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I’ve been doing studies in the Robert Bateman brand sketchbooks, which are a pretty smooth vellum surface; the oil pastel slides around wildly on them but gosh it’s fun! This drawing is maybe 7 x 7″ or so in size. Reffed my own photo.
Again I did an underdrawing with the cray-pas expressionist oil pastels – they hold a decent point and are very easy to layer over with softer brands like mungyo, haiya, or god help me sennellier.
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Did this study from a photo I took during the pandemic of a delightful vehicle we occasionally saw in our old neighbourhood. A magnetar is a very, very cool and scary space phenomenon and I extremely respect naming your ancient honda accord after it.
A couple process shots to show you the underdrawing I did in the cray-pas pastels – they’re very firm compared to the rest but I was still able to blend them a bit as you can see in the second process shot.
I did this study in the heavyweight coldpress Canson XL mixed media sketchbook; I was assuming the paper texture would hold the pastel still better than the bristol I’d been using in the Bateman brand sketchbook, and I think it did, but, only for a layer or two; by the end the pastel was very slippery and I could easily lose mydrawing if I wasn’t careful.
Speaking of drawing, since cars are a real bitch to draw, I did a full underdrawing of this in pencil crayon first to nail down all the shapes and the perspective, and it def paid off. I think the drawing as a whole stayed decently strong through to the finish as a ersult of the time I put in before adding colour; I really need to do that more often.
One thing I was trying to do with this one in particular was more blending to get custom colours. I rewatched a few Yolanda Blazquez demos to see how she gets such soft customized blended skintones, and ttarted trying her soft layering/finger blending technique here. I do think it helped and I got colours on the page I don’t have in stick form! However, yolanda uses pastelmat paper and that stuff holds the pastel still better – again, at least to a point – and she’s VERY good at putting the colour right where it goes the first time. I think one of my problems is I like to work up t o the right colour, and with pastels you do end up wit h Too Much On The Page eventually. I could be more liberal with my scraping back in future, I think.
Also, fun trick, you can do a lot with pencil crayons on top of oil pastel if you press firm enough to scrape back the pastel as you draw. That’s how I did the license plate.
I’m going to do a few more studies, trying to figure out what my favourite surface for oil pastel is. I’ve got some mi-teints paper on teh table now, and lots of printmaking rag on teh shelf nearby for further tests. Figuring out how I personally like to work in oil pastel remains a very fun quest and as my right hand regains tiny amounts of precision every day I amstarting tosee some real possibilities with this medium beyond the playful angle that’s attracted me so far.
Finally, I don’t know exactly what did it, but I seem to have ended up in a very 80s advertising painting zone with this – what would you call this vibe? Either way, accidental but fun result!
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got the gouache out again for the first time in months; arm recovery really took the fun out of it for me for a while there! but I’m feeling more myself when it comes to holding the brush again, and it was lovely to sit and do a study of the hawk I watched kill and eat a squirrel at my friend’s park birthday celebration earlier this year.
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while i am gardening this website i realize the weeding process is maybe invisible
posted:
updated:
posted to: tech lifeAs I edit posts for spelling and grammar and tagging and layout and all these little invisible things I do to try and learn how to wrangle my website and all its content, I realize that a) this seems to kick them back into RSS “unread” status, which must be annoying..? and b) most folks will not be able to discern any difference in the post itself in most cases.
So what if each post had a potential little changelog on it for stuff like that? so when I modify it I can add a reason why? is that … interesting to anyone else? I’m likely to do it just for myself but let me know. Also, are there folks doing this in a fun way? Curious website owners want t ofind out.
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Browsed through Earth’s World for some great natural light portraits to practice with. This was made in a new little 5 x 7ish sketchbook I picked up that’s filled with recycled cotton rag paper. I’d been noticing that rag papers have taken my softest oil pastels the best – you can see one pushed to its limit here – and finding a rag paper sketchbook seemed lucky! So my plan is to fill it up with small tests and just work on my technique.
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watercolour and fountain pen, in my sketchbook.
I’ve been drawing modern wizards for my wizard puberty zine and what if they hung out on crystals islands.
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So back in 2016 I decided to learn how to use gouache.
For context, I finished my second round of art school in 2013, and that included a lot of drawing training and anatomy study, which I still use every day as an artist. I also already had some classical Russian academy style portrait painting training in oils, from back in 2012 and 2013:
gouache sure as hell doesn’t behave the same way, and there is something so alluring and entrancing about oil paint, especially for painting faces and figures! But it’s beyond my scope for a home painting setup, and I say this with four years of using it academically. Gouache just fits into my life so much better! And while it did initially feel like an alien tool compared to the softness of oil, learning it has been a fun journey!
Speaking specifically of gouache portrait practice, here’s a record of some of my stops along the way to where I am today.
2016 – started doing lengthy, and tiny (4×3″), photo studies, mostly of landscapes but also the occasional face:
then in 2017 i put photos away and just played with gouache for a year with minimal reference used, learning about the medium and learning a LOT about colour:
2018 was packed with freelance painting so i only snuck in a few proper studies, mostly still life work:
2019 saw me laid up on the couch most of the year so things were limited to digital iPad work mostly, with a few gouache sketchbook still life studies that really focused on pushing my control of the medium, not portraits:
2020 was a famously rough year but i did get back finally to my desk and my paint and my paper and started properly studying gouache portraits:
2021, i kept going, wrestling with anatomy and surface and value and temperature and just being both excited and frustrated by my gouache work:
2022 I think something started to click – between getting better at anatomy AND starting to see how gouache can be blended and worked up into lost and found edges:
in 2023 I really felt like I was getting somewhere! Painting bigger was making the drawing harder but I was really starting to get a feel for rendering different materials and surfaces with the gouache:
… and then i had my arm surgery and i couldn’t make precise marks anymore. Early 2024, done with mostly my non-dominant hand:
and now almost a year later, I’m slowly relearning how to use my still-healing dominant hand make the marks i want, and it’s so, so good to get back to gouache!
ok but how tho
if there’s one piece of advice I can give you if you’re trying to learn how to do realistic rendering in gouache, it’s this:
these rendered paintings take me three to 12 hours of work. i am not going to get a painting to this level of accuracy and polish in a single sitting. doing a good painting requires stepping away and refreshing my eyes and coming back; and it requires being willing to paint over entire features if they’re wrong.
give yourself the time to take a painting to finish so you can see what you are capable of, then, figure out what you need to work on, work on that discreet thing as a separate sketching process, and finally come back and try another long study and see where you’ve gotten to.
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