About Art References

"Ships Passing in the Night"

Prints ($16.95 & $26.50) available -here-

A question I was asked recently:

How much do you use references for animals in particular?  

At this point, I mostly do birds from my imagination. Other animals I usually need at least a few reference pictures. I don't ever draw directly from any one photograph. Here's a pinterest board I use for gathering references on any one particular piece that I might be working on at a time: http://www.pinterest.com/puimun/references/

You can get a pretty good idea looking there, what my painting of the moment is. I like to gather a lot of angles and really start to form a picture in my mine about how something moves, because movement is always utmost important to me. I want my paintings to be active in some way, even when the subject is still, there is movement in all the interconnected elements.

Often photos are of static poses just because of the nature of what it is - a photographer waiting for a moment, and the difficulty of capturing spontaneous movement. For example, it's very hard to find any reference of a bird flying AT the camera because usually a bird will be seen in profile, or flying away from the photographer. You're also not going to be able to find lions pouncing out at the viewer either because...well...that might be the last photograph the photographer would ever take.

So I have to examine the anatomy and figure out how things would look from angles that are not seen. If you scroll down through that pinterest board, you can see that I've got a ton of stag photos currently, and going back a few weeks armadillos, owls, moths, chinese junks, monasteries, running children...etc.

Fermata

Fermata

Size: 7x14 inches

Medium: Watercolor, metallic pigments, gold leaf

For prints ($12.75), original painting ($650.00) and detailed closeups, -click here-

In musical terminology and notation, a fermata means to hold a tone or rest beyond the written value. It is a sustained moment beyond that which the meter or rhythm would normally accommodate.
Incidentally, a fermata is also sometimes known as a "bird's eye".

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Some of the in-progress scans and photos of this piece:

Initial sketch. I was scrawling in my sketchbook and the idea took shape as I went. So when I reached the upper edge of my page, I taped another sheet above to keep going.

 Scanned that and modified some aspects in photoshop. I wanted him to be standing on a rise, and so changed the angle of the haunches to better reflect that, as well as some of the lines of face and neck. It's mirror flipped so that I could get a better idea of what changes I needed to make. Sometimes when you look at a piece too much, you no longer see the flaws. Flipping it gives a fresh perspective.

 Finalized sketch on my painting surface. The birds were added just before painting and were not a part of the initial conceptualization. But something was missing and once I added them in, they felt right.

Two days of painting later.

Cherry

Cherry

Size: 18x18 inches (Fully framed size)

Medium: Mixed Media - Watercolor, Ink, Metallic Pigments

Original painting, fully framed, available for $550.00

The past month it has felt more like the middle of Spring than the early December Winter that it should be. I was inspired by the profusion of blossoms on all the cherry and plum trees, and by the Lunar New Year to paint some blooms.

I was recently at the Berkeley Botanical Gardens to see a Botanical Illustration show, and fell in love with the pieces that were done on a surface called Dura-lar, which I found out was a brand that made translucent vellums and other acetate surfaces for drawing and painting on. I bought a couple pads. I found out after I got home that I had accidentally bought one that was just clear acetate. Colored pencils didn't work on it, and neither did watercolor painted directly. Though ink did work quite well, and my watercolor gesso worked too. So I set about playing with it to see what I could do.

Painted the watercolor ground in silhouettes of the blossom branch.

It was quite fun to see the finished branch on the transparent surface.

I tried out various backgrounds to set it up against.

And finally settled on painting a textured surface of metal leaf, metallic powders, watercolor, and sealer. The result looks bit like beaten copper.

Sandwiched the acetate and background with mat board for the final piece.

In the Wake of Her Passage

 In the Wake of her Passage

19x19 inches

Medium: Watercolor, ink, metallics powders, gold

Detail closeups and prints (8.5x11 inch @ $16.95 and 11x17 inch @ $26.75) -available here-

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The process:

Initial brainstorming ideas. I scribbled some thumbnails. This one came together rather quickly. After the figure with the swirling mist in her wake I already knew the title, and had in mind the colors as well.

A more detailed sketch of the figure, using the first concept as a guide.

 Then I scanned the thumbnail and figure and moved things around in photoshop. Flipping, resizing, determining the background composition.

 Afterwards I transferred the sketch, much more fleshed out, onto the final drawing surface, and lightly sprayed it with workable fixative.

First drippy ink & watercolor washes. Doing this is giving me flashbacks to my Berkeley college art days where it was all about drippy paint and sloshing massive amounts of pigment onto huge canvases. Of course, this is only a fraction of that size, and I'm using the most sinful of mediums - the "illustrator's tool", WATERCOLOR!

 A couple hours later, after it dried, a light fixative spray, and more washes, and then I started in on the distant background to the lower left corner.

 Kept it light so that it wouldn't war with my foreground for attention later.

 Slowly worked my way across the bottom and into a bit of the foreground elements.

 And then up towards the figure.

 I kind of worked in a counter-clockwise fashion on this piece, starting  with the lower left background, then moving up the cascade of pools towards the figures and the trees in the upper quadrants.

Worked my way back along the glowing flowers that had sprung up in the wake, under her feet. Used white gel pen for these, and then blended with paint for shading.

A little bit of gold leaf for some accents.

Background trees.

Wasn't very happy with the shape of the arch, in the left side of it, and I had been putting off dealing with that area for a while. But at this point I had to address it. Finally reshaped the area with some watercolor ground and ink and created a much more pleasing (to me) silhouette.

The owl.

Finishing up the lower foreground areas and incorporating it better with the rest of the piece.

Keeper of Keys

Keeper of Keys

Size: 7x10 inches

Medium: Watercolor, ink, metallic powders, gold leaf

Prints ($16.95) and Detail closeups available -here-

I was visiting the Berkeley Botanical Gardens the other day, right about at sunset. The sun was slipping down and through the dawn redwoods, setting golden fire to the edges. A bit of that image trickling through my mind, as well as the lovely bark textures of the redwoods, and a desire to revisit Muhru from my Dreamsign painting of last month.

The sketch on the board. I didn't bother with sketching much of the background. I was going to let that happen organically. Just had a vague concept in mind for what I wanted, and the colors. The rest would happen as the paint dripped.

Here's the initial wash. This one takes the longest to dry. Because I use so much water, to let the pigment from the ink, metallics, and watercolor move, it usually takes about an hour before I can proceed.This is the scariest phase usually, though less so for this particular painting, because I spent so little time with the initial sketch. When I have a very intricate sketch it can be rather unnerving to pour all this ink onto the page and then hope things work out. I've started to lightly spray my sketches with workable fixative before proceeding so that the graphite doesn't get obliterated. I didn't used to fix my sketches.

Once that dried, I dabbed watercolor ground for the keys. I let the ground blob and mound up to create relief texture. Watercolor ground is basically a watercolor gesso-like substance. It's porous, and so you can paint watercolor on top of it.

And I lay a glaze of the watercolor ground over parts of the background as well to soften up the hardness of the black ink textures.

My daughter loved the keys. Every time she came to peek at what I was doing, she ran her fingers over the raised parts!

Once those base layers of texture are in place and dried, I start to pick out forms and shapes from the randomness with highlights and shadows.

Wasn't quite done with the background yet, but I decided to move on to Muhru and get him painted in so that I could figure out what colors he would be and therefore what other colors I needed to pull out of the background to tie things in cohesively.

Worked some more on the background, and then the final step was to apply gold leaf to the relief keys.

Nocturne: Visitation

Nocturne: Visitation

Size: 15x19 inches

Medium: Mixed

 Prints: 8.5x11 ($16.95) and 11x17 ($26.75) -available here-

Visitation is a companion piece to a painting I did a month ago, Nocturne.

The wanderer's presence has not gone as unnoticed as he presumed. The faerie queen of the woods gazes upon his slumbering defenselessness and muses on what to do with this reckless one who dares to walk the hallowed paths and set eyes upon her.

* * *

Below are the sketches and photos of the piece as it progressed.

Started off initially thinking of a horizontal composition. Later on that changed. Thumbnail of the concept. Grassy circle in the forest, surrounded a stone cairn, and the faerie queen stands over his slumbering form with a lantern in her hand.

Brainstormed sketches for the Faerie queen. Went through many different scribbled sketches trying to find the right attitude.

 And sketch for the wanderer. He came easier, nailed what I had in mind on the first attempt.

At this point I ended up changing my mind on the horizontal composition and moved to a vertical one that matched the proportions of the original Nocturne painting. Cut and pasted the various sketches in photoshop, moved things around, scribbled in a rough approximation of the background.

 Then transferred and refined that onto the final surface.

First washes of color and ink.

 White watercolor ground layered on top, and more washes, and started on some detail on one of the trees.

More details, and some bold red and gold in the foreground

 The wanderer.

 First light glazes on her dress.

Drapery, hair, and face.

The little faeries around her and the lantern.

Picked out the negative space in the tree branches above.

Splatters of gold and red to help tie it back into the lower parts of the painting, as well as some blue/purple glazes.

 More work detailing the trunk textures.

 Gold leafing in the cores of the tree hollows.

And the final result.