From the 1st day of class of Introduction to Pastel, taught by Sandra Warren Gobar, an ingenious stepped warm-up exercise, which can be done all on one sketchbook page (9x12) as shown:
- first, walk around the area (if plein air), your scene, or around the still life set-up and find your view, the view that you want to engage; situate yourself in front of that view.
- do a preliminary 1-minute warm up sketch
- next do a 40-second two-step (look up and look down) contour drawing
- now a 10-second gesture drawing
- then do a 30-second blind contour drawing
- finally, do a 1-minute warm up sketch
The theory behind all this is that, in the first minute you initially engage and explore, without being allowed to get too anal. During the first contour you find the lines. The gesture finds the movement. The blind contour forces you to look more carefully. And the last sketch is the one with the most "visual information". Is it your final composition? I dunno. But putting all these on the same sketchbook page is very handy. You can actually see your thoughts. Very revealing and instructional.
ADDENDUM: Possible plein air locations, in DC:
ScumbleWorld! This is Arches 300lb 'Rough' paper, coated with clear Colourfix Primer, so it's like painting on aggregate concrete. I could have added quite a few more layers with no problem at all. That squatty foreground jug is a shape that I keep coming back to time and time again, even though I don't have anything in my real universe that is that shape. It lives a very chunky and substantive life in my imagination, however. It's a standard doodle shape for me.
PS: 8 hours + 17 minutes until Hockey Season!
This began as a sort of tea-stained board. The pear color is the 'compliment' of that tea-colored surface. Blue-violet being the compliment of the drab ochre. Palette below. The four there in a row that all look black are actually various tints of a wonderful deep deep Terry Ludwig aubergine (technically a "violet"). Neat color!
Inspirational pears here.
One of the key elements in these exercises is knowing when to stop. Clearly an element that has yet to sink in with me. As you can see, the shadow is particularly worked nearly to death. Practice! Practice! This is about 8"x10" on Canson Mi-Teinte blue paper. I like the look of the bare paper edge when I take the masking tape off. It somehow brings the whole thing back to a baseline of some kind. It would work even better if some of the blue paper were peeping through. Better on rougher paper.
I am eager to try out the clear Colourfix Primer on the colored St. Armand very rough watercolor paper. Will it let the color of the paper shine through? Will it do so with the addition of some more pumice? With some carborundum? The "support" prep part is really fun for me too. Why is that?
The support for this is a very rough watercolor board that I prepared with a mixture of white Colourfix Primer mixed with some 100 grit carborundum. It was so rough that it ate pastel like Godzilla! It was great! (I have some finer carborundum which I will try as well.) You can see the grayish flecks of carborundum on the paper, which might be mitigated with some tinting of the primer.
As for layering and scumbling, this surface was the greatest. I could have put many more layers on it. Great fun! I can scumble like Creevy.
(Could the word 'scumble' be related to the word 'scumber"? It's certainly not far fetched. They probably come from the same root.)
This is 7"x10" on very rough watercolor paper that I coated with white 'Fine Tooth Colourfix Primer' and then toned with deeply pigmented watercolor. I put red under the green pears and green under the reddish background. I got so much into the layering that I ended up nearly smearing. I had to spray it with workable fixative often. The 'tooth' of the primer isn't as good as the that of the sandy papers. Maybe I will add more grit to the primer and see what that does.
. . . .
I think I may be getting it. This is 6" x 9", done on Wallis "Belgian Mist" paper, with Nupastels. This whole layering thing is very riveting. Also Belgium is a great place. So the paper is definitely helping.
The pastels learning curve is taking me for a ride. Pears rulz. I suppose.
Below is a page from the everyday sketchbook. Gouache+pen+ink+watercolors on darker colored paper. Quebeçiose St. Armand 'coloured' paper rulz. Although those pink legs look a tad skanky.
Q: How many days until the beginning of hockey season?
A: 27 days, or 653 hours, or 39,234 minutes, or 2,354,063 seconds
Addendum: SOON!
This is one of the barn complexes at Homestead Farms, along with one of their dragon flies.
Metro sketching benefiting a bit from the figure drawing class. Look and look and concentrate. In the upper right I am experimenting with diluting pastels with watercolors. I am trying to start a Color Journal but keep getting sidetracked. Soon!
Old, tired pear with bruise front n' center.
Day One? K! Day Two? Dunno!
I stopped at Monocacy National Battlefield on the way home from Libertytown yesterday and discovered an 'Encampment' event being held on the grounds of the Gambrill Mill section, which is my favorite part of the battlefield. There was a group of Confederate re-enactors and a group of Yankee re-enactors. The Yankee group did a nice artillery demonstration. There were only six of them, but it wasn't hard to imagine that same sound, but coming from a thousand guns. Pretty scary. I was sketching this view of the Confederate tents (they had slept in them the night before) when four of them came over to chat. To see what I was doing. And then one of them showed me his sketchbook! He had been working in it for years! It was chock full of delightful pen and ink drawings done with an historically accurate steel nib! (I should have asked him about his ink.)
His drawings recorded encampments and re-enactments that he had participated in. It was meant to be like the sketchbooks Civl War soldiers and their contemporary newspaper illustrators kept during the War. The other three guys looking over my shoulder pointed out buddies and relatives and recognized events they had attended from these drawings. This is testimony to how well the artist had captured likenesses! These were great drawings, very delicate and precise, and I urged him to take very good care of them! He just shrugged.Anyway, these Confederate fellows were telling me about some of the odd questions that they get from onlookers during these kinds of re-enactments and encampments. I wrote some of the good ones down. These were NOT questions from children either: -- How come all the battles were fought on National Park Service land? -- Were all these monuments here during the battle? Is that how the troops knew where to go? -- (and my favorite) Is that real fire? -- (and the one I asked yesterday) So, who won?
Later in that same general area I got out my new sketch box and set it up to paint a small view of the edge of a pond and a path leading off into the dark woods. I learned a bit about the logistics of the set up and the limitations of the watercolors. (Gouache or the pastels will be much more fun!) As well as the odds of attracting folks who want to look and chat. I suspect that the sketch box all set up is a magnet. I actually enjoy this chatting part. Especially when they have to come some distance off the 'beaten path' to get close enough to talk. You do meet some nice folks! Which I did yesterday.
On the way home from there I stopped at Homestead Farm, just a bit south of Poolesville. I got the most beautiful peaches and blackberries. There were folks emerging from the orchard area with wheelbarrows full of peaches! Who were they? What on earth do you do with thirty pounds of peaches? Cobbler for a hundred!
The Arf Arf Days of summer are in full swing. Note to Tourists: Stopping at the top of a moving escalator on Metro is generally not practical. You could get trampled!
Q: How many days until the beginning of hockey season?
A: 70 days and 1,686 hours.
Addendum: [sigh]
My Figure Drawing Class is going well, despite my sloth. I really enjoy drawing 'from the figure' and may sign up for open figure drawing sessions. Someday.
My experiments with pastels are going very slowly. The noteworthy mess that the whole enterprise makes is daunting. Despite that, I have a plan predicated on my friend Samter Petuel's stellar+inspirational example: a Pear A Day, with these variations:
- different color schemes (analogous, complimentary, split complimentary, complimentary with the "discord"
- different lighting effects, different directions
- different points of view, such as straight on and from above
- different kinds of strokes - cross-hatched, scribbled circles. layers, layers with intervening fixative
- different surfaces
- different colored surfaces
- different kinds of pastels, hard, soft, pencils
The theory and framework are there. Where is the get-up-and-go? We'll see.
I have been lately playing around with pastels --> literally solid sticks of (almost) pure pigment. I have rarely encountered a messier medium! You just have to pick one of these little pastels up and you are all blue -- or red or magenta or green -- all over. But the colors are really lush and the mark is nice and sketchy, if I can stop myself from blending, blending, and over-bending. I have a miscellaneous set of various very soft pastels and a full set of hard pastels. I like the soft pastels for the lushness and goopiness of the mark and the brilliancy of the color. But I like the hard pastels for the control. I took a few of the hard pastels out with me to the Palisades Farmers' Market on Sunday morning and sketched some fruit with them. I didn't really give them a good try because of the gnats. (Note to self: put insect repellent on, even if you're in town!)The sequence for value is dark-to-light, for the most part, as it is with gouache. But not so strict. 
Another variable is paper! Paper color is one choice and another is paper texture. The hue and value of the underlying color seems to be a key element in pastels (as it is in gouache!) and the texture of the paper coating has to do with how many layers of color you are able to lay down. The coated papers are like very fine sandpaper and they accept a lot of layers. And you can buy light colored coated paper and color it yourself, any color (or combination of colors) you want, with watercolor or acrylic washes.So much new stuff to try and so many variables. And sooooo much more money to spend!
Yesterday was the first session of my 7-week Figure Drawing in Varied Media class at the Art League. It's three hours every Saturday morning, led by Priscilla Treacy. It's a fairly large class, as these classes go, so I'm not sure how much individualized attention each of us will get. But oh well, I'll make sure that it will be fun.
What luxury to:
-- Have a model that will hold still! So much better than my usual "models" on Metro.
-- Get all messy with charcoal! This stuff called Char-Kole is the greatest! As black and as heavy and as creamy as you could ask. Neat stuff. (I definitely need to bring hand wipes next week.)
Eventually we are going to paint on paper with a technique called "peinture a l'essence" (used by Toulouse-Lautrec and Eddie Degas), which appears to be regular oil paint that has had the oil leached out of it by letting it sit on absorbent paper for a while. We'll use turpentine to dilute and apply it. It sounds stinky and awful to me and I wonder, if the 'requirement' is that we have to use paper as the support in this class, why we don't just use gouache. No muss no fuss. No turpentine! Maybe I'll be a pest and ask her.
Some folks on Metro last week. The tan paper on the left is the BFK again. I am obviously into those white gouache highlights. This is a page and a half scanned from my small everyday sketchbook.
The little blue sliver on the left is a page of Québécois St. Armand paper, which was part of a sample pack that I found in New Mexico. I chopped it up and put pages into the sketchbooks here and there. Nice to have different textures and colors to mess around with.
Fingers portrait and why not? Done with ink, watercolor, white gouache, and then finally some smudged Pierre Noire, on tan BFK Rives paper. The "negative space" is kind of a smile, isn't it? Hadn't noticed that.
BFK, by the way, stands for Blanchet Frères et Kleber, the original manufacturers of the 'Rives' paper, at a mill in Rives near Grenoble, France.
Speaking of France, I have been studying (not reading, but actually studying) the old and respected book about Cézanne by Erle Loran, an art professor at UC Berkeley, entitled Cézanne's Composition: Analysis of His Form with Diagrams and Photographs of His Motifs. It was written in 1963 and lately re-printed.
The term 'motifs' in the title refer to photos of the actual places and scenes in France that Cézanne used as subjects. One of Professor Loran's excellent analytic diagrams is reproduced below, from page 77. (It's his diagram of La table de cuisine, now at the Musée d'Orsay.)
I have learned two new and interesting things from the book so far. First, that Professor Loran is convinced that Cézanne himself did NOT construct his compositions using the same kind of analysis or forward planning that the professor uncovers. He goes to great lengths in the introductory material to 'prove' that Cézanne had no systematic/academic understanding of the theoretical underpinnings of composition.
It was all pure instinct, according to the fine professor.
And second, for Cézanne, the choice of initial subject matter had little to do with the success of the painting, as measured by Professor Loran's analyses. So really, all the parts in the book that are devoted to discussion of the original 'motifs' are pretty moot, in my opinion. Cézanne wantonly re-arranged what he saw in front of him to meet the needs of his picture. He made a timeless masterpiece out of a picture of some old rocks in a quarry.
What this also says to me is that you need not and ought not to wait for your surroundings to provide you with exciting or inspiring subject matter. You can learn and grow and get satisfaction and enjoy the heck outta just drawing a door handle or a chair leg.
And so there it is.
Sketchcrawl June 2008! Once again, I am the only one to show up. But it's still fun. Above, on the right of the sketchbook page, is the view along the north side of the golden NMAI, with pinky-gray Air+Space in the background (with the top of Ad Astra, which means 'To The Stars', that spiky sculpture by Richard Lippold in front of Air+Space, popping up above the trees), as well as ye ole Washington Monument.
On the left side of the page is an experiment: sketching a face with just a dark watercolor tone. No detail, no line. A few more wc sketches are below. (Here is another one.)
Speaking of NMAI's Mitsitam Cafe, is it my imagination or is it getting even more expensive? A simple lunch of roasted salmon with two sides, and a Key Lime tart (excellent!) cost just shy of thirty bucks. Oh, wait. I guess it was that cup of coffee that almost put me over the top. Hmmm!
I enjoyed my weekend workshop at the Art League with Diane Tesler entitled Gouache for Field Studies & More. We spent all of the second day outside, painting scenes in Old Town. There were a few demos at the beginning, but we were pretty much on our own, with a little bit of individual critique, when and if Diane could catch up with us. It was very instructive just to get down to it and mess around.
One of the elements that she emphasized was to begin with strongly tinted paper. Depending on the scene you intend to paint, tint with a warm or cool acrylic wash. The watered-down liquid acrylic wash also seals the charcoal underdrawing, which is very handy. (But I'm not sure I am willing to give up that pristine white page! I suppose when one of your colors is white, it isn't that critical. I have put some BFK Rives tan colored paper in my everyday sketchbook, to test it with watercolor. If it works well I might add that white gouache to my palette.)
Once again, there were some very nice folks in the workshop. As always at the Art League. One of them is going to Provence with Susan Abbott in a few weeks. ENVY!!
I spent some considerable time on the painting above. Really messed around with it. The one below was a very quick sketch with minimal prep. Gouache worked well for both of them. I think.
Here is an experiment with Conté à Paris Pierre Noire charcoal pencil and watercolor. The charcoal is dark as the darkest night and smears really nicely. More experiments to come!
I have enrolled in a two-day workshop on gouache this weekend. I am worried because the techniques used for gouache are diametrically opposed to all those used in watercolor. In common with oil painting, with gouache you apply the paint dark to light. Where in wc, you do the opposite. As per MacEvoy: We get a hint of what's involved in the use of gouache (pronounced "gwash") by considering the origins of the name: it comes from the Italian aguazzo, for "mud." I may be hopelessly muddled/muddied by Sunday afternoon.
I don't know why. Why not?
I arrived home here to Maryland yesterday and very much enjoyed all the familiar smells. Particularly the smell of honeysuckle. Honeysuckle and rain-fattened foliage and the smell of Thirteen Original Colonies dirt. At the least the northern seaboard Old Confederacy Thirteen Original Colonies dirt and foliage. There is something very satisfying and cozy -- for me -- about the smell of Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina. In the spring and autumn especially, the smell is all of mustiness and life. Or maybe it's just a reminder of the good memories of my time in NC and now here in MD. This is also the season where I have to resist the very strong urge to buy a farm. Or at the very least a cottage in the countryside.
(I visited my favorite cottage in the countryside, overlooking Burkittsville and, yet again, there was no For Sale sign on it. Luckily for me, I suppose. I ought to go back there and sketch the expansive view from the front porch. I wonder if the residents would mind. Hmmm! Field trip! For a photo at least. Quickly snap a pic before taking a pants-full of buckshot, for trespassing.)
The sketch above is of another lazy old porch in the late afternoon, with the sun on the backs of the dark green Adirondack chairs filtering through some enormous trees. It's part of an old country inn nearby that I stopped at, to prolong my vacation.
