Here’s a section of the putto for one of the Thunderstorm Dancing spreads. He will have digital layers added and be incorporated into a spread design, but this is how he looks before all that happens to him.
Category Archives: art projects
Cabinet Card Faces that tell a story
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Young actress wearing a hat – This was my warm up sketch. Fast and loose.
Waiting for the kids while they are in their drama class on Wednesday afternoons, I am in the lap of luxury for an hour in a big leisure centre. There is a huge room with large tables, very few people and a nearby change room with fresh water for painting. This week I took my altered book sketching back-pack (have ink, can travel) and did some sketches there.
When I want to launch into something without thinking too much or wasting limited time finding a subject, I sometimes like to look at vintage cabinet cards, featuring studio portrait photographs from the 19th and 20th centuries. The faces are intriguing, the costumes often more interesting than today’s garb and usually the poses are wonderfully contrived. They are in black and white so the tonal values and detail are usually good for my purposes.
Italian ballet dancer with smiling eyes. This one was done after I got home and she has a touch of collage. I cut the face first, loosely without drawing an outline, to avoid getting caught up in detail..
This woman looked like she was having a ball being photographed. She had a confident pose, uplifted chin and laughing italian eyes with Audrey Hepburn style eye make-up and brows.
There was something rather sad about this woman’s eyes that touched me. My sketch looks very little like the original woman, but it has retained the inward gaze. Although it’s not a particularly good picture, I find that I like her in a personal way, so she’s going up.
Just now as I was jotting down notes for the colour scheme of Thunderstorm Dancing, I had a vision of the book being a costume.
The book covers are the dress – deep purples, greys, blues with a flash of red.
The endpapers may be startling like a red petticoat suddenly revealed
The internal pages are creamy lace and muslin with some blue embroidery, black stockings and a red ribbon here and there.
Drawing the little wench seemed the best way of jotting down my colour scheme. So here she is, a little 3 minute PhotoShop sketch (so forgive the hands and feet). If the book turns out very different, I might have to draw her a sister in a different outfit.
Weather fragments
What a rocky road this picture book has been for me. It looks like it is coming together at last though. Here are some weather fragments to make you feel lucky to be indoors, out of the rain.
Another for the 52-week Illustration Challenge.
Theme for this week, ‘selfie’. I am looking a bit Holly Hobbyish here with a large, collage head of differential calculus hair. It would have looked better with darker hair, but I didn’t want to lose the lovely calculus curves under a heavy load of ink. So I’ve left it lightly tinted.
I liked the way the little numbers and mathematical figures here and there remind me of insects or seeds that the chickens are constantly seeking.
The smooth paper of a vintage book reacts completely differently from the way proper watercolour paper should react to paint. But there’s something rather nice about it. It sucks up the ink in a thirsty way, remaining very smooth and composed all the while.
Scott discovered the word ‘groke’ the other day. We all like it in this house and think it deserves constant and affectionate use. It reminds us of Tove Jansson‘s Groke and it means this: to ‘stare at someone in the hope that they’ll give you some food’. (The Groke in Jansson’s Moominpappa at Sea visits Moomintroll every night to beg him to show her his lantern flame, because she is a lonely creature craving warmth and light but unable to get either. So it’s a poignant form of groking after all.)
With six pampered chickens and a dog, we get plenty of groking around here. Speaking of which, better go and lock the girls up.
A sporting chance…
Cornish drops in for a birdie, after an afternoon of thrashing about in bunkers.
A friend’s kids have started up a blog about sport. My boys have blogs about art. Not that they chat about it. We just post their own art on it for fun. But thinking of the two different blog subjects got me thinking about sport and art.
Then on the weekend, Dad came home from lawn bowls and told me about how he played. Sometimes he plays well; sometimes less well. And he tries all kinds of different experimental methods seeking that elusive, perfect technique. It was the same when he played golf. The frustration, the elation… the never knowing why or how one day’s performance was better than another. On a rare occasion, he’s ‘in the zone’ and the ball goes wherever he puts it.
Tell me, if you can do that on one occasion, why can’t you always? There’s no doubt that practice makes a big difference to how you perform, but nevertheless not many people can hit a hole in one.
It’s really a lot like art. One big difference is that in sport it’s easier to agree on the score. In art, everyone has a different set of goalposts…
Caravan
A little pick-me-up / warm-up session this morning for Tania McCartney’s 52 Week Illustration Challenge.
(funny how sometimes my post headings don’t show up… It could be just at my end. Who knows? Now that I have typed the heading into the body of the post, no doubt it will come up as a double heading. Oh well :-)Monotypes with Dad in the garden on a Sunday
Lovely to have a day off yesterday, and to spend it with Dad and the boys, (as well as Scott when he wasn’t on board his yacht admiring seals in the bay). Dad suggested we do some monotypes, and we finally got around to it in the late afternoon. It was really pleasant in the garden, and we could use the hose to easily clean off our plates without messing up the bath as I usually do at home. Boy, you should see it after a printing session!
We didn’t get too fussed about what we drew, and we were mostly messing about trying to find a paper that would take the monotype process and a bit of ink added afterwards.
Unfortunately I didn’t get a photo of Dad’s pictures, but he probably wouldn’t have let me post them anyway!
This little dark girl was taken from a photo and was an experiment in drawing with big, angular shapes and using high contrast. It’s so tricky to draw children without the results looking sentimental, because the subject of children is so heavily laden with very strong human emotion, and many pictures of children actively seek to communicate those emotions. This drawing probably looks sentimental too, just because the child is thoughtful or pensive. She certainly wasn’t meant to look like she’d left her favourite teddy in the park. I just loved her blocky haircut and the shapes her interlocking arms made. Oh, and the reason I was drawing a child (on my day off, ha ha!) was because I decided to join in a Facebook group with a weekly illustration topic, just for fun. This week’s topic was ‘children’.
The paper was medium weight, and was fine with the monotype process, but didn’t cope with the ink wash afterwards. Buckled all over the place. Earlier, we tried with 300 gsm watercolour paper and couldn’t get an ink impression because it was too stiff. Wetting the paper didn’t work too well either, because our block printing ink is water based. (I think the ink used in intaglio printing onto wet paper is oil based. Somebody tell me if I’m wrong.)
The cat was a bit of fun for me as I suddenly had the happy thought that I could combine altered book art with monotype. Although the page was rudely removed from the book, as you can see, it did cope perfectly with the ink, and also coped rather well with the wash afterwards. Strangely, it has a fine, sparkly thing happening in the dark areas when I hold it to the light. It must be to do with the paper, as it isn’t the ink, I’m sure.
This little guy was done on very lightweight paper and the monotype line is rather delicate because there was not a heavy load of ink on the plate. I added chinese ink, Prismacolour artstick and soft pastel afterwards to give him a bit of contrast, and the original monotype line is barely there. The paper of course, buckled.
Thanks for an enjoyable afternoon, Dad!
A short while ago, I had to get a bit organised before going colour for Thunderstorm Dancing. Getting organised goes completely against my grain with any of my art. It’s a kind of superstitious thing. So much of my better work is on bits of scrappy paper, drawn in eyeliner or using a waitress’s pen, and so much of the work I like less (that’s for those of you who will kindly reprimand me for not liking some of my work ;-) is on expensive paper using the very best of materials… well it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. I only need to pick up a bit of expensive paper to get so uptight that I can’t draw to save my life. My lovely art teacher at school, Cecily Osborn, identified this problem about 30 years ago. (OMG!)
This is a little sidetrack really…. what I was going to say is that I drew (in a wonderfully organised way :-) a little menu of characters showing which watercolours I mixed to make the various characters’ skin and hair tones. I sketched a couple of options for each character to begin with and then got impulsive and drew only one of each. (From this you will know that I very logically started on the right and worked left. Ahem.)
Here it is, ink smudges and all.
Of course, in-spite-of / because-of the fact that these characters took two seconds each to draw and are imperfect, I immediately liked them more than some of the painstaking images I have drawn for the book.
This doesn’t surprise me one bit.
However, I know as well as anyone who has attempted it, how hard it is to draw a character in two seconds and get it right first go. In my case, practically impossible. Only one in about 12 drawings will look remotely right. Put eight characters together on the one illustration (dancing together) and you have a logistical challenge. Devon, you can do the maths maybe ;-)
So… interesting times. I am not, in reality illustrating the book with two-second-characters. But I am loosening the style up a bit as I go along. It has its challenges. And its rewards.
p.s. Bella may notice that I have two different skin options for Pippa. One much warmer than the other. Possibly the one on the left is a Soft Summer, the one on the right a Cool Summer. I can make his outrageous statement only because she has dot eyes, right Bella? The Pippa on the left has brown eyes, the one on the right blue eyes… in my imagination. I think I am going the warmer, Soft Summer. I may be going mad too, but that’s nothing new :-) Last time we went here, Bella was giving excellent colour advice on a family of mice...
Seems like a decade ago.
Judy Watson 