Back to Kachigawa! I finally found it!! And it's a beauty, all white in the sunshine. Not the easiest to paint - I worked all in negative shapes. Lost some of the proportions along the way, but I'm happy overall. Next time we go, we'll have to take a photo in front of the house and walk the streets together, looking at all the lovely houses in the neighbourhood! Something to look forward to!
The challenge from Dublin Sketchers last week was to sketch in chiaroscuro. I decided to try two self-portraits. As is always the case, I see a bit of myself in both of them! It's all to do with the "self-portrait face", looking straight at the mirror, with my the eyes staring, the mouth all serious and the chin slightly down! Not my best look, the second one in particular!!
I think I've been here before, haven't I? I love everything about this painting, except the composition with the road to nowhere!! Someone I know would probably call it self-sabotage. I'll call it part of the journey! Even though I painted this on half sheet! It didn't take that long, apart from the 20 thumbnails and quarter sheet explorations! Actually I painted this in exactly the same amount of time as a quarter sheet. Just used a bigger brush and had to keep a close eye on paint drying in different parts, but it's helped me gain confidence in painting larger! And that is a very important part of the journey for me, to overcome that fear of painting big!
Sometimes, I just need to remind myself that art is play for me. I don't have commercial ambitions. I just like to paint for the joy the process gives me, not for an end result to be appreciated by others. But sometimes, I forget and I push towards more serious goals. Nothing wrong with that. Except that I can be competitive. And not just with myself!! Now it's all coming out!! Not something I'm proud of !
So a little fun break with the Queen of gouache, Maru Godas, on the Domestika platform, was just what I needed. Oh don't worry, watercolour will always be my first love, but I just love Maru's beautiful illustration style and I had heard lots of good things about this course.
So here is what I'm playing with at the moment!
Too many trees, and the colours are a bit softer than I would like, but I'm starting to get a feel for what I want in this scene from Beara. Although I'm still not sure about the overall composition!! A bit late, says she!
The sun is out! Spring is finally here! So I had to take a break and sit in the sun for a bit. And sketch what was in front of me! I got lost in these garlic plants, but getting lost is what it's all about!
I had an opportunity to sketch a few more people when I joined Virtual Sketch Leicester on Zoom for their virtual visit to Dublin. Just a fountain pen and ArtGraf graphite. None of the people look like themselves, but it was so good to be sketching from a moving target!
And it was wonderful to see Birgit from Germany there. We had met in Amsterdam in 2019 the day after the Urban Sketchers Symposium - I had gone to a café, and she was sketching, and I sat across from her, and we sketched each other. We were later joined by Pat and Deb and we had a portrait party. It was a wonderful afternoon that was the perfect end to a perfect Symposium. Seeing her on Zoom brought back all those happy memories!
I explored the techniques from Sketching Playlab some more. Some more successful than others. But I enjoyed incorporating a bit of watercolour pencil into all the juicy texture effects! Even if the roses ended up looking like beetroot!!
A little bit extra I did during OneWeek100People2021. I tried to sketch hands in more detail. I was struggling with it. But then I remembered the extended-tool technique from Sketching Playlab and all of a sudden, my hands were expressive and full of life!
Final day of One Week 100 People. I'm pretty sure I didn't meet the 100 mark. But I had a lot of fun, and I learned a lot with this new way of working, which really helped me get away from obsessing about detail. Like the little detail of where is the woman's body? No, she wasn't cut up! Iphigénie had put away her knife, and she was actually comforting the woman who was lying with her head on the sacrificial stone. I just didn't see that the woman was actually in front of Iphigénie, and by the time I realised, it was too late. I'll blame it on the lighting. Or on the fact that I was chatting away on Zoom with a friend while I did this!
I enjoyed Iphigénie en Tauride so much that I decided to stay with it. One simple scene alone had so many dramatic expressions. Plus I'm trying to sketch hands better, and there were lots of close-ups! I also tried to include a little bit of the backdrop, again using the techniques described by Marion Rivolier in her wonderful book!
