JKPP Gouache sketch of Stuart, gouache, 8×10 inches
I sketched Stuart (from the Julia Kay Portrait Party) and painted him in gouache. I’m still struggling with mixing colors to dry light enough. In this sketch I started by painting the light on the side of his face and leaving it alone. That seems to be a good way to proceed since painting light over dark doesn’t work seem to work that well for me. I’m so enjoying painting and drawing people. I got too many layers of paint on his hand and arm so I gave up trying to get it right. I know the hand looks like a slab of mystery meat with no bones in it but oh well. It’s always about getting the drawing right first, which I didn’t do with the hands. I also apparently need to use less pink/red in flesh mixtures to avoid getting this icky pinky-grey color.
I painted Kathleen (from the Julia Kay Portrait Party) side by side with the flower below but decided to post them as separate images. I’m loving gouache but really struggling with the way light colors turn so much darker when it dries. I actually lightened the sketch above in Photoshop so that it wouldn’t look so scary.
Azalea in Gouache, 7×5 x 5.5 inches
I found this flower (I think it’s an azalea) growing along the sidewalk in the neighborhood and picked off a blossom to paint. The flower is too dark because of my lack of experience with gouache, but I had fun painting it. Gouache is so much fun and I’m especially loving M. Graham Gouache. Now to just learn to mix colors about 4 shades lighter than they look! I mastered doing the opposite with watercolor so I’m (almost) sure I can do it with gouache too.
Tacubaya Awning and 4th Street Berkeley, ink and watercolor, 5×8 in
I’m going to post often for the next couple weeks to get caught up on all the things I haven’t posted because of continually choosing painting over posting. I’m also going to try to write less and keep it simple so that I can get the images online quickly and get back in the studio. So here are 4 sketches that got orphaned from last year. Above is the view from a table under the awning outside Tacubaya on 4th Street in Berkeley.
Rocking Horse and Junk at Pallet Space, ink and colored pencil, 5×8 in
The Pallet Space was a junk shop going out of business in Oakland where we sketched one evening. An amazing collection of junk and trash ripe for sketching.
Cow Glass Found, ink and watercolor, 7×5 in
Someone wrote and asked for a print of a previous sketch of my cow glass that I’d sold so I offered to paint it again but still haven’t gotten it just the way I want it.
Leaf Sketch with QOR watercolors, ink and watercolor, 5×7 in
I was experimenting with some sample QOR watercolors. I haven’t fully explored their possibilities since I got seduced by gouache and haven’t looked back at the QORs since then.
LEFT: Girl with wildly matted hair on pretty deck off pretty kitchen. RIGHT: Old lady dancing for people while workmen powerwashing on a roof spray water that turns to hail. Ink and White Pitt pen in compact Moleskine, 5.5 x 7 inches.
I used to start my mornings by drawing images from my dreams but got out of the habit some years back. I got inspired to start again after seeing Nina Johansson’s project of drawing from imagination daily in a Moleskine daily planner. Her strangely beautiful pages are skillfully drawn scenes from a vivid imagination. I loved her idea of using a dated journal so I bought up a pocket-sized yellow Moleskine planner and started drawing my dreams again every morning.
Russian soldiers marching and big feet. Chinese vase with butterflies and lady bugs.
I was pretty rusty at first, but with each drawing I’m feeling more confident about mostly drawing without references or props, and without worrying about accuracy. I’m using a variety of pens including Pitt Artist Brush Pens and their new PITT Artist Pen – White pen that works really well. I’m throwing out all the other yucky white markers I tried before.
The big screen kiss and lots of goats. Visiting my secret hidden basement room again and bowl of M&Ms.
The paper in the journal is thin so there is a little show-through from previous pages but the Pitt pens are great at not bleeding.
Woke with a migraine: shipwreck and monkey. Eat on Time.
Sometimes if there are no visuals from the previous night’s dreams or I wake with a migraine, I draw what I’m feeling or something else related to life, like the two above, the migraine image on left and the reminder to eat on time (to help prevent stupid migraines).
Guy from Ace Hardware tried to take my dog and phone. Tall ships, bundt cake and a painting in progress.
Odd, the food items that appear in my dreams, mostly stuff I don’t eat.
No dream, just a sketch of a shitty migraine.
From time to time I’ll post my favorite dream sketches here, but if you’d like to see them as I draw them, visit Drawing My Dreams Daily on Tumbler or my Instagram page, which I’m using to keep daily posting simple (no computer, just iPhone shots of the sketch).
Portrait of Millie, oil on Gessobord panel, 10×8 inches
This painting was a labor of love: love for my sweet Formosan Mountain dog Millie who has come a long way (literally and figuratively) and love of painting. Millie was rescued from the streets of Taiwan as a 4 month old feral pup and flown to SF with some other rescued pups. She was very fearful and independent (e.g. standoffish and stubborn) at first, but after one year together she is now a very happy pooch who makes me laugh every day with her quirky ways.
I love painting dogs, and gladly accept commissions to paint animals of any kind (including humans). You can see photos of the work in progress as I painted Millie below.
I started with some sketches (posted here previously) and then took photos of her in the studio to paint from. (The little bow on her collar was from Mud Puppies Tub and Scrub at Pt. Isabel after they washed off the sticky brown mud from her dive into the bay at low tide). I did a drawing on tracing paper from my favorite of the photos, corrected the drawing by taping it to the iMac monitor to compare to the reference photo and then transferred the drawing to a Gessobord using Saral Transfer Paper. I used Panpastels for the first block in and then began painting with oils, starting with her face.
Reference Photo with Dirty Nose (she’d just finished burying a bone in the garden using her nose as a shovel)
Drawing on tracing paper
Drawing on tracing paper taped to iMac to compare and correct from photo
Pan Pastels ready to sketch on panel after drawing transferred
Drawing transferred and PanPastels applied
Starting painting with her face since if that’s not right the rest is irrelevant
Painting blocked in and first layer started.
Panel all covered, time to adjust
Background work, adding and reducing details
More work on background, fading out darks on the right
Portrait of Millie, oil on Gessobord panel, 10×8 inches
SF Bernal Heights Sketchcrawl, ink, watercolor, gouache, 7.5 x 11″
When it was time to leave for the Sketchcrawl in San Francisco I couldn’t find my sketch kit containing all my favorite sketching tools. I scoured the studio and the house. No sketch kit. I feared I’d left it at my figure drawing class the day before at the community college where it had probably already been adopted by a needy art student. Sad and frustrated, I cobbled together some pens, pencils, brushes and paints, threw them in a bag and drove across the Bay Bridge to San Francisco.
Catching up with my friend Susan Cornelis who came down from Sebastopol for the day, and connecting with some other local sketch buddies helped me forget about my missing precious pens and paints for a little while. Since I was so late, after a quick walk around the neighborhood, I decided to sketch what I could see from a bench on the porch in front of the library where the final meet up would be. The lamp post in the sketch above was up on the porch too, which is a little confusing perspective-wise, being up about 8 steps from the sidewalk in this hilly neighborhood.
The good news is that I had a great time at the sketch crawl AND the next day when I was getting ready to go out to the studio I picked up the basket I use to carry things back and forth from house to studio and my sketch kit was in the basket! YAY! And I put a “Reward for return” note in the bag with my name and phone number on it in case it ever disappears again.
I think I like the sketch better broken into two separate ones (below). What do you think?
SF Bernal Heights Sketchcrawl (crop 1) ink and watercolor in XL WC Moleskine
SF Bernal Heights Sketchcrawl (crop2) ink and watercolor in XL WC Moleskine
Portrait for Julia Kaye’s Portrait Party, gouache in XL WC Moleskine, 9×6.5″
When I learned that Julia Kay’s Portrait Party (Facebook) (Flickr) was coming to SF in March for a weekend of live portrait party events I signed up. My goal for 2015 is to develop my portrait drawing and painting skills and this seemed a perfect way to get started, along with the excellent 4-hour figure/portrait drawing/painting class I’m taking at my local community college.
Since I’ve been experimenting and teaching myself to paint with gouache (more about that soon, with reviews of paint and brushes for gouache). I thought it would be a perfect medium for my first Portrait Party attempt. One thing that I know about gouache but am not yet accustomed to, is that it dries significantly darker than it looks on the palette (unlike watercolor which dries lighter). That explains the very vibrant tones in the portrait above compared to the original photo (which I don’t have permission to post here)! Below is the original sketch that I painted over in my X-large Watercolor Moleskine.
Sketch of Jan Jaap for Julia Kaye’s Portrait Party, graphite, 9×6.5″
Thank you to everyone who responded to my previous post and offered feedback about whether to try to fix the right-hand rose that was bugging me. I figured if everyone said leave it I would, but if others saw the problem too, I’d try again to fix it. They did, so I did, and now I can look at it without feeling frustrated.
To solve the problems with the rose, I turned the photo and the painting upside down and could immediately see I had the shape wrong. Then I converted the photo to gray-scale to check values. I reshaped and repainted the rose using grayed-down, paler colors. I touched up a few other spots in the painting (back top right flowers, some leaves and small changes to both left roses). I added a black border to simulate how it will be framed.
Now I think the focal point (the middle rose) stands out, and the minor right rose recedes. FYI, the reason these roses don’t look that rose-like is because although I started working from life, I could quickly see that the flowers were about to completely fall apart (it was several days after the wedding) so I took a photo of the almost over roses.
Below Left (AFTER): fixed final painting; Below Right (BEFORE): before adjustments and fixes.
I started this painting of my daughter-in-law’s wedding flowers soon after the wedding in January 2014 but wasn’t thrilled with the way it turned out so set it aside. I began reworking it again recently, and after several times reaching a point of saying, “Finished” and then working on it some more, I remembered the saying, “Art is never finished, only abandoned” and decided it was simply time to stop.
But there’s still one thing that bugs me in this painting: the pink rose on the right just feels too Barbie pink to me. Every time I look at the painting it irks me. But I’ve repainted it 5 times and perhaps because the photo I’m working from isn’t very good, especially of that rose, it keeps turning out the same. I may try one more time. What do you think? Leave it or try again? Or maybe find another photo of the set up with a different view of that rose and try again from that photo?
My challenge in painting is always how to maintain the freshness of my original inspiration, color choices and brush strokes while holding back my inner perfectionist who wants to keep noodling around forever. Another challenge with returning to an older painting is that the fresh flowers are long gone and only a so-so photo remains to work from. Likewise all my new fresh ideas about painting have to be set aside to work on something from the point of view of a year ago.
Morton Skullman the Man Skull study, oil on panel, 12×9″
I painted my skull model, whom I call Mortie Skullman, to kick off my painting for 2015 since my plan for this year is to focus on portraits, mostly of people (but also of dogs of course, my favorite subject). The process I followed for this study was based on the approach David Jon Kassan takes on his online skull painting video, “Premier Coup” (only $1.95 to rent for 1 week). It was fun painting along with him, taking inspiration from the thoughts he shared as he worked.
The process starts by drawing and blocking in with PanPastels using Sofft Tools and then moves on to oil paints. You can paint over PanPastels without need for drying time or fixative and they can be completely erased with any eraser, making them ideal for underpainting.
Below is the setup and most of the painting sessions in progress.
Jana Bouc, Artist 