Al Fresco Art Club Challenge for Oct 13, 2019: Paint a Common Object in Gouache

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This week’s challenge continued in our tradition of painting common objects (still life) in one hour. I chose to paint a class Penguin paperback published in 1984. For the past month I’ve been having trouble completing my paintings, so I chose a book because the shape is easy to paint, and I made a conscious decision to avoid details. I intentionally forced myself just to block out the large shapes and then just let go of it.

Penguin has a wonderful graphic style: white text (looks like Helvetica) on a black background, illustrated with a painting from the period covered by the book. In this case, Maupassant’s “Selected Short Stories” were written from 1880 on. The fitting illustration for this collection of stories is a detail from Edgar Degas’ painting named “After the bath”. Degas liked this topic and made many paintings on this theme.

Here’s my version.

Al Fresco Art Club Challenge -- A Common Object Painted in Gouache

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This week the Al Fresco Art Club continued on the path of learning how to paint with gouache. I chose to paint my kitchen timer. I tried some of the new brushes I bought yesterday, in particular a size 2 flat. I love flat brushes and use them whenever possible, even when I should be using a pointy round brush for details.

Here’s my kitchen timer.

Al Fresco Art Club Challenge, Sep 8, 2019 -- Maneki-neko in Gouache

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Today’s Al Fresco Art Club challenge was to do a still life in one hour. I chose to paint one of my maneki-nekos, a shiny black marvel with lots of highlights and reflections. I started with a sketch using a water soluble graphite pencil, then painted in the local color: black, then blocked in the other gold and green areas. By the time I had done that, my hour was almost up, so I painted some rushed highlights to give it a little more interest.

Chore Day Sep 7, 2019 -- Arteza Gouache Color Swatches

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Besides my usual chores (cooking for my furry friends), I went to the Coop for onions, garlic, kale, and vegetable broth. There are times when I feel disbelief that I now eat only plants. But, I do, and I’m happy with what I eat.

Besides thinking about food I made some color swatches for the Arteza gouache kit I bought a few weeks ago. There are 60 colors, most of them are convenience colors. Here are the first 20. There’s no telling when I’ll do the other 40 — I find doing the color swatches to be tedious and frustrating. I usually screw them up with misspellings, putting the wrong label on a color, irregular lettering, and so on. When I see Youtubers with Youtube smiles on their face doing elaborate and perfect color swatches, I assume they couldn’t think of anything important to talk about, so, hey!, why not do another set of color swatches using some gouache/watercolors they would never use in their own art.

Here’s my contribution to color swatches. You can see that some of the colors are transparent or semi-transparent. The Peach Red is a neon color and difficult to capture in a photograph or scan. The “Pearl” colors are mica-based to give them a shimmer, which also cannot be captured in a photo or scan.

atreza_swatches_first_20_blog.png Arteza gouache,color swatches


A Steller's Jay in Gouache

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In my children’s book the protagonist is a young Steller’s Jay. I plan to use one of my end matter blank pages for a painting of an actual Steller’s Jay. If you live on the West Coast of the United States, you’re probably noticed these noisy, playful birds that might be called Blue Jays. I always called them that, but when I was doing research for the book, I thought it would be a good idea to double check. I found out that Blue Jays are East Coast birds. What I’ve been calling Blue Jays are actually Steller’s Jays.

I’ve been drawing the comic version of a Steller’s Jay so often that I was unsure whether I could paint a real Jay. I decided to use gouache because I really need the practice.

Here’s my effort today. It’s a work in progress. I’m going to add a few details tomorrow. The top page shows my Wikipedia reference photo and a practice sketch. I used a water soluble graphite pencil for the sketching and M Graham and Creta gouache for the painting. I’m intimidated by gouache, but I love it. When I’m painting I feel the same excitement I felt as a kid doing a really messy finger painting.

gouache_stellers_jay_09052019.pngm Steller's Jay, Not a Blue Jay, M Graham Gouache, Creta Gouache

Al Fresco Art Club Aug 25, 2019 -- Gouache Painting of the Siskyou Mountains from Memory

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Today’s art club challenge was to paint anything using gouache. I’ve been shying away from gouache for years, but now the look has great appeal, and I find that I can’t get the look digitally. I want to give gouache a try in my future children’s books and I know the most reasonable way to get the look is to use the real stuff.

I bought scant palette of seven colors: cadmium red and red light, cobalt blue, cadmium yellow, yellow ochre, and cadmium orange, as well as some titanium white and zinc white. I painted the view of the Siskiyou Mountains, as I see them from my back yard, from memory. I was going for a purple haze for the atmospheric perspective, but I wasn’t able to mix the color I wanted. I see now that I was on the right track, but I could have mixed in more white.

When the painting hour was over, I felt that I’d broken some long standing ice. I liked my painting. My dread of real painting with real paint was lifted. I could see that my fear of creating an ugly painting had kept me from taking the plunge. Fear is such a waste of time.

Out and About in Southern Oregon

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I was out of the house most of today. When I got home I spent an hour in InDesign rearranging images to tighten up the flow of the story. I even removed a page, which hurt a bit because I have lavished a lot of time and love on that picture. But, I have a 32-page limit to stick to. It hurts to lose the one you love.

While I was in Medford I went to our amazingly well-stocked art store, Central Art Supply. Considering that we’re in the middle of Nowhere — 400 miles are from Portland or San Francisco — Central Art has a full line of Winsor and Newton, Holbein, and Daniel Smith water colors, Copic markers, Arches and Fabriano paper. And, prices are competitive with the big online vendors. I’ve made a pact with myself to buy all of my art supplies at Central. I really want to do my part to support their business. It’s fun to go into a brick and mortar store and touch the goodies.

I bought some gouache and a couple of water brushes. I’m preparing to learn how to paint with real paint.

Converting JPGs to CYMKs

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I have about 35 psd images in my children’s book. Over the past eight months I’ve exported all of them as JPGs or PNGs for creating an e-book. E-books use the SRGB color space. Now that I’ve decided to make the print version, I have to re-export all of the images using the CMYK color space. It’s not hard — it’s just tedious. Understanding these technicalities takes time, but the more I learn about the publishing business, the more I feel in control.

I’m really slow with Photoshop. I can convert about two images an hour to CMYK. I estimate that it will take me one week to create the new CMYK images. As I’m doing that, I’ll also be exporting all of the JPG images at a high resolution to make sure they meet the 300 dpi minimum for Ingramspark books. To make sure I don’t get the CMYK and SRGB files confused, I’ve created separate directories for the two type of color spaces.

I spent some time in a waiting room today. To while away the time, I sketched the back of some dude’s head. I used a Daler-Rowney sketching pencil for this. The paper is Strathmore VIsual Journal 140 lb. watercolor paper.

Two versions of a page in progress for the children's book

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54/365

I finished the drawing I started yesterday, the drawing of the two boys reading a comic book. I replaced the ominous cat with two cute mice, moved Buddy Butterfly’s antennae out of the way and added some hatching. Today it was Photoshop to the rescue.

I moved Buddy’s antennae to give the mice more focus. He’s got an extra pair before I took the image to Photoshop

Still more cleaning up to do…

A bird and a butterfly draw each other's portrait

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50/365

A quickie today. While I was at work I got the idea of having Jimmy and Buddy doing fun stuff like drawing silly portraits of each other, as best friends do. I would use this image in the sequence where the two best friends ride bikes, play football, play cards. Real bromance stuff.

I limited colors today: cool blue, yellow ochre, and purple.