Another from the Sketch Pad

Here is another study done without any pencil drawing on my 9x12 sketch pad. Using only planning marks made with a brush is very different from painting over a full sketch; it is not unlike painting in oils. I had used this approach before, but only in plein air and not in a series, as an exercise. I have been enjoying the challenge this represents--I have to pay much more attention to the placement of shapes of color, rather than the shapes of objects in the scene. Precision suffers, but there is a more painterly feel to it. (The photo is not great--taken with my iphone)

Using a Pochade Box

I have been using a French Resistance pochade box for my sketching outdoors and at home. With the need to carry my paints with me around the house to keep an eye on the children or simply sketch around my family, and to be able to quickly close the sketch box and put it all away (as when the baby monitor goes "wahhh"...), this has become a convenient setup to buy me more time to paint.

The box mounts on any of my tripods, but it takes the Velbon to make it really stable. My En Plein Air Pro easel is more convenient outdoors, but to paint from the car, or a home on a table or on my lap, the pochade box works better. I carry it with me in the trunk of the car. It is pretty convenient and it takes only a minute to open it and get ready to paint, and even less to close it up and put it away.

I've been carrying a 7x10 sketch book in the storage compartment of the box, and have water, brushes and pocket brushes, and a folding plastic palette with my colors. The photos show both the use with a sketchbook, and with a loose sheet of paper, using the cover of the storage compartment as a support for a gentler angle.

The photo also shows a recent sketch of a house down the street, as seen from my back yard gate.

Happy 2012!

Happy New Year! We have had good Holidays, and these have been exciting times! We have been in the midst of preparations for the arrival of our baby boy, it should be any day now...

Meanwhile, this is the most recent page from my sketchbook, with a small study I did this morning. I used cobalt teal for the flaked painting of the trucks, and burnt sienna for the rust, and mineral violet for the roof, with touches of other colors here and there, to capture the light while trying to keep the shapes simple. That is, keeping things simple before life gets a little more complicated!

Gypsy Look, a Portrait Sketch

I did this sketch last night to take a break from a meticulous realistic large portrait I'm doing of my son. I chose a vacation photo of my wife, in the rental car, all tan from the beach except around her eyes because of her sunglasses.

It started just as a pencil sketch but I decided to color it. I was improvising, pushed the study farther than I should, applied paint beyond the capacity of the sketchbook paper and the paint started looking blotchy on the shaded area. I should know better, but thought "oh one more application will be alright..." Well it wasn't, but the study was fun to do and it captured her expression well, so I decided to share.

Gypsy Look, 8x10 inches, on a Strathmore visual journal, cadmium yellow, cadmium red light, burnt sienna, cobalt blue and perylene maroon, with some raw sienna, and some ultramarine blue used to mix the darkest darks, Escoda travel brush #12.

A Window of Opportunity

October has been very hectic, with the celebration of my son's second birthday, family trips and a business trip--very little time to paint and little opportunity to post until now. I don't go anywhere without my sketchbook though, and look for the chance to sketch and practice.

I did take advantage of my trips to sketch, including the pen and wash above, done last week with a regular pen, a water brush and my small half pan palette on the tray of the airplane during flight, to the amusement of my fellow passengers. The photo is from a challenge from the painting forum I take part in. I sketched in pen while I waited at the airport in Charlotte, NC, and colored my sketch before landing in Denver.

Before takeoff, I took advantage of the time to sketch a few of the airplanes I could see out of the window, with the intent to show them to my son when I got home--he loves airplanes, trains and tractors...

Boulder County Plein Air Art Exhibit

This a recent plein air study done on location in North Boulder, celebrating the fact that the weather is more friendly nowadays, and that I have been accepted into the first Boulder Country Plein Air Art Exhibit. The 16 selected artists will be doing their paintings in June, and the exhibit will be held from August 1st to September 3rd, in two different locations, in Boulder and Longmont. Four guest artists will also add four paintings each to the show, for a total of 80 pieces portraying the beauty and variety of the local open spaces, from lakes to museums to mountains.

The painting above was done with a single brush, a squirrel mop size 6, on a 18x12 sheet of Fabriano Artistico rough paper. All the colors are M. Graham: ultramarine blue, cobalt violet, yellow ochre, cobalt teal, viridian, burnt sienna, permanent alizarin crimson, and burnt umber. I used a lot of drybrush to bring out the textures of bark, ground and rock.

Sometimes Good Things Come in Pairs!

Supposedly, misery loves company, but sometimes good things also come in pairs. Even though I find guinea fowl curious creatures and decided to do this sketch of two of them, that is not really what I am talking about...

I just got good news of acceptance into two upcoming exhibits: The Rockies West 18th Annual National Exhibition, juried by Paul Jackson, and the Colorado Watercolor Society 20th State Watercolor Exhibition, juried by Soon Warren.

This is a good start towards my goal of exhibiting more often and more widely in 2011. Last year I was very busy being a new father and limited myself to only a few events. I will be posting more information about these two shows, which happen in March.

And since I did mention the guinea fowl, this is another page of my sketch book... I observed them at a farm during my trip to Brazil, and thought this would be a good subject for a "lineless" sketch, in which I try to paint directly, without pencil lines or any drawing, by observing and reproducing with the brush the shapes I see. This is a fun exercise to do and it helps loosen up from the rigidity of lines.

Happy New Year!

Happy 2011! I believe this will be a busy, eventful year for myself, and I wish you a lot of health, happiness and success as well.

I'm just back from a trip to spend Christmas with my family in Brazil. It was great to see everyone and they were particularly thrilled to spend time with our 14-month-old son. The image above is a study of my nephew Alexandre, based on a photo I took while he watched a movie. He is such a handsome boy, so full of character, I look forward to painting a full size portrait of him. This sketch is 6x9, painted with a size 12 synthetic round, with cadmium yellow, cadmium scarlet, burnt sienna, cobalt turquoise, sepia and light ochre.

Cloudy Irish Day

The images and stories of my visits to Ireland in March and May will continue to find their way into my sketchbook and my blog. This time around, I decided to practice by doing a sketch of a street in Inistioge, a beautiful, scenic village where I stopped for lunch on my way to Kilkenny. I was sitting outdoors at a cafe, and this was the view uphill from us. Only occasionally would the sun break free of the clouds in that afternoon in March. My goal here was to capture the atmosphere and the light conditions, using some muted yet interesting colors. It was a fun sketch and brings back good memories.

Boulder Creek Sketch

My latest outdoor work was this sketch of Boulder Creek, with the morning sun shining through the canopy of trees and warm up the water and some of the rocks. With the colder weather and shorter days and a busy schedule the opportunities to paint outdoors have not been that many.

This was done with watercolor sticks and watercolor pencils, and a size 10 synthetic travel brush.

Have a Game Plan...

Performances, events and games are a really good opportunity for sketching people, as subjects are engrossed in the activity and retain their "poses" for a long time. This is another page of my Aquabee sketchbook where I tried to quickly capture this man's serious and attentive expression, and the quality of the reflected light. This was painted with pigment picked up with the brush from watercolor sticks.

I also included below the pencil sketch I started with, it's pretty indicative of how much drawing I do in a sketch before moving to color. The goal is to quickly map main shapes and mark the essential highlights and deep shadows. Once that pencil outline is in place, even if the subject moves somewhat or the light changes, it is still possible to achieve the initial goal in the study--that's what I call following the game plan.

Trying a New Sketchbook

A page from my sketchbook, showing a sunset view of a back alley in Boulder, captured with a quick sketch in watercolor.

I have experimented with a lot of different papers and surfaces for my paintings, but had stuck with the same sketchbooks for quite a while. I have been using Moleskine sketchbooks, for their great format and sturdy cover, even though it is a bit of work to overcome the paper's resistance to watercolor. There is a watercolor version of it, but I don't really like the landscape format. I also use Arches 6x10 spiral pads, but it has the opposite problem, it is great for watercolor studies and small paintings, but does not work well for simply sketching.

This time around I am giving the Aquabee Super Deluxe 6x9 sketchbook a try. It contains 60 sheets of 93 lb neutral white paper, very slightly textured. It is a little bulkier to carry than what I've grown used to, but the spiral allows for more freedom during use--I don't have to hold it or clip it open. I included a photo above, and you can see it took watercolor well and ended up only a little buckled, even when I used wet washes--as opposed to my old Canson sketchbook pages that buckled severely and acquired a crackly sound when they dried. I have only filled out a couple of pages in this new book, but am enjoying it so far.

Silos in Blue, a Landscape in Three Acts

Silos in Blue, watercolor on Yupo synthetic paper, 13x20 (detail)

[Note: I've edited my post on 8/20 to include the detail above, in order to allow viewers to see some of the texture and brushwork.]

First Act: "Silos in Blue" is my third attempt at painting this scene. I had often seen this farm with two large silos, in the distance, as I drove home from work in Boulder. I liked the color of the silos against the pale yellow grasses that surrounded it in the fall. So when winter was over, I hiked to a point from which I could view and sketch the scene.
Only now the scene was quite different, the grass was greener, I could no longer see the hills in the background from that position, and instead of long shadows, I had the sun high in the sky. So I did a small study on site, but added a lot of the elements I was missing, such as the color and shadows, from imagination. The result was "Blue Silos," watercolor on Arches CP paper, 6x10 inches (left).

Second Act: Some months later, I decided to do a larger studio version on a half sheet of yupo synthetic paper. I moved the slightly silos off center, and tried to create a cruciform composition by introducing two fence posts in the foreground. This second version is shown here on the left, "Silos in Blue," watercolor on Yupo, 13x20 inches.

Third Act: Early viewers kept giving me the feedback that the poles were too distracting, that the complexity of the middle ground called for a simpler foreground treatment.
I finally took the advice and changed the foreground, taking advantage of the ease of lifting or wiping off entire sections on yupo.

This is the third version of this painting, but is it THE END? ...or is this play open to a sequel? Only time will tell.

...But if you try sometimes...

This is a quick sketch I made of a road-side coastal view on the Ring of Kerry, in Ireland. I had intended for it to be a soft, atmospheric transparent watercolor sketch, like the one from my last post, but it got away from me. I almost tossed it in the waste basket, but then decided to bring out the old permanent calligraphy pen--which is almost dry by now--punctuate the composition with a few darks and turn this into a pen and wash exercise. I think the rescue worked; much more interesting this way...

I like vignette sketches, they always look so fresh and immediate to me as a viewer, as if you were watching them take shape before your eyes. So I guess the lesson is when things don't go your way, maybe it's time to let them take you their own way... Experiment. Dare. Be open to possibility. Work in abandon. You can't always get what you want, Mick would say, but sometimes you might get what you need, if you try...

Van Gogh watercolors on Arches cold press paper, 6 x10 inches.

Painting Ireland, 2

Houses in Dun Laoghaire, Ireland, watercolor, 6x10

Ireland was a wealth of beautiful, varied scenery under changing light conditions. I didn't do as much painting as I had intended--both lack of time and the weather conditions made it difficult at times to even complete a sketch. The sketch above is an example, a scene viewed from the fourth floor of an office building, on a cold day, captured during lunch time in between business meetings.

Painting Ireland...

Enniskerry, Ireland

I'm in Ireland, on a business trip. I had to work this morning, but took a road trip in the afternoon through the Wicklow Mountains south of Dublin. The scenic route winds through mountains, blanket bog, valleys, wooded hills and open farmland. I stopped at a café in the picturesque village of Enniskerry, and took the opportunity to make a quick sketch, even tough it was pretty cold (I had to wear gloves to sketch). I'll do some more painting tomorrow. Cheers!

Sunshine after rain!

Here are two more of my sketches from my last trip, using watercolor pencils. It was warm and rainy in Brazil, these scenes try to capture moments of intense sunshine at noon, and a beautiful sunset after rain... These nice looking houses were just a hundred meters or so from the sea.

It was harder to make this latter sketch, given the intense sun and the wind. Another reason to rush was that it was lunch time and my family was waiting for me...

Back from vacation!

We are just back from a trip to Brazil, to introduce our three month old to my family. It was another busy trip, with little time to paint, but I did add to my sketchbook. The scene above was a view from the beach in Coroados, Paraná. It was sketched with watercolor pencils, which proved very practical in the hot, windy weather.

Graphite and the painter's mind...

Ever since the workshop with Mel Stabin, I have felt encouraged to do close-up figures and portraits in watercolor--the ones I did at the workshop were really exciting and fun to do. So when I did a sketch yesterday, I chose to plan for a portrait of this interesting character I met in the Caribbean.

Sketching already takes me one step into the painting, it prompts my internal dialog: "what kind of brushstroke will I use for this stretch of hair? which "strands" should I make dark and which should I make gray? how light should I make his long gray beard? how far can I obliterate detail in the face area and still leave enough of a sense of expression? is it important to leave some sense of the man's age, or is that irrelevant? how can I portray his gentleness and peace and avoid making his face hidden in shadow scary? how much do I need to describe his t-shirt? how much overlap to create between his hand and his head? which edges should be lost, and soft, and which should be hard, and found?" ...and I'm not even thinking color yet!

Those questions were set in motion and now will live in my mind, much like characters do in a for a writer during the writing of a novel, and I know the answers will oscillate back and forth until I finally pin them down in the painting itself.

Sketching the Passage of Time...

Miguel Lucas turned one week old today! Christina's prenancy is over, but it was a joyous time of anticipation, and I am glad to look back and find it documented in so many photos and in my sketchbook. It was only a week before the birth that I made this sketch:


And before that, I had sketched her in color, rehearsing with her Balboa group for a dance performance at an event. She was seven months pregnant then.

And earlier still, at four months, when her belly was just beginning to show...


Now we are beginning a new phase in our lives, with many more sketches to come, to mark the passage of time with the scenes that touch the heart and spill onto the paper...