Progression of a Painting: Moonbathing (part 2)

(Part 1 with the initial sketches and concepts here.)

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Note: This isn't meant to be a tutorial so much as a walk-through of my process. When writing instructional tutorials I try to be a bit more purposeful and conscious of choices made. Though in truth my process is usually much more chaotic and consists of decisions made on the fly.

Chaos doesn't generally make for very good instruction though, so while I try to define a process in Dreamscapes that is logical and easy to follow, I think simultaneously that "simplification" raises an illusion about creating art that makes things more daunting in a way.

I wanted to show here that it is not always so thought out. Every choice about color and composition doesn't have to be made before you start (though with watercolors, you do have to have at least a general idea in mind). And that accidents and decisions made on the fly are a part of the whole process. A part of the fun of creating art in fact.

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10x15 inches
Strathmore lightweight illustration board
Winsor & Newton pan watercolors: Burnt Umber, Payne's Gray, Reddish Brown, Lemon Yellow
a few Kremer Pigments: Elderflower Purple, Stinging Nettle Yellow

Step 1

Laying in the Background

I start off with the lower background, working from the ground up.

Courtesy of my friend Sophie Klesen, I have in my posession some lovely paints from Kremer Pigments Inc. Their colors are historical pigments, and have a fascinating way of separating and creating unexpected variations of tone, especially when some kind of texturing is applied to the wet paint.

At any rate, I've fallen in love with this Elderflower Purple. I've been looking for an excuse to use a lot of it.

I painted the the lower area in with many thin glazes, alternating the purple with some mixes of Burnt Umber and Payne's Grey as well. At one point I realized that the purple lifted exceedingly easy. And I know that Burnt Umber and Payne's Grey are generally more permanent. So as I started on the left lower corner, I painted the lower layers with the greys and browns and reserved the upper layers for the Elderflower Purple, and I found this made creating a smooth background much easier.

Determining the ordering of layering is something that you figure out as you experiment and actually work with colors, as every pigment has its own qualities and lifts easier or harder or behaves differently when splattered with salt or rubbing alcohol.

Step 2

Background Skies

Moving upwards, continuing the slow layered glazes up into the sky. Now though I'm splattering it as I go with rubbing alcohol to create a starry texture.

I'm using a no 10 round brush for most of this, blending out small patches as I go so that it creates a seamless background. You can notice there's color shifts in the upper sky of what seems like blue and purple varations. Here's one of the things I love about these Kremer pigments -- that's all from the one Elderflower Purple color. It just...varies by itself.


And if you look closely at the rubbing alcohol splatters, it looks more like Cerulean Blue in the center, with Magenta outlines. Pretty neat stuff. :) Can't wait for Sophie to send me more colors from Germany at the end of May.

Anyway, lots of splattering and glazing, and a Lemon Yellow nimbus around the moon, and her head, blending into the white surrounds with water and dabbing with paper towels.

Step 3

Moonbeams

I keep darkening the background with more glazes. This kinda just keeps going until it feels done. Watercolors dry pretty fast, though not instantly. So sometimes after working in a wash say in the upper corner, I'll want to continue layering there but it's currently wet. So I'll switch to another layer at the lower corners instead and then switch back to the top after it has had a chance to dry. I jump all over a painting like this, working wherever is currently convenient. There's no need to stay locked to one element of the piece at a time.

Now for some more Kremer fun, I pull out the Stinging Nettle yellow, which sometimes surprises me with little bits of crimson in unexpected places. But I use that to fill in the moonbeams, blending it softly into surroundings. Leaving the moon itself with the white of the paper.

Step 4

Need More Moonbeams!

At this point, I sat back and decided that I didn't like the symmetrical moonbeams just on her outstretched hands. The background was looking too BoringBlue. Considered for a while, then decided to add more moonbeams off to the right side. Sketched in very faint guidelines in pencil, then proceeded to paint those in with more Elderflower Purple and Stinging Nettle.


Step 5

Stars and Shadows

Trusty white gel pen, dotted in the stars. I'm not really a stickler for purist watercoloring. If it works, do it.

Also, shadowy tendrils of hair on her with various mixtures of Payne's Grey, Burnt Umber, and Elderflower Purple.





So here's my stopping point for today. Some book layouts are calling to me so for the moment Moonbathing has to be set on the back burner. More will be forthcoming over the next few days!

*Continued here: Part 3*

Progression of a concept: Moonbathing (part 1)

Another chapter of Dreamscapes II completed, so now I'm at the halfway point. Right on schedule for sending in to my editor at the end of this month. Going to let it sit for a while and review one last time before mailing in next week. Meanwhile though that leaves me free for my own devices once again. At least, for one week. Plenty of time for another piece!

Had this idea a month ago. Flash of an image as I was lounging in bed reading Rain of Gold by Victor Villasenor (which my flamenco partner claims is her Favorite Book Ever) before turning in for the night. Hopped out of bed over to my desk to snatch up my sketchpad and pencils and jumped back in before the warmth could leave my cozy little spot.

Hurriedly scribbled down a thumbnail to get the essence of the piece. Scrawled notes on the sidelines to remind myself that the tree limbs would fade into the night sky like phantom branches. Little details like that which I would probably otherwise forget come morning with the sunlight to burn off the haze of sleep and Ideas-From-The-Night-Before (which from experience always seem a lot more brilliant at the moment then they do upon more sober and wakeful reflection afterwards).

Next day I tried a few sketches, but wasn't able to get the figure to work for me. It stubbornly refused to synch up with the image that had flashed in my head the night before. Ultimately set it aside for the time being. I've found over time that it's sometimes just better to quit banging my head against a piece that isn't working. Leave the sketches. Work on something else. Then when I'm flipping through my sketchbook for ideas and least expecting it, that sketch will suddenly find its place and work.

Well it almost played out like that this time. I was flipping through my sketchbook silently bemoaning the fact that I was having trouble with motivation these days. An affliction that usually did not plague me. In fact I had a conversation with James Browne earlier in the day about just how fickle the muse was at times. She comes, she goes as she pleases.

I came across the thumbnail and the two initial attempts, and again was intrigued by the prospect, enough to try for a third sketch. And suddenly it was there. Like Athena, she sprang full fledged from my brain, complete with a title. It's funny how inspiration just strikes like that. I can agonize over some sketch and pose for an hour, give up on it and start anew only to have The One within 5 minutes. A fresh viewpoint is sometimes all that's needed to be injected into a piece.

So here she is, ready to be painted.

"Moonbathing" work in progress sketch

10x15 inches

*Continued here: Part 2*

A grey-green cup of jade

"Jade Hills"
8x14 inches
watercolor

And many a night it seems
That all the valley fills
With those fantastic dreams.
They overflow the hills,
So passionate is a shade,
Like wine that fills to the top
A grey-green cup of jade,
Or maybe an agate cup.
-- William Butler Yeats, "The Dreaming of Bones"

Painted as a commissioned piece for someone who was fond of my backgrounds. As I was posting it though, that little bit from Yeats' "The Dreaming of Bones" came to mind that I had read in college. It's written in the fashion of a Japanese Noh play. Very stylized and symbolic. But it's a haunting tale that draws upon the story of Diarmuid and Devorgilla, who for love of one another forsake their country; he brings a foreign army across the sea to fight his own people. And so the two lovers are cursed, as are their ghosts centuries later, doomed as dreaming bones.

But that segment in the opening part of the play/poem always resonated with me. I loved the image of: "A grey-green cup of jade."

dA prints of ink drawings

"From Sea Foam"
Medium: Ink
Size: 7x11 inches

Since I don't offer my ink drawings as prints from Shadowscapes, I've decided to add availability of them through deviantArt. As well as some miscellaneous others that are not sold as prints on Shadowscapes. Mostly it's the recent ink drawings of the past several months.

Along those lines as well, I'm still on the hunt for a good printer for Inklings II. It's been several months of wrangling. Unfortunately the printer who did the first Inklings for me went out of business. So it's left me in the lurch in getting reprints of it, and in getting this second volume off the ground. Was aiming to have some in time for Comic-con (mid-July), and in January that seemed like "Plenty of Time!!!" And then the months creep by and I'm still stuck at Square One.*hair-tearing moment*

I've been sending in price quote and sample requests to numerous printers. And while the prices have all been good, the quality alas has fallen far short of what I was hoping for. After chatting with my old printer a bit the other day though (probably something I should have done a while ago), I found out the reason why was because most of the print-on-demand companies are optimized for text printing. Since that's the bulk of what they do. They're not so good when it comes to the quality of grayscale printing.

I'm crossing my fingers though that the current company I'm having conversations with will be able to print with the same quality of Inklings I. Waiting for their samples later this week with baited breath, and then hopefully I can get past this roadblock.

Meanwhile...sweating through this sudden heatwave. Poor freezer's icemaker can't keep up with me.

Time Warp to 1988

In an attempt to get me to stop using her house as my extra storage space, and arguing the fact that I had now been living in my own house for over 2 years, my mother settled two large boxes of "Old Stuff" into my trunk the last time I was visiting. She said it was a box of my love letters that she wasn't going to toss. I think she was being facetious.

After driving around with said Old Stuff for a week and having it rattle around every time I took a sharp turn or raced through a yellow traffic light, I finally got around to sifting through it all last week during my Hunt for Prismacolors and Discarded Art Supplies.

No love letters. But I was surprised to come across something that I had thought long junked...some old tarot cards I had started to draw. There's no date on these, but I think it must have been around 1988. I have some vague recollection of learning about this thing called the Tarot in junior high, and being fascinated by it. I was determined to make my own deck (I never got further than 7 cards + 1 sketch). I was always that kind of kid who would see something and rather than want to buy it, instantly start to deconstruct it in my mind to figure out how to want to make my own.

At any rate, I thought I'd share some of these very early attempts. For Laughs, for Mockery, for Encouragement to fellow artists who often find themselves discouraged looking at the finished products of professional artists and wondering from whence they spring (yes, practice does bring about evolving skill!), for that bit of Nostalgia at seeing the seedlings of what eventually led to the project I finished this year.

Winding Wall

"Winding Wall"
size: 7x11 inches
medium: ink

Another ink thanks to John Shannon's photos of Yorkshire Dales in the UK. I loved the way this wall wended a path along the hillsides, weaving through the oaks.

This piece is a bit of a combination of my recent experiments and my usual work. The melding is more noticeable if you take a look at the detail shots for closeups on some of the texture in the trees and shadows. Toying around with ideas of how I can work this type of texture with color as well (not for this piece in particular, but in general).

Although, playtime is over, gotta get back to working on another Dreamscapes chapter before the end of this month. Self-made deadlines. Promised myself I'd start up again on the 15th.

Beyond the Hedge

"Beyond the Hedge"
14x19 inches
watercolor
Prints, details, and original available -click here-

There are hedges and fences and walls all around. The world is parceled out into packages hemmed in by imaginary and real boundaries – the rules of respectability, acceptability, ownership, and reality. Towering brambles behind which are what-if’s and maybe’s.

I drive along a side road near where I grew up. A twenty foot sound barrier has sprung up along the right side in the intervening years; separating the snarling I-280 rush hour noise from the neat little houses along the stretch.

I walk with my husband after dinner at night, and from the backyard garden of one house, a fountain plays. The enticing musicality beckons temptingly, “Come peek in!” Ah, but the walls are too tall! And the fences too diligently mended and sealed to afford even a tiny glimpse. I stare at the wooden obstruction in frustration and wonder if this was how Rapunzel’s father felt when his wife demanded that he scale the fence for those wondrous radishes.

I wander through the tangle of Sausal Creek. The blackberry bushes tower with their full summer growth; fed by a stormy and wet spring. The berries have been picked clean from all of the nearby branches, but there – tucked away amidst the thorniest hardest-to-reach spot – that one there is the most luscious berry of all! I pull back from the hedge suddenly as the gleam of little eyes catch a wayward beam of sunlight. Did I imagine that?

Follow the rabbit down the hole. Chase the fox beyond wall. Pierce through to the enchanted heart of the keep where Briar Rose sleeps for her hundred years, and place the kiss upon those expectant lips.