Color Pencil Pathways

The color charts for Prismacolor pencils look like pathways, new pathways for me. I'm getting ready for a color pencil workshop and making out color swatches is one way of familiarizing myself with the touch and feel of a new medium. 

FDAC -- Day 5: Home Place Barns

FIVE DAY ART CHALLENGE – Day Five: Home Place Barns

Ed and I are rural people and our rural nature is defined by the four barns on the home places where our parents were raised.

All four of the home place barns are still in place – the Eichler barn on Whipple Tree Farm near Pigeon, the Graywood Farm barn (Pauline Geiger Eichler’s home) on Geiger Road south of Pigeon, the Sunnyside Stock Farm barn (Vallanee Rose Luedtke’s home place) on County Road Y near Lomira, Wisconsin, and the Valley Drive Farm barn (Stanley C. F. Hayes’s home place) on County Road K, also near Lomira.

For this last post in the Five Day Art Challenge we will take a look at art work related to the two barns that have been restored.

The Thangles Barn on Sunnyside Farm in Wisconsin is home to Thangles, the quilting notion and publication company owned and operated by my sister and her husband. Two years ago in April, I spent a week with my dad on the farm. During that time I did a little watercolor of the Thangles Barn in my art journal. Dad liked the sketch, but he and I figured that I had the colors a little wonky, so I did a color chart and he chose a color that he liked for another version of this little drawing.

I’m partial to this little piece of artwork since my Dad died within weeks of our conversations about color and the barn, and I have yet to attempt that second watercolor, one that will be informed by Dad’s color choices and made better by my art study.

The Graywood Barn is the subject of the two drawings, one done in ink wash and the second, colored with watercolor. I used a photo of the barn before restoration had begun as the subject matter for both of these pieces.

The color version of this work was my Christmas gift to Ed for 2014 and now resides in his office. I completed this work during a Pen and Ink With Watercolor class last fall.

For this final day of the FDAC I am tagging the photography sisters, Marye Keim Maarsen of The Netherlands and Charleen Keim Neer of Michigan. Born and raised in the Bay Port area, both share a love of photography. Their artistic eye will be a delight, I’m sure.

Thanks for following my Art Challenge posts.

FDAC -- Day Three: Flowers

I am participating in the Five Day Art Challenge on Facebook this week. Here is the entry for Day Three.

FIVE DAY ART CHALLENGE – Day Three: Welcome back to my art challenge posts. Today’s theme is flowers as interpreted in sketches and watercolor. While I admire the genre of botanical art with its attention to detail very much, I also like doing flowers with a loose hand. All three of these pieces are from my sketchbooks or art journals. The Ruby Throat daylily was drawn from life, as was the dried rose. The peony comes from a photograph taken by LeVan Hawkins, Chicago area writer who is gracious enough to share his words and work with me from time to time.

The peony and the daylily shout “summer” to us in this before-spring-and-gee-but-it-is-cold-up-north month of February. And the dried rose, well, I save roses from almost every special bouquet. They end up in my box of things to sketch where they are a reminder of how even when colors fade and stems dry, the fullness of the rose, its essence, remains.

Today I tag Tamie Dell Cook, a graphic artist and scrapbooker from the Thumb. I used to work with Tamie at the Pigeon Progress Advance, many moons ago. I’m really looking forward to Tamie’s contributions to the Five Day Art Challenge.

In case some of you would rather see my posts and read about the art all at once, I have combined the FDAC Album from Facebook with the posts over on my personal blog, From Under the Willow.

Thanks for following along and be artful in some word or deed today.

Day Three: Flowers
Chloe's Rose is a preliminary sketchbook painting that I did for a framed rose that I
sent to my niece, Chloe Rose, on her 18th birthday. Caran 'd Ache watercolor pencil, micron pen.

 
Day Three: Flowers
Sketchbook page from August 2013. A single scape of the daylily, Ruby Throat, one of my
favorite daylilies. Sketches/painting done one evening in twilight and finished in the
studio at Cedar Bluff. Caran 'd Ache watercolor pencil, micron pen, Winsor and Newton watercolors.

Day Three: Flowers
From Art Journal #13, the first version of a drawing that is inspired by a photograph from a friend.
I call this "LeVan's Peony," after photographer and friend LeVan Hawkins. There is a second version of
this same flower in another sketchbook. Notice that the sun in the daily cartouche
 has peony petals for its rays.
When I see a photo on Facebook that I want to work with, I contact the photographer for their permission.
LeVan and other are gracious to say "Go ahead! Sketch and paint!" I'm grateful for that permission
since it links their careful eye with my drawing and painting efforts.

FDAC -- Day Two: Cows

I am participating in the Five Day Art Challenge on Facebook this week. Here is the entry for Day Two.

FIVE DAY ART CHALLENGE – Day Two: Well, quite a few of you are enjoying the FDAC photo gallery and that is very cool. The Art Challenge, a positive way of using social media, helps connect ideas and people.

Today’s theme is “Cows,” with three sketches/paintings of my fledgling approach to bovines. I take photos of cattle whenever I can. I have also been known to sit with a pen and sketchbook at Junior Livestock Shows in the Thumb, as you can see from the rough sketches applied over auction listings. These sketches are from the Huron County Junior Livestock Sale in 2013.

When you sketch animals in the auction ring, you have to work fast. You begin to see the differences in ears and forelocks and heads and height as you sketch. A 1500 pound animal towers above the auction gates; a 900 pounder barely reaches the top rung. Animal by animal, you learn to see each animal as a separate creation.

Today I tag Howard M. Sharper who is a Saginaw photographer with an eye for light and nature. Be sure to look him up on Facebook so you can see his work.

Day Two: Cows. Graphite sketch of one of my grandfather's Herfords
 I used an old slide that my Dad took of this cow as the source photo.

Day Two: Cows. Purple Cow from Art Journal #10, March 5, 2014 entry
 The purple is ultramarine blue mixed with quinacridone red.
My journal shows that I cooked a Melissa Clark shepherd's pie recipe with beef, onions, and potatoes on this day, which goes to show how good old dairy cow (ground beef) can be.

Day Two: Cows: Michael's Cow, named for Michael Barone of Pipedreams fame
 While visiting two pipe organs in the Swiss village of Romainmotier in May of 2014, our tour group paused to hear the bells of a herd of Swiss cows. Michael walked over to the fence and urged their melodic Sunday ringing, hence the name, Michael's Cow. Pen and ink with watercolor on Strathmore mixed media paper.

And just because it is fun to see, here is Michael with the Swiss cows

Mark Making

A lot of the visual art world likes to talk about mark making. Mark making, the code words for just getting something down on paper, or cutting into fabric, or using your hands in clay, can be an intimidating thing.

Over the holidays I moved away from doing much visual art. I did a lot of cooking and baking and reading. I knit and I played keyboard. I visited with my family and watched football and concerts and dramas. I spent time with photography and Photoshop and did some writing. And I worked on a new website for my knitting company.

What I did not do was any mark making in the sense of picking up a pen or a pencil or some paint and just getting something on paper. By mid January, I needed a breakthrough to restart my drawing juices.

That breakthrough came late this month as I have been photographing birds at the feeders. None of the photo are stellar, but they do provide a source for sketching. This chickadee is the first of several sketches that might become watercolors. I'm just glad to see the work coming on the lines and shapes of these birds.

The next day I tried a winter tree in watercolor. I started with Alwyn Cranshaw's little book "You Can Paint" and copied the drawing and used the suggested colors.

I had been noticing tree "bones," the outlines of trunks and branches against the winter landscape as I drive across Huron County, but I had not put any of those observations down on paper. This one tree got me started. I didn't get out the right brush and I hurried the work, but I made some marks.

Finally, two days later, I grabbed a Technalo pencil (it is water soluble so it can be moistened with a brush and turned into graphite wash) and started drawing a pattern that has been scrambling around my brain. Now that I see the pattern on paper, I might take this further by making it larger and adding color.

All of this mark making feels good. The tools still work in my hands. My brain circuits are firing with color and line. I'm back to some mark making and that's good.

Artwork: Aloe in Black & White

"Sharon, can you give me some tips for doing scratch board?" I pulled a chair up next to my table partner at art class and listened while she gave me tips on how to get started with this new technique. 

You start with a piece of lightweight board that is coated with white clay and black India ink. Then you sketch or trace a drawing or photo onto the board and, using a pointed tool or the top of an exacto knife, you scratch in lines so as to make the drawing come to life. 

So for several days, working a few minutes at a time, I have been scratching away at an aloe outline that I traced using a photo. The spikey stems with spines are emerging from the black surface. I know that some of the white is too white already and I know that there is no reversing all of that white. But I'm not concerned about that because this is a learning process and a first attempt at scratchboard's contrasty look.  

Subtle Desert Colors

The colors of the desert circulate around subtlety. The greens are grayed and lean toward blue, sometimes. The grays are are somewhat blue, yet have touches of brown.

When mixing colors for desert watercolors, you move from bright, pure colors to their complements, those that are more teal and taupe and gray.

One of my charts takes phthalo blue and combines it with yellow ochre and raw sienna. As the two colors mix, first a big puddle of one with a touch of the other, the color dips toward the desert.

An agave plant in a pot, photographed against a stucco wall, has those tones. I can see the blues and the browns as I ask myself the question, "What colors could I use to create this plant in watercolor?"

It's that subtlety that I am learning to see as I take out paints and find a palette that works.

Little By Little

Little by little, I am seeing progress in the artwork that I am doing.

The three pen and ink illustrations in this photo are sourced from one drawing of an agave plant located just outside the Baldwin Education Building at the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum. The first drawing, the one in the middle, was done for a session of the Pen & Ink I class that Rick Wheeler taught last spring. The other two drawings, also done for that class, are versions of the original. All three are done with Pigma Micron pens and ink wash that is applied with a brush.

The top board, my sampling substrate, takes the black and white art into the color realm. I enlarged the agave drawing and am working on the color and line for another version of the original, this one to be done with pen and ink outline with watercolor. I had to learn how to mask out the main subject matter so that I could sponge the background before the ink work begins.

All of that is done -- the sponging, the inking, the planning, the color choices. Next I will do the fine tuned inking of the drawing and then, finally, I will mix watercolors and take a brush to the work.

I have learned so much. I had this idea that an artist just takes paint and brush and goes to it. Well, it doesn't work that way. I have had to learn about colors, about mixing, about line, about composition. I learn something new every time I get out a pencil or a brush. I learn as I watch my fellow students and see their work develop.

None of this happens overnight, yet I can sense that something wonderfully original and creative is emerging. It's happening little by little, but it is coming.

Postcards: Before the Hills in Order Stood

For several weeks I have had one stanza of the hymn "O God Our Help in Ages Past" running through my brain. Whenever I'm out for a walk or a drive here in the Tucson basin, these words come to accompany my day.

Before the hills in order stood, or earth received her frame,

From everlasting, Thou art God, through endless years the same.

The art, my fledgling watercolor work with pen and ink accent, in this set of postcards depicts images of those hills, the hills that seem so ordered, yet are bested by the wonderment of how they got there in the first place.

Since I like the juxtaposition of recognizable images (think, my rubber stamp collection!), the mountain and sky images are contrasted with a childlike face, one that could be the warming sun of innocence in life. Oh, and I threw in a cowboy boot, again, just because I like it.

Theological? Thought provoking? Artistic license?

Who knows! I just enjoy the thought of all these images coming together.

Postcards: Turkeys & A Pumpkin

I had a good time playing with paint, rubber stamps, and some postcards cut from watercolor paper this week. The perspective is a little wonky in some of these and the trees might feel misaligned.

Nevertheless, they are art and they are fun.

You know the rules from last week. For the first five people who private message me via Facebook (name and your mailing address, please), I will traipse out to the mailbox tomorrow and have one of these cards on the way to you. Again, U.S. peeps, only.

And here is one of the cards in a closer view. If you want a copy, right click on the image and save it to your 'puter. Notice that I did not put my copyright on this art. That is because I used stamp images that belong to someone else and for which I had to pay some dollars. Just a detail, but I do observe those protocols.

Happy Friday, from Under the Willow that shades us all.

Homework

Scumble. That's a new word for me. It describes a form of pen and ink technique where scribble-type lines are used as filler to denote light, medium, and dark spaces in a drawing.

I quickly did an art journal page over the weekend with the various fillers for my Pen and Ink With Watercolor class. Session 2 meets this week and I'm getting the homework done for the class.  

Scumble or scribblle lines come easy for me and don't take very much time. I like the pointillistic effect of the stippling too, but it is a time consuming technique. Homework equals practice, and practice is what challenges me as I move along in learning more about art. 

My next task is to draw the examples on heavyweight Bristol paper using much more exact strokes. That will be tonight's challenge, and the completion of homework, finally.

Artwork: Maple Leaves and One Cowboy Boot

There are tubes of watercolor paints scattered all over the dining table out here at our Arizona place. India ink markers and number ten brushes and kneaded erasers and sketchbooks and graphite pencils join the mess. I'm back at taking art classes and the house will soon turn chaotic with art supplies.

The "Pen and Ink With Watercolor" class met this week for session one and students were treated to a demonstration of watercolor washes as performed by master watercolorist, Susan Morris. Our assignment for next week's class is six sketches done in pen and ink, all of the same object, but rendered in different styles, namely, hatching, cross hatching, stippling, scumbling, contour hatching and cross contour hatching.

I, of course, got carried away in my daily art journal and did a triad of maple leaves using stipple and cross hatch. Just for good measure, I added a touch of yellow ochre watercolor wash to the drawing. The leaves are totally from memory, but I'm rather linking the sketch.

Yesterday, while playing with new tubes of watercolor, I laid washes over a few postcards. I had a cowboy boot rubber stamp (cool, something that looks like I bought it in Arizona) that I found this week (rubber stamp selections are pretty generic and aimed at the scrapbooking market, since art people are supposed to draw their own boots) so I stamped that in black ink on top of the wash.

Then I added a big rock and a cactus and some watercolor glazing. I used Pitt markers, the set that comes in shades of gray, to tone in heat lines and contour a bit. The boot was filled in using Polychromos color pencils, the set that I bought at the Bennie's store in Pigeon, Michigan. (Some of you know that shop as HarJo's Ben Franklin, but my dear mother-in-law Pauline always called it the Bennie's Store and so do I).

Then I grabbed another Pitt marker, this one black, and stippled the heck out of the base of the boot and the cactus.

I like this drawing, too, but I'm willing to shove this postcard into my mailbox and send it to the first person who sends me their snail mail address via Facebook. (And by so doing, I get to name you and where you are from in another Facebook post, okay? So if you don't want to be known, don't send me your address.)

Let's keep it in the U.S., people, since those of you who are in other places probably know enough to right click and save the image on to your computer.

So, here we go. First private message with a U.S. address gets this postcard, an original piece of mailed art. Ready, set, GO!

CCC (Cool Custom Card)

I grabbed this image of a hummingbird which I posted to the blog last week and, with some fiddling around, uploaded it to the credit card site that I use.

So here is an approximation of what the credit card would look like with my customized photo, fully approved by the folks at Cap One and Visa.

It could be my CCC -- cool custom card.

And, no, I did not give those folks the right to distribute this image on their website. I maintain the copyright. Interestingly enough, the rules (lots of fine print) for what you cannot upload to use on a custom credit card run the gamut. No flag images. (They have lots to choose from.) No art. (That's someone's lawful work.) And more stuff like that. Once I got through the list, I realized that this image might work.

The image came through with links to share it to Facebook and Twitter and the like. Guess I'm advertising for two companies in this post. Oh well. Onward and upward.

Restful Harbor

Summer got away from me this year. I had fully intended to fill a sketchbook with drawings. I schlepped around my watercolor palettes and blocks of paper, hoping to get in a bit of outside painting. Those good intentions (buenos propositos, our Spanish speaking friends call it) never happened.

So instead I offer this somewhat artsy Photoshop manipulated image of the Edison plant and a sailboat at anchor, taken in Harbor Beach one evening.

Here's what I started with.

And lest you think, dear reader, that Photoshop is a scourge brought about through our digital world and the screens that we use, do remember that even Ansel Adams took his images to a darkroom and played artist. The image starts in the eye of the photographer, is filtered through a camera, and becomes even more than what was apparent in once glance.

Art is like that. This one, to me, is restful.

Ruby Throat Art

Paintboxes and art journals have been laid aside for a few weeks as gardening and other concerns have filled life. I pulled out the paints last Sunday night and had a little session with watercolors. My subject was the big daylily known as "Ruby Throat."

This plant, a tetraploid variety, is a forceful daylily that stands close to five feet high. With thick stems and multiple substantial buds, this Ruby Throat lets you know that it is present and accounted for in a garden bed.

Ruby Throat has a center, the throat part, that moves from red to orange to yellow green in a span of centimeters. You can't miss this beauty among the daylilies in our gardens.

Artwork: Swiss Cow

Lots of delightful summer company and a productive garden have kept my knitting needles in their basket. My art supplies have been tucked away, too.

Late last week, however,  I took the time to sketch and paint a small cow figure that Ed and I purchased in the airport as we were leaving Zurich.

Carved from wood using a flat carving method, the cow translated quite nicely into a pen and ink sketch with watercolor. I added a bit of funk with a checkerboard border, and, I see now, that I left out the tiny Swiss cowbell that rings a soft reminder of the mountain cows that we saw in Switzerland in May.

Da Mushrooms

From all the plenitude of art and nature journaling websites, I'm following John Muir Laws, painter of birds and trees and bugs, this summer. Late last night I played with a "How to Paint Mushrooms to Look Wet and Glossy" blog post. I copied his drawing freehand, using a Micron 02 pen and then took Caran d' Ache Supracolor Soft II watercolor pencils with a water brush to add the color. 

I let the drawing dry overnight and added the opaque accents that show reflected light for the glossiness. The opaque white is watercolor, too. I used Winsor and Newton Designer Gouache "Zinc White" and then added touches of Uniball white gel pen. 

It's my first time trying this technique, but once you've done something with your hands, your brain starts firing in a new way and you just might remember the technique when you need it again. 

Here's a link to the Laws website. If you are a bird watcher, you might know his work well already.  The lesson using mushrooms is on his blog. 

http://www.johnmuirlaws.com/

Hummingbird Art

Small sketches of hummingbirds, scattered through my June art journals, are changing the way that I look at these tiny creatures. I try to sketch them in flight as well as perched on a feeder. I've been using watercolor pencils, standard colored pencils, watercolors, Micron pen, and graphite pencil as my tools for these little drawings.

My go-to resource for working on bird drawings this summer is "The Laws Guide to Drawing Birds" by John Muir Laws, a talented bird artist. There are so many hints and observing tips in this book that I find more information to absorb every time I study another page.

For Father's Day this year, I did a small piece of framed art for Ed, a hummingbird at the feeder, drawn this June while watching birds at the lake house.

Watercolor Brackets

I'm funny about how I follow the NCAA basketball tournament. For three years now I have been making out a brackets sheet, not to pick a winner of each game, but to follow the course of the tourney. The first and second year sheets are in pencil. Year One (2012) is haphazard. Year Two shows more detail with scores and rankings and even the names of some of the coaches.

This year's bracket sheet was started with pencil which was then overlaid with black ink. (I use a Pigma Micron 02.) Carefully laid out on watercolor paper, the brackets sheet has a background of green glimmer mist spray. The green honors MSU, since I am a MSU fan and the Spartans are a green and white team.

Oval circle highlights Payne's Gray and Viridian Green, colors chosen for WJ's brackets

Each team that wins is highlighted in gray. Actually, I am using Payne's Gray, a paint color name that watercolor aficionados will recognize. I chose this color in honor of Adreian Payne, Michigan State's senior player who is an integral part of the MSU team. (But my favorite player is Travis Trice, for whom I could not find a color name.)

Michigan State is highlighted in Viridian green. That green streak should continue to the center of the brackets sheet and be the dominant color for the Final Four.

Go Green!

Artwork: Grandpa Bill's Cow

My Grandpa Bill Luedtke raised Hereford cattle. Here's my graphite pencil sketch of one of them. I can see that I'm getting better at drawing these animals. The heads still are confounding for me. Practice, practice, I tell myself.

And here is the source photo, from a slide taken by my dad, Stan Hayes, and scanned by my sister MB. The photo is probably from the fifties. And that is one beefy cow!