And this begins a series of posts of the sketches I’ve been doing before breakfast at the dining room table where I start the day with a cup of coffee, my journal and my iPad. I read a bit of email, journal a bit and sketch what’s on the table in front of me, pretty much as I find it. I don’t always have time to finish a sketch but it’s always a great way to start the day.
Continuing my gouache experiments, I was pretty happy with the way this one turned out. I gave it to my daughter-in-law when she told me how much she liked it and would love to hang it on her wall. Now she can. That’s one of the best by-products of a passion for painting…being able to share my vision with others.
Sktchy app is such a great resource for finding people to draw. Here are a couple of gals drawn/painted in Procreate on the iPad.
More sketches inspired by the interesting characters who post their photos for artists to draw on the Sktchy app. Many of them are artists too. All done on Procreate on the iPad.
This was a fun two afternoon painting. Below are the steps in the work in progress and photo of the setup. This was painted about a year after my mother passed away. It’s poignant to be painting some of her special glassware.
Continuing on with my big May catch-up on posting work from the past few months. It was a gloomy winter day but one of the volunteer calla lilies was blooming and I had to paint it. This was a one-session alla prima oil painting.
I painted these from life, but first did a value sketch in Procreate to help me stay within the range of values I chose for the painting. That’s a concept I’ve been pondering: that you can design whatever value range you want for a painting, from mostly light to mostly dark, and then mix the paint colors accordingly. I printed out the Procreate value sketch and put it on my easel for reference as you can see in the work in progress photos below.
I’ve been working on doing Alla Prima (all at once) paintings in order to become more decisive about the paint I put down instead of noodling around. It requires getting the drawing right, understanding what I’m seeing and if it fails, starting again instead of trying to keep fixing, which usually goes badly. This was the third attempt at painting a rose in my mom’s yellow glass bowl. The previous attempts and photos of the set up (as the rose opened) are below.
Thanks to Kaelin on Sktchy app for the twinkle in her eyes that inspired me to sketch her on my ancient Winnie the Pooh book’s last page map of Pooh Corners. Digital ink in Procreate.
Kaelin, digital ink in Procreate on iPad.
Here is the photo reference from Sktchy.
There was something regal about these two, hence the name, despite the queen sitting in a soap dish, not a throne. I started out thinking “values and planes” and then, as usual, got seduced by color and detail. I did manage to keep some of the planes I saw in this pomegranate (which was becoming more faceted as it became more elderly, having been painted a few times over the past couple weeks). However, I’m not sure the painting actually benefitted from leaving the planes (or so many of them) visible.
Below is a photo of the set up and below that the two previous pom/persimmon paintings that were a nice warmup and introduction to the subject, though perhaps not terribly successful in terms of paint application, composition and/or drawing.
Jana Bouc, Artist 