Questions for painting

My last painting showed me just how much I’ve been ignoring the planning stage before painting. I’m not saying the painting was bad, just very much outside of the direction I wanted to go in style…it felt like it belonged to the 90s, too saturated and detailed for my tastes.

I spent a while looking at the artists I love, considering the things that annoy me when painting and the things I enjoy, and looking at my own art to see what I was happy with in the past.

May I present to you my new checklist of things to take into account with each painting. Obviously this is tailored towards me, and my own goals, but the idea might be useful to other artists as well.

With some work I’ll hopefully be happier with my paintings. Expect some playing around with style in the future.

 

Rowan Fairy (Finished)

So, for this one I just wanted to paint rowan leaves really, though you can’t see them here yet. I decided to do the sketch without them, just because the sketch was small and things would have gotten confusing with a pile of leaves dumped on top of her.

So in that aspect it worked, however she doesn’t quite feel like she’s interacting with the leaves, hiding behind them when I carefully placed the leaves not to cover the interesting bits of her. Maybe I should have moved those interesting details around so I could fit more leaves over her.

Rather happy with her expression, you can find the reference for it here: https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/closeup-portrait-curious-young-girl-looking-200661203

Umbrella elf & Derwent pencils

I got Derwent coloured pencils for my birthday this year and I’ve finally had a chance to play around with them a bit.

This isn’t really a review, I don’t know enough about pencils to talk about them properly, I will say that they’re better than the eclectic mix of unbranded and student quality pencils I’ve had since I was in primary school and are all tiny stubby things with shattered lead. So to be honest it’s not that hard an improvement.

It was a second hand box of Derwent pencils so I had to buy in some extra purples to replace the missing ones, even then I think I’ll still be going back to my box of old pencils for purples every now and then. The range of purples on the website wasn’t as good as I thought it would be. All very natural tones.

One thing I do really like about the Derwent pencils is actually the coating on the outside, it’s matt and nice to hold.

So here’s the test drawing I did with them, using Maria Amanda’s stock photo as reference. Not much to say about this one, other than it was nice to play with pencil again.

Butterflies on Honeycomb

 Turns out butterflies will steal from honeycomb if it's left out. It was almost completely Red Admiral and Peacock butterflies, with the occasional Comma butterfly.

 

 

....Can you tell I can't figure out how to get Blogger's photos to behave? 

Bee and dragonfly mugs

 

I made these for my mum's birthday in spring. The blank mugs were from a children's mug painting kit (the type of ones with terrible paints.) I used Pebeo's Cerne Relief Outliners for the linework and then once that dried I used a mix of Pebeo's Moon, Prisme and Vitrail....paints? to colour. I have no idea what the correct name for these ceramic paints is.

The only real difficulty was only being able to paint a thin strip at a time without it running around the mug. And hiding the smell the paints make so my mum wouldn't know what I was doing.

I have more blank mugs somewhere, might do more abstract ones.

 

Aureate WIP & Finished work

So this one was fun. I also went about it completely different to how I usually do. As a starting point I wanted to do something somewhat inspired by Klimt, I just wanted gold and jewel colours, I didn't even have a pose at first; which I almost always normally start with.

So I had a look at the sort of patterns Klimt used (a lot of triangles and rectangles) and hunted for a pose that looked a bit Art Nouveau. I ended up using Divine Sword by Liancary-art. Didn't even really mean for her to have wings...just sort of happened when I wanted to break up the space behind her a bit. 

It was so different for me to have what patterns I wanted to use as a starting point instead of the actual character. In a way I feel the character is the weakest point, she's really not that different from the original stock photo. I just made her slightly more warrior like, I wanted her to feel like a warrior queen who wouldn't normally be dressed up like this, giving her a dragon tooth crown helped add to this a bit (somewhat inspired by the jagged crown? from Skyrim.)

A small mistake I made right at the start was forgetting the stock photo had the sword sheathed, therefor the sword blade was actually smaller than it looked....ended up with a blade way to wide for its grip. I did manage to fix/hide this a bit later though.

Fixing damaged/roughened watercolour paper

 

I've damaged my paintings so many times by leaving tape or masking fluid on for too long, so I hunted for ages to find something to help fix/hide it.

...And then on one random forum some random guy just said I take the back of a dessert spoon to it. 

And it works, it doesn't fix everything but it does hide a lot of the more mild damage...it's so simple.

So I did some tests, rubbing Sellotape onto the paper then ripping it off and taking a blade edge along the top for some extra roughness. 

 

From left to right:

1. Just the damaged paper, for reference. 

2. Just rubbing it with a spoon, works but becomes slightly shiny and is easy to roughen again if you touch it too much.

3. Wiping water on with a brush, helps ever so slightly.

4. Water sprayed on, doesn't do quite as much as the brush. 

5. Water sprayed on and then rubbed with the back of a spoon, this works rather well but not as good as:

6. Water rubbed into the paper a bit with a brush and then the back of a dessert spoon. It did smudge the graphite of my writing a bit but on clear paper you'd be fine. Not sure how this would work with paper that already has watercolour on it. It also does still roughen up slightly if it's handled too much so you may need to fix it up again at the end of your painting.

 

Now the bottom strip was testing with some Pound-land PVA glue, not something I'd use on an actual painting at all. Research your glues. It also wouldn't take anymore paint on top later, there is a watercolour medium out there that lets you use watercolour on top of anything; I imagine that would work well. You just need something ever so slightly sticky to dry on it. 

And the glue worked really well, I did three different thicknesses mixed in with the water and you really just need the bare minimum to stop the paper roughening up again when rubbed. 

But yeh, don't use cheap PVA glue on real paintings, get something that might not change colour or crack with time.