Oriental Flair Big

Oriental Flair Big

11" x 14"

Prismacolors and Coloursofts on grey Pastelbord

I hope everyone had a good weekend. I carved out some time this weekend to work on a larger version of the oriental inspired orchids (mostly the rainy Saturday we had). I haven't varnished this piece yet, so I hope the grey board won't darken it too much when  I spray it. I think what happens is the varnish makes the board show through more making it darker. 

Below is this piece paired with the mini piece for scale. 

Oriental Flair

Orchids

         6" x 10"

Prismacolors of Fisher 400 paper mounted to Gatorboard

I'm kind of hooked on this 6" x 10" shape. Its kind of funny because this shape is just the leftover piece from the board I had Creative Encounters cut & mount off of my sheets of Fisher 400 paper. I just like that little bit of extra height to cure that perfect rectangle feel of an 8 x 10. 

I am also stuck for a little bit on the tiny details after doing these! I better do a bigger one next to get me out of it for a bit - but I have 2 more 6 x 10's left!

Here's a pic of the three small ones sitting on (a very dusty) ledge together. Seeing this I may darken Maggie's figure  on the first one. 

Well Read

Well Read

6" x 10"

Prismacolors on Fisher 400 

The last one was so much fun I had to do one more. Unfortunately I had to use me as the model because Maggie and I posed at the museum. That's fine really but its just not my best side. 

Anyway... the work of art I am in front of has some meaning too, but not as much as the other one. My husband had a print of this painting hanging in his room in college which is where we met. It is Fragonard's Young Girl Reading.  On the National Gallery's website it has this to say about the painting:

 "Fragonard painted several young girls in moments of quiet solitude. These works are not portraits but evocations, similar to the "fantasy portraits" Fragonard made of acquaintances as personifications of poetry and music. He painted these very quickly—in an hour, according to friends—using bold, energetic strokes."

The fun thing about doing these miniature paintings is it feels like your tiny pencil tip is a big paint brush - with every stroke counting!

detail of my drawing about actual size!

Mini Maggie

Dress Casual

6" x 10"

Prismacolors on Fisher 400 paper (mounted to Gatorboard)

 It is my contribution to the CPSA convention Silent Auction.

This piece was fun for me  in many ways. First off I am a HUGE fan of Karin Jurick and her popular series of people at museums, also of the famous Norman Rockwell where an older gentleman is looking at a very modern painting.  I'm not trying to be either one of them, but wanted to try the scenario of a museum goer myself. Since I am working in colored pencil with a very small tip it lent itself to a miniaturist's approach which I very much enjoyed doing.

Okay now for the meaning in the picture. It may look like an innocent girl just at the National Museum of Art looking at  a Whistler painting. Well... its not. :-) It is of my friend Maggie Stiefvater. Recently we went to that museum together and walked through beating up some very famous paintings.  This one - Whistler's Symphony in White - was one she liked that I was not too keen on. I couldn't get past the fact that when viewing it at the museum you don't even see the girl. When in front of it you look smack dab in the open mouth of this scary looking dead wolf rug that she is standing on!  Then if you look up at the girl's face you get nothing but glare on the mirror-like surface of the face. It seems that Whistler at some point rubbed the face off and repainted it, but left an oval of a smoother surface around her face.

That's not what is funny about my drawing though. The girl in the foreground is Maggie Stiefvater - bestselling author of the Wolves of Mercy Falls series. The first book, Shiver, is about a girl named Grace who falls in love with a wolf/boy. In the summer Sam is a boy  but when the weather turns cold he becomes a wolf (not a werewolf but a full wolf which is much prettier). The story turns into a race of time to treat his wolfie affliction before the weather runs out.

Shiver has been on the NYT bestsellers list for a gazillion weeks and is still there now on the paperback list. The second of the series Linger is due out in July.

The girl in Symphony in White is very different from the character Grace however. She is emotionless, almost a shell of a person staring out in an odd gaze. Grace is much more like Maggie in the foreground with her sassy stature, ponytail, and mail bag. So why does Maggie like this painting? Could it possibly be a melding of her Faerie series and the Mercy Falls wolves (the Ice Queen Faerie defeats the wolves of Mercy Falls)?  I don't know but this drawing is my way of asking that question. :-)  Don't tell me though Maggie - some things are best to wonder about! I'd be crushed if you told me you just liked the brushstrokes!

Below are some more pics to get a sense of scale. The wolf and Maggie on the left are about actual size (Maggie's body is only 4 inches tall). The picture on the right has a couple of pencils and a penny for comparison.

a cute little commission

8" x 10" Prismacolors on Pastelbord

Butterflies & Roses

Butterflies & Spray Roses

8" x 10"

Polychromos on Fisher 400 paper (mounted to gatorboard)

I did something last night that I haven't gotten to do for a long time: stay up drawing past midnight. This is one of the perks of moving my studio back home. The cons of course being the clutter of all my supplies and distractions, but I'll take the late night drawing sessions!

A lesson relearned: Have you ever printed out reference photos where you lighten all the shadows to see what is in them and use both the dark photo and the lightened photo in your drawing/painting?  All I can say is be careful. You can change things obviously from a photograph or life, but changing lighting is a tricky business. I printed out a dark and a  light version  of the reference for this so I could see all the subtleties in the flowers and see the edges of the bug which did not show up in the dark photo. Well... I started the flowers first with just a bit of the background in... all was going well until I switched to my darker photo for the rest. The result was garish - the flowers did not match the rest of the picture at all.  Think about it like in writing... you should not change your tenses from 1st to 3rd person in the same paper. Why would you be able to change lighting on the same drawing ? Anyway I fixed it, but it was a bit of a struggle to remove the lightened details in the petals since the lighter colors in colored pencils have more wax/oil...

That doesn't say you can't lighten things a little bit, just not so much where it is mismatched or changes the light source only on one part. Like let's say you are doing an adorable drawing of your child... but the way the light is hitting him/her his eye color is hard to see because they are in shadow. What should you do? Either draw it without the pretty eye color as in the photo or retake the reference photo with the right lighting to see their eye color! If you bring the eyes out of their shadow and don't change the lighting on the rest of the face - it will look like a demon child!

My beautiful daughter above has gorgeous blue eyes when light hits  them but when the eye sockets are even in a slight shadow like above her eye color does not show. So maybe I'll just pop up the color... I could make the eyes look gorgeous, but what  I'll have is gorgeous eyes but a final portrait with lighting that doesn't make sense. People won't know what is wrong perhaps, but their psyche will pick up that something is off.

butterflies and roses

I am honored to have been asked by Ann Kullberg to jury her annual online members colored pencil show. Please take a looksee at it on her site:

It was REALLY hard to pick winners!!

I thought my vase was way too big for the next still-life I am doing so I played a bit in photoshop. Of course I'll fix things when I draw it, but above are the two reference photos to compare. I plan on starting it tonight as I just got a bunch of my beloved Fisher 400 paper mounted to some gatorboard from Creative Encounters (my favorite frame shop). 

Anyway I can't wait to start - it will be 8 x 10" only, so it will be a sweet little piece, I hope. 

this week...

It is the last week of school (teaching) and unfortuntely I will be very busy so artwork will be put off again. I've got grading... getting assignments back to kids, etc so I envision some overtime on my part.

but I do have some florals in the works... I am on the lookout for fresh from the garden flowers that I want to do some still-lifes with. You know the last one I did (and cut!) and I think I will do it over but with the wood gone and on fisher 400 instead of Pastelbord. It was a bear to get all the spiky detail on the Pastelbord and I don't think I can do it again! & then here I am playing with some spray roses. I think the vase needs to be a little shorter and not so tall. I also think I need something small to place next to the vases... I'm thinking some old marbles.

Anyway things are getting ready for some serious art making - just another week away. In the meantime I just found this pic of me. Its my senior picture nd since it is my 20th reunion I thought I would share it. Some things do get better with age! Although the hair is an artform!

Uh-Oh!

hmmmm... I was trying to crop that still-life, which is on Pastelbord, when the blade skipped and sliced into the drawing. Sigh. After shedding a few tears, since it was actually a rather difficult drawing to do, I have decided to give it away. It can't be sold as is but it can still have a good life on someone's wall.

So the first person to email me their address gets to have it.

Weird Purple Flowers

Oh you don't want to know how busy I've been lately, so I won't bore you. I'll just say I brought my studio home so I can sneak in more work here and there.

Here's the newest, some strange purple flowers from Lina's house. I don't know what they are. :-)

The framing on this one will be difficult to get the illusion right so I will be taking it to the framer instead of doing it myself. I have a couple of others I need to frame too.