The Young one first. A Halloween visitor. Three year old pirate Captain Ellis showed up on our front porch to collect the booty. He’s a serious guy who meant business, as you can see.
And the old. Somebody’s grandpa (from the SktchyMuseum app). Such gentle compassion in that face.
I think I would title this one “The Shoes” because they are definitely the star. That and the exposed shins and socks. The picture makes one feel a bit tipsy, like the feeling of riding on public conveyance. But this guy is a pro.
So how does he really feel about it? Blood pressure skyrocketing. Finger in a light socket? Missed his flight? Just got canned?
French diplomat? Who knows? I got out my Fude fountain pen with the crooked nib. Its hard enough to handle that all precision gets lost. So the big shapes, the chisels on the face of an older gentleman can have the emphasis they need. There’s intellect, experience and power there.
The gray toned paper needed some relief but I might have overdone it with the white gouache. So much detail in the hands left out here. I must admit, all those fingers, like so many windows on a building, sometimes bore me. All you need to know here is that they are hands. Period. More attention for the face.
OK, so now I’m caught up with portraits for now. Next batch in a month. Thanks for hanging in there with me. Since I know many of you are portrait artists, questions or advise! about materials or sources are welcome in comments here!
My source for inspiration, as always in the Sktchy Museum app.
Time to catch up on posting portraits from the past couple months. It’s my way of archiving and maybe getting ideas for new directions or more practice on old. All of these portrait subjects are from the Sktchy Museum free access archives. Many thanks to the folks who offered these great poses!
Here we go! This fellow above has the kind of face just made for portrait artists! Life experience chiseled into every dip and turn of the physiognomy.
I’m beefing it up here with lots of watercolor texture, splatters, wet crawl-backs and the stuff watercolor loves to do, if you let it.
As always though, bouncing back and forth between the quick-and-simple to “clear the palette” after getting so detailed.
Started this one with a fine liner pen, adding w/c textures in layers.
Can you tell that my main interest here became this fellow’s black hair and beard, the texture and color – blues and indigos. I never got back to finishing the rest in similar detail. Best to stop while ahead.
It’s really about the hard working hands here. What is she doing with this lapful of herbs? I imagine the simple hard working life of my ancestors. Rising before dawn, in bed by nightfall, and all those hours with no screens to lure the mind away from the tasks of the moment. . .like sorting herbs.
I wanted to try out my the new colored inks I bought for my fountain pen sketching, and ended up using them in dilutions as paint as well, and even mixing them with white gouache for pastels.
If you got this far, thanks for coming! Questions and comments welcomed.
(thanks to Julie Kim whose picture is on Sktchy Museum)
Why is it so hard for many of us to “stay loose”, especially when drawing and painting the figure?
I’ve been seeking the cure for tightness for many years. Here’s what generally helps:
Speed for one. Set your timer and go for it.
Splatter for two. Load your brush with juicy pigment and fling it across the paper, or tap the brush handle on your finger to knock the drops off the brush.
Willingness to dirty up the page for three.
Spritzing the paper with water so control is lost. (Of course often that results in messes, but sometimes they are messes that work!)
(thanks to E.W. Parris whose pose was on Sktchy Museum)
And painting outside the lines! You can always go back in to delineate shapes with value. And often I’ll glaze the background color into parts of the figure to get color bounce.
This pose was the source for Bianca Rayala’s Etchr workshop– my copy of what she demonstrated. To get the wonderful splatter background you splatter the colors used in the figure and then spritz with water so that they run and the paint dissolves into parts of the figure, creating lost and found edges. It’s one of those easy techniques that looks hard.
More messy drama. Wet on wet background drama and some spicy bounced light for this lovely Guatemalan lady.
Now are you ready to get messy?!
One of the reasons i love to paint people is that it doesn’t take much (skill? accuracy?) to communicate feeling. A little exaggeration of one aspect goes a long way. So at some point I always think “oh what the heck. It doesn’t really look like so and so, but it’s an interesting expression, so let it be!”
We were out in the back yard putting a shade cloth over our gazebo, which was letting too much light and therefore heat onto our heads! Andrew took his shirt off, since it was hot up there where he was stationed to pull the fabric across, and his head was burning so he made a sort of turban of it. And then he crouched as low as he could to get into the shade a bit. I had my hands full and no sketchbook at hand anyway, so I snapped a pic and later sketched this out.
He’s a very patient fellow with his parents, but I don’t imagine he was having fun. He had a good laugh when he saw this sketch!
Another Sktchy app portrait. I loved the blue hair and the dark reflection on the one side of the glasses and was having fun playing with opaques on toned paper, doing my own thing with the color. She looks pretty heavy duty, I mean strong personality you wouldn’t want to mess with!
Our new home is beautiful. No doubt about it. Which is not to say that it is without, shall we say, unexpected occurences which must be dealt with or accepted as is.
On the beauty end is the climate and the way the garden view enters our home (now that the recent heat dome is a point of history that is). Andrew has found the perfect perch to absorb the warming rays for a cat nap after lunch.
And then there are the surprises. Interesting sounds. Like the crickets in the toilet downstairs, sounds that is. After watching a few Youtube videos Bob was able to discover the problem and after several tries, silence the crickets, at least for now.
Then there were a few days when we would suddenly out of nowhere hear the first few bars of Beethovan’s Fur Elise. No it wasn’t the doorbell, or the dryer telling us the clothes were dry. No one at the door. . . Finally Bob discovered that it was the old security system which was being activated by something at the street, and he shut it off.
Then there was the discovery that pretty much every wall in the house is painted a color called Spiced Vinegar and it was beginning to feel like a bit much.
But walking the trails around here seems to put things to right again. A couple days ago I was walking on the Chehalis Trail just three miles from home. It reminds me a bit of the Redota Trail in Sebastopol, though the forest is denser and taller. I stopped to look at a lake that was almost covered with some kind of water lily, and a tiny old woman saw me puzzling and stopped. I knew immediately I wanted to talk to her.
And so I met one of my first new friends here in Olympia, Bronka Sundstrom, a 96 year old woman who walks 5-6 hours each day.
We walked for a while together as she told me some of her story. She was a Polish Jew who was interned in a concentration camp during WWII at the age of 12, lost her 7 siblings and both parents while there, barely survived herself. She was so debilitated when finally rescued, that she had to learn how to walk all over again. But she went on to marry a Swedish man with whom she led a long life of skiing and mountaineering, and here in Washington acquired fame for breaking records for climbing Mt. Ranier as an old woman.
Needless to say I had to sketch her portrait, and now I have a reason to see her again and give it to her. Maybe some more of that courage and determination will rub off on me. And maybe this walking-the-trail activity is not a bad to make new friends here, not to mention increasing longevity!
I’ve had the strangest feeling about moving lately, that I’m not so much packing belongings as memories and layers of personal and shared history. And if I had a more efficient/useful/reliable way to accomplish the memory thing, there would not be so many things to find boxes for!
For instance, the wind chime, a gift made by my friend Ellyn that reminds me of her warm and wonderful heart every time I see and hear it. Or the beaded talisman made by Muriel to guard my studio door. Or the metal frog fountain-head from our pond in our Albany home, dating back to when the boys were into tadpole-ing and bringing critters home to take up residence there.
The boys (well men now) are a great deal less in need of these reminders of childhood than I. They are too busy writing the big scripts of their lives, while I am enjoying the reruns.
So these things got packed today along with birdhouses and nests and rocks from my collection. The nests that were too fragile to pack have been distributed to key locations in the yard.
This one is my favorite, nestled in the bosom of the old apple tree behind my studio, inches from the tiny new apples. The history that I leave behind is somehow as essential as that which I take with me to re-plant in the fresh soil of the north. I can finally imagine how all these mini tasks are the structure of ceremony, that of continuance as well as rebirth.
Meanwhile the evening portrait painting continues, as I pursue a variety of poses on Sktchy and much needed practice with gouache.
I have more control and dexterity with watercolor, but love coming in with the opaque white gouache at the end to perk up the toned paper and make the eyes sparkle.
We all love characters! They wake us up and make us realize that being a human is an amusing business, capable of endless entertainment. And Derek McClure, of Sktchy fame, is one. . .or many as you will see here. I have sketched him in his many personas. He photographs himself at angles that distort and amuse. My lack of skill with gouache and BLACK paper help me to relax a bit and just give it a go.
Here he is again! eye popping and jaw dropping his challenge to “paint me!!” I draw it with pencil and then just, gulp, dive in anywhere to start painting. Eventually it starts to look like someone, and so I throw caution to the wind, and keep painting, glad that no one’s looking. Telling myself that I don’t HAVE to post this on my blog. The best part is the end, coming in with white gouache for the highlights and white pencil or pastel for the hair. And, well maybe I’ll post it after all. I always do.
We have a new home in the Pacific Northwest! Last week, about ten days into my Washington state odyssey, just when I was feeling a touch of despair at soon being “homeless”, we found an Olympia property that we fell in love with. When I say “we” I mean me, and my husband Bob (at home here in Sebastopol and with me on Facetime), and my dear friend Janet who was with me every step of the way, driving me around, helping me with sanity checks, while we explored the area with walks in the woods and on the beaches. And then there was our tireless realtor Connie, whose energy in this thoroughly nerve wracking endeavor never flagged. Our offer was accepted and we move in June!
My best estimate is that moving takes up 95% of ones mental real estate for weeks/months, and possibly a larger percentage of physical energy! For three days after our offer was accepted I took an average of two naps a day. So in between naps and phone calls to arrange details, I would pick up my brush and paint a bit. One day I even walked to a park across the street to sketch a “living table” for a half hour!
And then a couple more portraits. . .
My weariness shows here! I couldn’t bring myself to finish the clothing!
(Both portraits from pictures posted on the Sktchy app)
And now I’m home in Sebastopol again, enjoying the spring garden explosion, looking forward to seeing friends, and little by little packing and clearing. Will it never end? Ah, but yes! Now I can see the end and am breathing deep again.
Thanks for hanging in there with me! The blog isn’t going anywhere and I hope you’ll stay with me.
This month’s Sktchy app’s 30 faces in 30 days event has turned international with so much variety of poses! I’m way behind in posting my efforts. Although I signed up for the Sktchy School with a different teacher demo each day, I’ve not been able to watch most of them, but I’m enjoying looking at the teachers’ choice of model and approach. It’s all watercolor and gouache, and each teacher puts their personal stamp on what they do. I’ve been enjoying alternating between watercolor and gouache and trying some new techniques.
This was Michael Creighton’s lesson. Not at all the way I usually paint but I really enjoyed this almost pointillist method of painting in brushstrokes! My impatience made it needlessly messy, but I liked the overall effect. Thank you Michael!
Gouache makes for a more sculptural effect, and I like the creamy texture of the paint and the ability to paint light over dark.
I’m finding that I spend a lot more time trying to get the drawing “right” than with the painting. This one feels unfinished to me, but it was getting late and. . .so I grabbed my pen . . .What a fun subject though! He really had that blue hair with beads in it!
The idea for this two color portrait was from the teacher Kate Tsunoda and with an outrageously wonderful model.
It took me forever to get this drawing close, and then it almost painted itself.
This Indian gentleman with his mahogany skin was a great subject for layering of pigments.
Another one of those characters that I would like to meet. He personifies delight! and don’t you just love his hair? an opportunity to make all those curlicues.
I just bought some more gouache colors and am looking forward to putting the paint on thicker in my next portraits!
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