I need to work on improving some of my habits. It’s a never-ending struggle, but we have to keep trying! In addition to the less-fun things currently on the list, some of the habits I want to build involve fun things like keeping active with sketchbooking. I haven’t been as diligent since the end of the last challenge, earlier this month, but I’m going to make an effort to get back into it. I don’t think it will necessarily be a daily thing, but maybe at least every other day, when possible.
Color Pencil over Watercolor
I started this one with a few inspiration cards. I didn’t want color inspiration, so I just drew a subject matter card and a couple of my homemade stylistic prompts.
“Pick One: Appetizer, Main Course, Dessert”
I’m lazy, and desserts seemed easiest, so I went with that.
“Add diagonals—lines, shapes, etc.”
and
“Paint in the style of Terry Runyan”
I wanted to use my new Anilinky paints (Koh-I-Noor Brilliant Watercolours), so I chose a couple of the pinks and a reddish purple, along with a couple of earth tones (a yellow ochre and a darker brown). I watered them down to varying degrees and mixed as needed, but those were all the colors of paint I used. Oh, except for the dark grey for the mice!
When that was dry, I went back over the page with just a handful of oil-based color pencils. I think I had three pinks, a couple of berry/bright purple colors, a golden brown, and a minty green.
After that, I added just a tiny bit of black fineliner to add the details to the mice.
It wasn’t until after I’d taken the photos that I realized I’d forgotten the “diagonal” prompt. Oops! There are some diagonal elements in there, if you look hard enough, but do those count? It doesn’t really matter, since the prompts are just to get things moving. If you’re so involved in the process that you forget about the prompts, they’ve served their purpose!
At least I got “dessert” right, and the playful mice are inspired by Terry Runyan.
If you’re wondering about the choice of mint green pencil, here’s the explanation: I recently watched this video about using color pencils over watercolor, which is a variation on the “reverse coloring book” technique. The artist behind the video suggests using small touches of complementary colors to add sparkle to your work. I thought I’d try that with this page. I normally would’ve stayed with the pinks, purples, and browns, but I do think the mint adds something. It looks a little greyed out in parts of the photo. (Not sure if that’s accurate or not, because I don’t have the sketchbook here with me now.)
Anyway, I kind of like the effect and will try it again—if not in every picture or sketch, at least in some of them.
Color Blocks
I don’t actually know for sure if this is “color block” style art, but it’s the term that came to mind, and I think it fits.
I’d seen the idea in a book I’m reading to add shapes or even loose splotches of color (or scraps of interesting paper glued in) to pages in your sketchbook, to sort of prime them for future use. (Really, the idea is that you’ll have them there to work on top of when you’re out doing “urban sketching” or “plein air” work. I haven’t quite gotten into that style, yet. I may never, but I’ll probably at least give it a try in my own backyard, one of these days.)
I used this as an opportunity to clean my palette and ended up with three rectangles of color. The book I mentioned before suggested using these types of shapes for drawing a row of houses, and that seemed like fun. I shamelessly copied elements from the results of a image search, but since it’s just a sketch for fun, that’s no problem.
This was definitely enjoyable for something that was so easy, and you could start the same project twenty times and end up with twenty different results.
I briefly considered adding details with color pencil, acrylic marker, or more watercolor—but in the end I kept it simple. However, trying different additional layers would be a fun way of changing it up, if/when I try this again!
Trying Clear Gesso
Months back, I got a small jar of clear gesso with the plan of using it to prime old book pages for use with watercolors. You can just paint directly onto the pages with watercolor, of course, but the results will be different, and you are more limited (I think) in terms of how much water you can use before the paper heavily warps or begins to disintegrate.
Now that I come to finally give it a try, I’m seeing people online saying that clear gesso isn’t ideal for this, and that you should use transparent watercolor ground instead. But then there are others saying it works fine. And to add to the confusion, different brands have different characteristics.
Well, I’m going to give it a try, and if it doesn’t work well for this, I’ll use it for other things besides watercolor.
I chose a couple of pages for my first tests. This came from an old copy of The Workbasket magazine:
And this came from a book about furniture. I don’t know what I’ll end up painting over either of them…
Is that all I have to say tonight about clear gesso? I guess so.
(Sorry.)
