Steampunkalicious

I'm getting super-caught-up in making Claire's Halloween costume. I don't even know if she'll tolerate WEARING half the stuff I'm making. I figure if she doesn't, I'll use it all for myself at a convention someday. :)

Steampunk wings. Thus far made completely from these foamie sheets I bought a while back for some other project, then spray painted coppery colored. So it's super-light. Which it will have to be if I'm to get Claire to wear it (and then once there, she'll hopefully forget that it's on her back). I'm having a blast. And actually getting some painting ideas with this too that I think I'll have to tackle once this current October obsession is past.

The stuff on the bottom right is Dana's poor dissected chess clock. He broke it the other day and was about to just toss the whole thing in the trash when I cried out, "WAIT!" He was completely bewildered as to why I would want clock guts. Why wouldn't I want clock guts?!?!!? Anyway, still mulling ideas on integrating some of that stuff in as well.

Learning to Paint Bamboo

Sifting through my stockpile of pens and brushes, and I am reminded of the lessons I took when I was in grade school in the afternoons with a lady who taught me the basics of Chinese painting. I went to her house with my brother and a couple of other neighborhood kids after school. For some of them, the time spent in her kitchen was not much removed from glorified babysitting. My brother liked to draw, copying some of the cartoon characters from the stacks of how-to books she had on hand. She noticed at one point that I was interested in some of the traditional Chinese art books. I wonder if something clicked inside her when she saw that; if it made her delve into something she obviously loved.

She gave my parents a list of materials. That weekend we went to San Francisco's Chinatown. We entered a store that on the outside was just like the dozens of others that catered to the tourist ideal of imported Asian goods. Past the twin kierun that guarded the gilded exterior. Past racks of polyester brocade dresses, earthen tea kettles, porcelain cups and bowls, paper lanterns and umbrellas, chopsticks, incense. The basement of the store was filled with prosaic and practical goods, and more like a thrift store than the jade and glittery upstairs.

At a glass counter, my mother handed the list to the clerk, who began pulling out various brushes, and describing the providence of their hair: goat, squirrel, wolf, horse. Brushes, ink stick and stone, and translucent rice paper.

After that, my time at my teacher's house changed. No more cartoon how-to books. The other kids still doodled with pencil and googly-eyed creatures. But she showed me how to mix the ink stick with water and grind it against the stone, releasing a mellow scent like old leaves and earth, and thick black ink. The ink stick itself was cast with the relief of a dragon on it, twining down the length that lay in my hand, melting slowly in to a pool of rich darkness.

The grinding of the ink, the smell, the tactile roughness of the rice paper, the entire process becomes a part of the art-making. It is a ritual where everything and nothing happens, before the brush is even lifted.

She showed me to hold the brush straight upright, and to not let my drawing hand rest on the paper, in order to facilitate sweeping gestures. A single brush stroke was like the choreographed movement of a dance. She made it look so easy. Her hand was just an extension of arm and body and mind - graceful, elegant. It was one of the most difficult things I ever tried - creating the illusion of looseness, simplicity, and freedom with careful forethought and planning. For weeks, she made me practice dozens of pages of bamboo: graceful, stark, in black and white. Grind the ink, lay out the paper, and dance the brush across the pages.

Queen Bee

Queen Bee

Watercolors
7x10 inches
Prints and original available -here-
Detail closeup -here-

Another fun little piece. It seems that summer is finally making (delayed) way for autumn. The sweltering days have passed, as it started raining here last week. But during one of the brief intermissions in the precipitation, when the sun had warmed my terrace, the bumblebees were out in force. They were quite busy amongst my lavender. Taking advantage of those last sunny gaps in the days.

On a more technical note, I was playing around a bit more with fixative on this one. It wasn't the main purpose for the piece, as for the previous, but I did want to try some more.

I mainly used the fixative for helping to build up the background color's intensity, much quicker than it normally would take me to do such seamless graded washes. Usually it requires many more layers to achieve the full darkness of a color, but by doing a very light spray (I just did a quick pass of the fixative over the page) I managed to get the cerulean blue to it's full intensity with only two washes, while still being able to blend smoothly.

New batch of pendants!

Whole new batch of pendants uploaded! New designs from my more recent art.
-click here- to view them at my Etsy shop.

Experimenting with fixative layers, Part 2

Eternity

5x10 inches

This post is a continuation from yesterday. -Click here- for part 1.

So I stopped spraying after the three layers from yesterday night. I think I reached the limit of what would be paintable. Even though the fixative is supposed to be workable with watercolors, I could see that it was slowly clogging up the paper's porousness. In some areas like the upper left, especially, it starts to get really grainy. Which isn't a bad thing -- it added a new dimension of texture. But I can see that if I kept going, the pigment would just start to roll off. Maybe a lighter hand with spraying in the future, would allow for more layers.

Also, that weird blotchiness that I mentioned this particular sheet of paper had? That never quite went away, but those areas started repelling pigment even more so than others. I was left with a lot of mottled whitish areas that were just refusing to take any color.


I pulled out a white gel pen, and started doing something with those splotches. Some of those splotches I had done on purpose; it was the ones from the paper's weirdness that I had to work at more to integrate. I added a dusting of white highlights in those areas, as well as adding highlights to the figure herself.

A lot of this is something I would usually have done via lifting instead. But because of the fixative, it kind of turns this whole process into something like a melding of watercolor and acrylic techniques. It's watercolor while a current layer is wet, but then it becomes permanent like acrylic once it's dried and I spray it.







Softening the hard edges of the gel-pen white. Adding more hints of blues and oranges to the shading.

Happy with the result, and definitely something I will try again in the future. I was pushing the extreme with this one, spraying so often and across the whole piece, but it was to see how far I could take it. Probably would use it more selectively, and with a lighter hand on the spray nozzle!

Experimenting with fixative layers

Giving something a shot that I've been meaning to try for a very long time. If you've worked with watercolors, you'll know that one of the quirks of watercolors is lifting. This can be used to advantage in numerous ways:

• smoothing edges between one color and the next
• creating a very gradual graded wash
• pulling out small areas of soft highlights
• correcting minor mistakes (sometimes you can lift and pull enough color out that you can almost get a fresh start for a small area)
• blending of tones from one layer to the next

Of course, lifting also has many disadvantages that can be incredibly annoying as well:

• when trying to get a very rich dark tone with layers, subsequent layers keep pulling color up, and so you reach a saturation point sooner than desired where you can't get darker.
• layering on top of a smooth wash sometimes will pull up spots and irregularities
• textures with particularly sensitive colors (blues and purples which are more prone to lifting) get smoothed out or obliterated when a second layer is brushed on top
  

You learn to appreciate the advantages, and to know and work around the disadvantages after a while. I had an idea however, of trying to spray workable fixative onto a piece in between layers, in order to try to work up to a really nice rich dark tone in areas, and also to maintain texture across layers. I'd lose a lot of the blending qualities that occur with lifting, that naturally happens every time you layer, but it would be interesting to see what results I could get if each glaze was fixed and made permanent.

So, using one of the sketches I did for a keyword card a while back, I penciled it onto a board and decided to give it a try tonight.

Going to use my Elderflower purple as the main color, as it is usually one of the most easily lifted colors I have, and one of my favorites.

* * *

First glaze of purple. About 5 minutes (plus the half hour of laying out the initial sketch) into this however I get a nasty surprise. I'm using my usual Strathmore illustration board 500 series, which I usually love. But on very rare occasion, (3 times in the past 11 years of many MANY paintings, so not often at all) I've gotten a bad sheet that has these weird speckles in it that only appear once I put water to the board. They seem to absorb the water differently and puff out. I get really annoyed, but it only seems to be on the lower half, with a little bit in the middle. And I really don't feel like re-sketching the piece.

I almost toss it, but decide to forge on ahead with the experiment. Maybe the fixative spray will help. Or maybe the fixative spray will do other weird things. I haven't ever tried fixative and then continued working on a piece. The only time I've ever used it is on pencil drawings when I was absolutely finished, even though I buy the "workable" version just in case I need to do corrections or additions.

* * *

Oh yes! The fixative has seemed to work quite well, and the paper is still taking liquid and pigment fine. I don't know if this will hold up well for multiple sprayings. We shall see.

But so far it is working as I had hoped. The second layer is MUCH darker than it usually is with this particular pigment, and I'm still keeping the textures from the first glaze.

Second layer is more purples, some burnt umber and paynes grey thrown into the mixture as well. The weird mottle texture on the paper seems to be less obtrusive now as well, so I'm glad I decided to continue instead of prematurely chucking the whole piece and starting over.

One major downside is that the spray is stiiiiiiiiiiiinky with fumes. Might need to wait a bit longer between spraying and continuing to work so that I don't get lightheaded with fumes.

* * *

Another sprayed layer. Still looking good. I'm a little concerned with whether I'll reach a point where it's too many layers of spray. Already the liquid kind of rolls around a little bit on the surface, rather than being absorbed by the paper immediately. But so far it still seems okay.

Added more purple to the corners, and started a bit of naples yellow glow on the left side. Started on some finer details using mixtures of reds and blues. I'm really happy with how rich the purple tones are getting, with so few layers applied. It doesn't usually reach this saturation of color very easily.

Stopping point for tonight. Will have to wait til tomorrow to have more fun with this.





Part 2 can be found -by clicking here-.

The First Moonrise

The First Moonrise
Medium: Ink
Size: 11x7 inches
original available for sale -here-

One evening, about a month ago, Claire was restless. We took her out of her crib, and down to the front room with the big picture room where Dana started to read her some books. But she looked outside and saw the moon, noticing it for the first time. Her eyes rounded and with the moonlight glowing in them, she exclaimed, "Up up UP!" We explained it was the moon, which she knew of by reputation through the pictures in her books, but this was the first time that the concept and reality were merged. UpupUP! So high and piercing bright, something almost primal that pierces through our windows and walls and structures.