Tag: water

Day 170 (Mon 6/19) Inky Cow sketch

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I tried out some Noodler’s Heart of Darkness ink in a fountain pen they include with the bottle on a sort of zentangle-y cow sketch. I ordered it because I thought it was waterproof, or mostly waterproof, and was going to add color… but you can see what happened when I touched water to it. I’ll try letting some dry overnight and see if it still reacts the same way. I like the result, but I wanted a fountain pen I could use for my watercolor sketches. Oh well, back to Staedtler and uniball. They are great, so it’s all good. I just wanted to play around with line width a bit.

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Day 98: (Sat April 8) One last try at the light study

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I purchased a mop brush, the Silver oval mop seen here on Amazon,  to try the background off these paintings one more time. I like the brush a lot, but I may still try to get a hake brush sometime. I think the shorter, but still very soft, bristles will work better for what I’m trying. I liked this one. It hasn’t shed any bristles for me, (contrary to the Amazon review), BUT…. when it is wet, it stinks to high heaven. No lie. This is some serious goat hair here. It holds a ton of water, though, and I’m hoping after a few uses it will smell like nothing for me. This brush does handle the large wet areas of wash better, but I still had trouble here (like not letting the background dry enough before I laid in the first layer of land) Still, I think it is progress.

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Also, my paints are granulating, I think, which means they separate some as they dry. See the effect?

I like the granulating effect but I think for this particular piece I’d rather have it flat and smooth. (like the yellow part is) which means (I think??) I’ll need to use a different blue. I’m not sure if I need a different brand or a different shade. (So maybe I’ll try it one more time with my prima paints?) The clouds are made by just touching a crumpled tissue to the paper to lift the color. Some colors won’t allow this, but these colors lift nicely.

Day 97 (Fri April 7) More light studies

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Still following Steven Cronin’s tutorials, here are a couple more.

I tried a cheap acrylic brush for this first one because I didn’t have the hake brush he used, but it absolutely didn’t work. Left stripes everywhere. It is very stiff and bristly feeling and (turns out, after a moment’s research) the hake is very soft.  The mountains are supposed to have three layers so you see distance, but the first layer was too wet and bled too much. The second layer too dark, so the third also too dark. I like the way he lifted a tiny sail out of the paint on the mountains to show boats in front of them. The rocks in the bottom right worked better today that yesterday. But not like his. They were scraped away with a bit of plastic gift card.

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This second tutorial used the same hake brush (!!) which I still didn’t have, but a different technique. He dried the whole painting, then wet the whole thing again, adding another wet layer, dried it again, added another layer. So I learned that if I wet the whole thing evenly I can rework it a bit. I’m happier with the light here, but the red I added to the clouds didn’t want to lift, and my little foregrounds on the right are too symmetrical. Still, it’s a light study, and I learned about light:

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Using a very limited palette, three colors, on Arches cold pressed block, with Daniel Smith watercolor paints. I like the way dried pans feel better, but I think Daniel Smith tubes might be better quality than any dried pans available.

If I crop it this way, I really like it a lot better:

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Day 94 (Tues April 4) Light studies

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I wasn’t satisfied with ANY of these, particularly, but I did learn about keeping the light in a dark sky or water.  I didn’t even finish some of them. And now that I look at them, I want a reflection of the land in the water (but that was’t in the tutorial.) I do like elements of most of them, though.

 

Also, the first two used m graham watercolors, the next used daniel smith. I liked the daniel smith better, but in the end, I don’t see much difference, really.

I really had trouble keeping the paper wet enough, but not too wet, controlling the color, etc. I enjoyed using my new Arches cold pressed block. The block of paper is sealed on all four edges so the paper stays flat, then you insert a palette knife of something in the one inch piece left open and slide it all around, removing the finished page. It’s so much nicer than using a book for a very wet painting! And taping edges isn’t required. Although, I still did it in some of them because I like the look. 🙂 The only down side for me is that I’m just doing studies and would like to keep them in a book. I have some rings and I’m tempted to hole punch them and hook them all together but something inside me is resisting that idea. Any other thoughts about keeping all these separate pages together somewhere?

This was a Steven Cronin tutorial. He makes it look SO fast and easy. I didn’t actually have the same colors he used, but close enough.

 

 

Day 23: a study in cobalt

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While looking for something for a drawing class I’m taking, I found a tiny little unopened pot of powdered gum arabic. I knew it was used in painting but didn’t know how, so I watched some videos and found that one way it is used is to slow the movement of watercolor. The video shows how to create the impression of a reflection of plants and trees at a river’s edge. The gum arabic used in the video, however is liquid. The powdered pot I have came with a small delicate fountain pen and pot of ink, so I’m fairly certain I’m expected to mix it with the ink (?) but decided to see how it would work in the water reflection test. This probably interests no one but me, sorry.

So, the first sample I tried. I painted a rectangle of water onto the paper… maybe 2×4 inches.  I mixed a small amount of the powder into a small amount of water (like… a ‘brushfull’ of the G.A. to six or so brushfulls of water.) Then I dragged a bead of blue paint along the edge to see what would happen. Didn’t do much. Nothing I didn’t expect, anyway. Second sample… another rectangle. This time adding no gum arabic. (my ‘control’ sample… I don’t know why I did it second… my mind doesn’t think scientifically.) Pretty similar results.  I could see a difference, but not much.

So I doubled the gum arabic in the solution and tried again, producing an interesting effect, but not really what I’d hoped for. I scribbled some tree shapes in to see how it would look. .

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One more try. Tired of playing, I painted my rectangle, and this time dipped my damp brush right into the gum arabic powder, and brushed it over the top edge of my rectangle of water. Then ran the bead of color along the top. Ah! There! Pretty cool, really. Except for that blob of white powder in the center. Sometime soon, I’ll invest in the liquid, and figure out how to really use the powder. Until then, I have this if I need it.

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