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Experimenting with graphic styles.

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First open drawing session in a while. The first few sketches were pretty rough, but the longer poses turned out a lot better, especially when I switched to my finest tipped pen.

A drawing for the first day of 2012

I returned to my acrylic painting experimentation tonight, but was less than satisfied with my progress.  The biggest issue I had with the original image was that the figure was too small for the canvas and that there was no background to structure the painting. I didn’t like the way the figure was just sitting in red so tonight I tried to add some depth through shading and abstract pattern.  This type of ‘fill in’ work is a huge weakness for me because I tend towards life drawing and realism.  If I’d drawn more of the background when I completed the original sketch, I would have had more to work with and the final result likely would have turned out better.  However, I ended up with some pretty painful colour mixing failures and a good sense of how much I need to work on my brush techniques.  

After a while, I decided to put this painting aside to work on two things: colour mixing and basic acrylic techniques. I want to do a bit more work in both of these areas before I try another large scale painting so that I don’t end up feeling defeated a few hours into a new painting project (and also so I don’t waste money on canvas).  The latter is going to require some research and maybe a trip to the library, but the first point is something that I can easily practice using some other mediums.

It’s weird to feel so bad at colour images, but I’ve worked in either pencil, pen and ink, or single-colour printmaking for so long that I haven’t created colour images in quite a while. Luckily, I still have a bunch of old art supplies hanging around that I can experiment with.  So tonight, after the painting work, I rummaged around in the basement and dug up a super old set of chalk pastels that I’m pretty sure haven’t been used in at least five years.  I chose another life drawing pen sketch for referenced and started practicing colour mixing and layering.

Pastels aren’t exactly the same as working with acrylic, but they are a really fast, tactile way to practice shading, blending, and colour selection.  For example, my first attempt went really well until I tried to mix in black and remembered that black (in both pastels and acrylic paint) has this special, obliterating quality.  Unlike most other colours, when you add it to an image it can really overpower the other colours you are mixing it with.  I ended up adding it too heavily into my image and I ruined the nice soft effect that I was going for. 

Attempt two was a little more successful.

I’ll likely try a few more figure drawings to practice this technique. I’d like to get back to an open drawing class soon as well so that I can actually capture some colour sketches to work from, but I’ll be travelling for work all of next week and I won’t have a chance to pop into a session until the second week of January.

I’d also like to move away from nude sketches and try some other types of subjects or even some abstract work, but nudes are just so easy at the moment because I have so many sketches to work off of and they lend themselves so well to pastel.

starting, again

I’ve started this blog a few times and let it trail away.  Each time I return with a new project and enough time has passed that I end up deleting everything and starting again.

For a variety of reasons, 2011 was a difficult year for me creatively.  It was tough to find inspiration and even tougher to find the time, so aside from a few open drawing sessions and a screenprinting course, I focused on other things. However, today I’m starting with a new post, a new medium, and (almost) a new year. I don’t want to make any promises (either to myself or the blog world) that I’ll update often, but I am re-committing myself to creative work in 2012.

Today I picked up a paint brush and started a painting for the first time in a very long time.  I tried to paint once about a year ago and gave it up after about an hour.  This time, I kept my expectations low and kept reminding myself that the first sitting is really just laying the foundation for more complex image.  It’s always frustrating to work in an unfamiliar medium because it takes a while to learn or remember certain techniques and the mistakes can take a while to fix. On the other hand, it’s been a long time since I’ve hung out by myself in a room listening to music and simply working with colour (I’ve always been a pen and ink girl at heart). It felt great!

Here is stage one (acrylic):

I’m not sure how far I’ll go with this one, but it was a great starting place in terms of remember how to mix colours and what brushes to use.  For my next image, I think I might move towards bigger brushes and looser strokes.