Pag

I've got this notion in my head about a painting around my favourite indo-european root, pag. Not the easiest thing to express in a visual way, so I'll need to explore for a while. I've started here with a few clothes pegs, courtesy of Padraig who took this lovely photograph, that I manipulated with Photoshop and Picasa. How I'll incorporate fasten, page, travail, travel, newfangled, peasant, peace, pectin and Pacific into this, I have no idea! And a peg is hard to draw, so I might need to make a little stencil that I can paint over. I might start with a collage, then move on to watercolours. 

St André Mist

You can't beat Photoshop Elements really, even the ancient version I'm still using (3.0). I brought in the drawing from Sketchbook Pro onto my laptop, connected my Wacom tablet, and opened Photoshop. A layer or two later, and the Bucket tool was doing its job nicely, a nice soft effect that I must now try to emulate with the real thing - watercolours!

For the first one, I used a left to right pattern for the sky.

On the second one, I went for a starburst pattern, which gave a lovely effect of the sun about to rise behind the hills













The last picture just shows the tracing done with the Wacom tablet! The weird squiggles at the end of every line are because the pen is misbehaving a bit - it's over-sensitive and starts drawing even when I'm about an inch from the tablet! It was still drawing in mid-air, although I had tried to lift it from the tablet as quickly as I could. I wonder if I need to recalibrate it, and how?

The Onion

Happy Birthday, Françoise - See, I thought of it on the day! I haven't sent you a card yet, though!


I don't think I've ever completed a watercolour project so quickly. I embarked on this one only about 3 weeks ago at most. I know for sure it was after 1 January, anyway. Desppite being very busy, I managed to fit in the time to do this little watercolour that I'm very proud of - The Onion. Or will I call it "Onion on Aveda gift box"?





I guess the difference with previous projects is that I dived straight in - no preliminary experiments with Adobe Photoshop or the Wacom tablet (my Mac is misbehaving again, so I haven't really used it much - everything is gone really really slow again), no aboriginal snails to try out the colours. I only did a few drawings as a starting point, and took a couple of pictures, in case the onion went bad (which it didn't - we've probably eaten it now!). Actually, the photograph is at a slightly different angle than what I painted, as I was sitting slightly higher when I was painting, whereas the photograph is taken from slightly below.



The only item for which I experimented on a separate piece of paper was the chevron pattern on the Aveda gift box (a gift from a few Christmases ago. I have a lovely big Lush gift box from this Christmas that I must use next time!). I was worried I would ruin the whole thing by messing that up, so I wanted to try out my watercolour pencils to draw the pattern, then apply water to fix it in. It worked nicely. A bit laborious, but the right side of my brain didn't mind at all!

The Hen

Here is where we are with our nice big plump hen: With the Wacom tablet and Corel Painter Essentials 2, I have been painting "over" the photograph. Very simple and gives great results! Using the colour picker, I copied the colours from the original photograph, then I applied the "digital paint" over a separate layer, using the palette knife tool.
I then copied this new layer and pasted it into an empty document. (I tried to remove the original layer, i.e. the photograph, but it was locked, and I didn't know how to unlock it in Corel Painter Essentials).

I know this is all cheating - no real creativity -, but I find it useful to use the tablet to get "into" a new project. + it makes me feel good!

Current Project

Despite our busy schedule, I still manage to work on my watercolours. It just takes longer to get a painting finished. Right now, I'm working on a gorgeous purply-pink poppy.

The difficulty is getting the colour right - some of the samples I did with Corel Painter Essentials are quite dull, so I think I'm going to pump up the colour a bit. I have a lovely Schmincke ruby red which I hope will do the trick. And for the green background, I think I will rely on my good old Schmincke vanadium yellow for the first few layers (it's nearly fluo yellow - it will lift the dullness of my greens)

Here are 2 tracings I did on the Wacom tablet. I haven't decided yet whether I will get rid of the few petals from another poppy in the right-hand corner or not.

I think I might keep them in, as the corner looks too empty without them. But I have to figure out a way of painting it out of focus, so it doesn't compete with the main flower.

Next time, I'll show you a few of the colour variations I've tried with Corel Painter Essentials. The colour picker tool (it's like a pipette) is very handy for picking the colours from the original picture and dropping them on the drawing. But I found the resulting colour drawing a bit dull, so I experimented with it - adding more light at the top, and also increasing the red hue.

There is nothing wrong with tracing!

When you're working from a photograph, I really see nothing wrong with tracing. I find it helps me understand the lines better, and what makes a particular picture interesting. Without the tracing, I find that I get distracted by all the details in a picture. Tracing a picture, whether it's with tracing paper or using the Wacom tablet, helps me see what's beautiful in it. The picture here is the tracing I took of the lilly. I just added the orange centre afterwards. I love the contrast between the pure white and the loud orange.

Next project - a white lilly

Don't think that I have been doing nothing these last few weeks. As soon as I finished the poppy, I started work on another flower - a lilly this time. No brash colours here. It's all subtle shades. And I'm struggling with it of course. It's a lot easier to go for strong colours and textures than getting just the right shade of grey to imitate indirect light hitting a beautiful white flower!

This particular lilly was at the back of Ballynahinch Castle Hotel, just overlooking the river. There was plenty of reflected light and I just love the abstract look of this picture.

I've been playing with it for the last while, but it's taking a long time for me to figure out how to turn this into a good watercolour. I've done a few drawings and tracings on the computer, using the Wacom tablet. The drawings here were all done without the assistance of a computer. For the last drawing, I actually measured, so the proportions would be right.

But I wasn't entirely happy with the overall balance of the picture. It lacked punch. Maybe when I'm more experienced I'll be able to get the light greys just right, but for now, I think I need to stick to strong colours and shapes.

So, as a starting point, I've cropped the picture, just showing the left part of it, and dropping the right-hand corner. I think the shapes are better balanced, and I won't have to worry about how I depict the hazy pink flowers there. I will have enough trouble painting the white flower itself without having to worry about other things.

And the next step

And here is the latest installment in the Poppy saga. (And I still haven't put a real pencil to paper, except for the first sketch!). This time, again, I started from the traced drawing in Corel Painter Essentials. Then I used a pencil tool from the same program and did some shading on the Wacom tablet. I used a fairly small pencil to start with, then I used the eraser to do the highlights on the stamens.

After that, I increased the size of the pencil about 5 times, and used a very light touch to do the shading on the petals.

Here is the result:

Poppy

I didn't get much time to work on my Poppy project this week, but I have been making some progress on a value drawing, done on the computer with Corel Painter Essentials (which came with the tablet). I'll show it to you in a couple of days. In the meantime, here is a picture of the colour experimentation I was playing with last weekend, based on the tracing I took with the tablet. Again, this was done with Corel Painter Essentials.

The base drawing was the tracing I took. Then, I started pouring colours I selected from the palette. I didn't look for an exact match. I picked colours that I liked best and felt right. After using the "paint bucket" tool to pour my colours, I then used crayons to paint the centre of the flower, and then acrylics to give a bit of texture to the stamens (apologies to any botanist out there if I got the flower terminology wrong - I checked it on Wikipedia, but I'm still not sure which bit is a pistil and which is a stamen!)

I had to do this twice, as I saved it as a compressed jpg the first time and it looks pixelated when you blow it up. It is a pity, as my first attempt was definitely more spontaneous and looks more organic, I think

Next Step

The next step in my project, which has been moving at a swift pace over the last few days, was to trace the picture - I'm not proud + I've already done a freehand drawing of it, so I see nothing wrong with tracing!

To do this, I decided to use the Wacom tablet that PC Medic purchased last year, rather than using tracing paper. After a little bit of fiddling around to adjust the screen vs tablet settings, it was very easy to use. I spent a good bit of time on Friday and Saturday trying out all sorts of techniques with different types of paint brushes, oils, pastels, crayons, etc.... all available with the bundled software. As I love experimenting with new media, this was the perfect excuse for me to spend hours doodling without really thinking about the end result! I will show you some of the resulting pictures in future posts.