art Gouache Painting Still Life

Playing with my flowers

20080521-black+gouache-mothersday-flowers

White ink, gouache on black Canford paper 10″x8″ (larger)

I got home from work just as my painting group was arriving for our weekly painting session in my studio. I grabbed a quick bowl of shredded wheat for dinner, fed the cats and plopped this little vase of white flowers on my drawing table.

I looked at the dainty, delicate white flowers, and feeling a little rebellious decided to draw them with white ink (using my favorite white ink pen, a Uni-ball Signo) on black paper, with no idea what I’d do after that. This was a “let’s try this and that and see what happens” sort of thing.

Once I had the drawing I decided to fool around with adding a little gouache. Just for fun I stopped before I’d covered all the petals, leaving some random black spots.

What I discovered is how much fun it is to paint with gouache on a dark background, which I’d never done before. It reminded me of those cool coloring books I always wanted (but rarely got) when I was a kid where you painted with water and the painting appeared magically.

It might have been a “better” painting if I’d paid attention to value, composition, light, etc. but tonight I just felt like playing like a kid, not trying to make a good painting.

Here’s the drawing without the gouache:
20080521-bw-mothersday-flowers

Which do you like better?

Categories
Gouache Painting Sketchbook Pages Still Life

Vegetable Medley to Celebrate: Taxes Done!

Vegetable medley

Gouache on hot-pressed Arches paper, 7×5” (larger)

To celebrate E-filing my taxes tonight I wanted to paint something bright, cheery (and low calorie to make up for all the chocolate I ate while preparing the return). For years I fueled my tax preparation with a big bag of Mother’s Iced Circus Cookies that I stuck in the freezer and munched on until my taxes were done. I needed all that sugar to be able to do the math, understand the forms, and reward myself for doing such an unpleasant task.

This year I skipped the toxic cookies (loaded with artificial color, flavor and hydrogenated fats but oh so yummy)…and bought organic, fair trade chocolate at my neighborhood health food store, El Cerrito Natural. I waited a week to let the tax returns “simmer on the back burner” to make sure I hadn’t forgotten anything. Then tonight I reviewed everything and clicked “Submit.”

It’s much easier to do taxes these days: Turbotax does the math and I just have to gather and enter all the information. But I still experience all the same old fear and loathing plus resentment at where my tax money goes. But it’s done for another year! Woohoo!

Categories
Animals Cartoon art Drawing Dreams Gouache People Sketchbook Pages

Dreaming: Beaches, buzzards, buffalo…

A Llama appears

All are ink & gouache in square sketchbook

I started my dreams Friday night (after a really crazy hectic work week) with a strange series of beach scenes. First a llama appeared in the surf and splashed its way out of the water.

Shortly after that a gigantic fat buzzard with white fluffy feathers like a tutu zoomed down and picked at a dead seagull carcass.

Then a buzzard...

Then a herd of huge buffalo chased by hunky hordes of horseback riders goes thundering through the surf: first north then south, then out of the water and up a hill. Then a helicopter (in first image) lands on the water and loads up with my co-workers. Those who don’t fit get into a boat and leave too.

Then horses chasing buffalo

Meanwhile it’s my first day on the job in a different department and I’m trying to print notes for how to use my cellphone and I’m trying to make it 2-sided to keep it in my wallet but I mess up the pages and then discover I have no computer to print from anyway.

Then a woman comes over and says she needs to measure my head size. She tells me how much smaller my head is than hers and says, “that’s just one of those things that happen at our age.” I’m wondering if my head is shrinking* and I also don’t think she’s my age, but then I can’t tell how old she really is.

Head size

* Hmmmm, maybe that last dream is telling me I need a good “head shrinker?” (as psychiatrists are called in the U.S.).

At first I thought there’s no way I can draw these dreams: I don’t know what buffalo and horses and buzzards look like in enough detail to draw them. Then I wondered, if I can see them so clearly in my dream, maybe all I have to do is look at the images I see in my mind when I remember the dream. If I can see it, I should be able to draw it. (Hah!)

I started sketching hesitantly in pencil but quickly realized I needed to just go for it with my pen instead as I usually do. It’s so much more fun to be adventurous and just see what comes out of the pen.

I was able to capture the buzzard, llama and horses close to how I saw them in my dream though not the riders who were all studly stuntmen/Indiana Jones type, not these wimpy riders. But I was hopeless at drawing the buffalo.

Maybe when I finish working on perspective I’ll switch to buffalo (not).

Categories
Gouache Life in general Painting Sketchbook Pages

Dinner at Costco: So much for my good attitude…

Dinner at Costco

Ink & gouache in sketchbook (larger)

Well, so much for yesterday’s Pollyana attitude of gratitude. Now I’m mad!

After working half the day I headed out to do errands, including shopping for new car tires. After going to the library, the Toyota dealer and another tire shop, I ended up at Costco. Normally I’m a big fan of Costco as they have reliably high quality products at excellent prices, but it’s not a place I’d ever chose to eat dinner.

Unfortunately I was stuck there for over three hours waiting for my tires to be installed, only to learn that they’d made a mistake and the tires they’d sold me were the wrong tires that didn’t fit my car.

Click “continue reading” below to read the rest of my rant:

Continue reading “Dinner at Costco: So much for my good attitude…”
Categories
Gouache Other Art Blogs I Read Sketchbook Pages

Waiting for the doctor

Ink in Moleskine sketchbook

Just a quick sketch while waiting in the doctor’s office (after studying all the charts of spines and wrists and skeletons). I was really enjoying drawing and hoping he’d be delayed but he wasn’t and then I had to return to the office. Nobody could focus this afternoon after an all-morning meeting and then a holiday gourmet pizza lunch complete with first visits from two co-workers who are out on maternity leave and their beautiful new babies.

We all took turns holding and rocking these little miracles while we played “Dirty Santa” (Everyone brings a gift, then we all draw numbers and pick gifts in order of our numbers. Each consecutive person can choose to “steal” the gift a previous person has opened until every gift has been opened and everyone has one.)

I brought as a gift Maira Kalman‘s wonderful new book of illustrations in gouache of her every day life and thoughts (always quirky and unique), The Principles of Uncertainty. I love Maira Kalman and highly recommend the book. Last year the hit of the party was my gift of her previous book, the The Elements of Style Illustrated (Strunk & White).

Not much work got done when the party ended at 3:00. Everyone was in a daze from the fun, pizza and desserts (including fudge–hadn’t seen any of that for years!).

Categories
Figure Drawing Gouache Life in general People Sketchbook Pages

Learning to Vacation

Peaberrys-coffee

Ink in Moleskine sketchbook – Peaberry’s Coffee in Oakland’s Rockridge District, land of yuppies with strollers
Click here to enlarge

Today was my first official day of vacation. There’s something about a week off that makes me want to hoard every moment and then I start worrying about it ending before it’s even gotten started. It usually takes me until the very end of vacation to get into the swing of relaxing. I’m so grateful that the physical pain in my back and hip is gone. Tomorrow I’m going celebrate feeling good and being free.

Today I had a wonderful hour and a half of massage and bodywork that my sister treated me to for my birthday and then I took an hour long walk along College Avenue in the Rockridge District of Oakland/Berkeley and had a latte at Peaberry’s Coffee (above) where I listened to the guy in the foreground rant for 20 minutes to a very patient woman about how he brought dessert and cheese to a dinner party where the hosts didn’t put his dessert out and stole the cheese for themselves and never said thank you. Then I drove over to Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley and exchanged a couple CDs at Amoeba Records. I really like one I brought home today: Rodrigo Y Gabriela–sort of flamenco/rock guitars from Mexico–wonderful!

skatepark1

Ink in moleskine: at Berkeley’s Skateboard Park
Click here to enlarge

Yesterday I rode my bike to REI looking for a Klean Kanteen which is a lightweight stainless steel water bottle to avoid polluting the world with jillions of plastic water bottles and my body with the chemicals in plastic that are now found to be absorbed into the water and the body. They were all out. Riding home I discovered the Berkeley Skate Park (above)– like a whole bunch of concrete ski-slopes, jumps, rails, curbs and swimming pools where skaters try out their tricks (video) without endangering anyone but themselves.

Afterwards I did some figure drawing using a brushpen, adding gouache later to some of the sketches. Here’s a couple of them.

body2

Brush pen in Aquabee sketchbook

body1

Brushpen and goauche on hot press Arches paper

I’m also a little frustrated because I’ve finished all of my work in progress and it’s time to start some new work but I can’t seem to settle on what I want to do next. After a couple days of trying to make myself settle down and get to work in the studio I’ve realized what I really want is to just be outdoors, drawing and painting what I see, rather than working in the studio. So that’s what I’m going to do because it’s my birthday vacation and I get to do whatever I darn please, so there!

Categories
Gouache Life in general Painting Still Life

Papaya in Gouache

Papaya in Gouache

Gouache on Arches hot press watercolor paper, 10×7.5″
Click here to enlarge, then click again

I meant to paint in oils this afternoon and I meant to go to bed early tonight and I meant to get some good exercise in today. Oops.

Instead I spent the afternoon with the president of my neighborhood association touring the former private elementary school around the corner from my house that is on the verge of being leased to a new charter high school. I’m feeling very much the Nimby-ite (Not In My Back Yard) because the school will almost literally be in my backyard — on the next block. While the school’s focus is supposed to be all about community service and group hugs, my experience with the nicest of teenagers (including my own who weren’t always all that nice)  is that high school students are noisy, drive like fools, and have lots of trash that rarely ends up in the trash can.

By the time I got home I had to cook dinner and then clean up the huge mess from chopping tons of different veges for a stir fry. When I finished it was 9:00 and I was about to head to bed for a nice early night when I saw this lovely half papaya I bought today calling out to be painted.

“OK, you have one hour” I told myself and then to bed!” Two hours later and here I am uploading the picture. I still have to do my back stretches. But at least I’m happy I painted today because tomorrow it’s back to the office.

Categories
Art theory Faces Gouache Painting People Portrait

Girl in Gouache

Girl in gouache

Gouache on hot press watercolor paper, 7×10″
Click here to see large (then click again)

I painted this from a photo I took of a little girl at my niece’s high school graduation. I’m learning a lot from working with gouache–it’s a great way to experiment with seeing values and color temperature which is so important, especially for working with oil paint. I’m also learning that while you can repaint layers with gouache you do eventually get unpleasant paint build-up and it becomes more difficult to blend, as layers beneath get reactivated (unlike acrylics).

One note for anyone who’s interested in working with gouache: Many of the colors are not at all permanent since many artists who use gouache are painting for publication and the work only needs to look good until it’s photographed. When shopping for gouache, make sure the tube of paint has an A or AA permanence rating. Anything below that (B or C) and the paint may fade or change color rapidly (just in case you paint a “keeper”).

Categories
Art theory Dreams Gouache Other Art Blogs I Read Painting People

Painting with Gouache

Phone dream

Gouache on hot-pressed watercolor paper, 7″x11″
Click here to enlarge

I’ve been wanting to experiment with painting in gouache (opaque watercolor) and today finally got the chance. I so adore the artwork of Maira Kalman and the painterly, juicy way she uses gouache….which reminds me a lot of the kind of oil painting I want to do–John Sonsini is one of my current favorites…and his work reminds me a lot of Alice Neel, one of my major art heroes, who, at the age of 80, did a wonderful nude self portrait of herself painting herself.

It turns out gouache, at least on the two relatively small pieces I’ve tried so far, actually combines the best of watercolor, acrylics and oils. You can blend easily, paint with bright juicy colors, it dries quickly but not too quickly, you can paint over areas, and it cleans up with water. I had some ancient tubes of Winsor Newton Designer’s Gouache and bought a few new tubes since some of mine had turned to cement. I love it!

I’ve been trying to paint in that juicy, painterly way with acrylics and oils but haven’t succeeded so far. I haven’t worked out the balance between working quickly, free and loose, and still trying to capture a likeness of my subject and getting to detailed and tight. Then there’s the problems associated with the actual media–acrylic dries too fast too do much blending and oil dries so slowly that I keep having to stop and let it dry for a week before continuing.

I’m excited about the possibilities with gouache and enjoyed this first experiment, which was inspired by a dream. I posted the original sketchbook image here.

If you want to see more of Maira Kalman’s art, she’s had a monthly art blog on the New York Times website and the work is stunning. It will be published in a book in October. The NY Times offers a free 2-week subscription, which I took in order to look at the whole year of her art blogs.