Do you need to Loosen Up?

Underpainting for a pastel still life that could be an abstract painting as is.

That's a serious question, by the way. You might be hearing something I did from friends who critique, especially if you're fond of certain mediums such as colored pencils, oil painting, some styles of acrylic or watercolor or graphite drawing with a lot of fine detail. "You could loosen up and start getting more painterly. Less is more."

Lot of good that comment does when you don't know which details to leave out!

There's a good reason to learn detailed, accurate drawing, realism in tone, value, color, texture, everything. Even to follow a photo reference slavishly with great and loving care, measuring everything twice with a grid or the "tick marks" method (choose dramatic key points like eye corners, mouth corners, edges that turn or change shape, make a dot on the dark side and follow the edge of light and shadow or hue change with a flat or shaded area of rendering.) Or you trace carefully and then render.

Realism and photo realism are a crossroads.

For some artists, they aren't just a crossroads. They are the destination. These artists go from very carefully copying and following the photo in archival art materials, scaling it up or down (especially up) to taking their own photos. Their photos get better and better till they become photorealists. To become a brilliant photorealist, you need to learn accurate rendering AND good photography, have an eye for the image that's going to look even better enormously larger than life and master one or more mediums that can render it.

One noted photorealist was so careful about hand rendering from his photo reference that a critic complimented him for including a JPEG artifact - a light-color effect that was a side effect of using a high resolution digital camera before rendering the powerful image as a very large mural. Gee. Pixels the size of small brush strokes might actualy work, you know? Pointillists have been doing that since Seurat, who predated digital photography!

Maybe that's you! Maybe that's your style and who you are, while everyone who's trying to encourage you to more expressive, visible strokes and broader strokes, conciseness, simplification and so on is leading you on a path not yours. This happens. Your style grows out of who you are and what you love. If you really like to see realism so good people think it's a photo - you can also get so good at rendering life drawing that people think you had a photo reference when you did it.

You could wind up like the great graphite artists who wrote several of my drawing books and copiously illustrated them with trompe l'oeil graphite realism. Black and white photo thumb tacked to a piece of wood with a bit of chain dangling off a push pin, an old shoelace, a few keys, a button with a pin stuck through it... maybe a chandelier crystal... a still life in the vertical. In graphite it looks like a photo of the stuff.

But it's actually better than the photo, unless the photographer is a truly spectacular artist and photographer. The eye can capture nuances the camera can't. You have binocular vision and hands. The camera is monocular and distorts things. It has limited memory compared to you, the human artist. There was fantastic realism in the Renaissance when the only camera was tracing from a camera obscura. You can get the proportions that way or grid or learn to eye them by long practice and lots of sketching. Many ways to scan that cat.

That's where I thought I was going with art back when I was primarily a colored pencils artist. I loved colored pencils realism and still do. It still delights me to see realism done well. It's wonderful and you can do things with it that cannot be done with cameras.

The people who do it for the movies, or illustrators like James Gurney, can turn that kind of realism into a camera to carry inside your head. Dinosaurs can strut with ornate howdahs on their backs and steampunkish colorful people coexist with them to talk to them. Rockets soar and vampires sweep through the night, flower fairies come up in your garden, all myth and legend are yours to paint.

From there some artists stylize and follow this or that style of illustrator. They may go in the direction of comics (or start there) whether Western or manga. They may want to create illustrations or study commercial art for a good job. It's a good use for it, as good a use for art as any. The Sistine Chapel was a high paid illustrator doing a story the patron wanted told in the cathedral!

But head toward Fine Art and someone's going to say "You ought to loosen up."

Maybe that's you. Maybe you look at a Chinese painter's three stroke koi and gasp in wonder, because ink just exploded into as true a likeness as you'd get in some forty hours of straining and measuring and checking. Maybe you look at the Impressionists and want that crazy light and color streaming through your work... maybe there's more than one style that appeals to you. But one thing's for sure. You are not there yet and afraid to take the plunge. It's a scary plunge.

Because one of the best ways to get accuracy is to choose a detail like the size of one eye and measure against that to get the proportions of the nose, the placement of everything else, width of the mouth, side of the face, top of the head, everything. Do that carefully and you will have the likeness, especially with tone rather than line.

This is where "too perfectionist" comes into it. It's a matter of word choice. Seriously.

Until you master realism to the level you are satisfied with it - you, not your art teacher, your parents, your spouse, your friend, the gallery guy, the critic, the artist friend who thinks you could loosen up - there is a natural frustration at every single proportion error or rendering error of any kind.

You might have a beautiful, expressive, gorgeous painting of a vase of flowers that everyone loves. Someone paid you a lot of money for it. And something about it gnaws at you. Because it was the curve of the bottom of the vase sitting on the table, an inaccurate ellipse, that curve was more shallow than the curve of the top of the vase but it's farther from eye level. The illusion breaks, it doesn't look real. The curve of the ellipse is rigth on one side but wrong on the other. And no one cares but you, because, the bottom of the vase is down at the bottom of the picture and you sensibly didn't give it a lot of contrast to distract from the main subject. The composition's fine. It's that stupid ellipse curve again, even after you read about ellipse curves and did exercises and tried to beat it into the stupid little animals at the ends of your arms that they go this way not that way.

Believe me, I have done that one when I knew better. Knowing better comes way before your eye knows and you can see that's what's wrong. You might think the vase isn't shiny enough or the loose stroke for its highlight is too distractingly ugly or the shadow isn't shaped right... but it's the dang ellipse curve again.

Or you got the ellipse but the shadow looks wrong, because it isn't the same direction as the light on the flowers. There are a thousand different rendering tricks to get realism and accuracy. When you master all the ones you need, you can go on to try to simplify what you paint.

It's also very vague to say "Simplify it and leave out what isn't important."

Yikes! You have to decide what's important or not! Oh boy! How do I tell people what's important or not? Maybe the viewer likes trees more than clouds and I should get the trees right, maybe they like the green one between the orange ones more than the orange one, those blobs don't look like foliage, how do I know how many leaves to put before the whole thing looks like a piece of leaf-stamped cloth instead of a clump of foliage. How did that impressionist actually do a blob just as blobby as mine and it looks like a tree?

Uh, you have to learn a bunch more tricks for that simplification too. Like the one about "Contrast draws the eye" and "Bright colors draw the eye" and low contrast and dull colors belong around the edges and in the backround. You need to learn a bunch of staging tricks to make the scene or person or animal look real - and they are not all about getting the shape of the nose right. Some of them work even if you get the shape of the nose completely wrong and paste it on the side of the face like Picasso, which is why he's famous and we're not.

It's hard to break the rules until you know the rules. On top of that, it helps to know why the rule is there so that you can break it on purpose to get attention by doing it exactly when and where it works. Making the exception to the rule a thing that makes the painting exactly what that one should be.

It leads to purple grass and turquoise in the leaves and pink in a blue sky. It leads to visible broad strokes that carry meaning and a swirl of paint or pastel dust that somehow gives the impression there is a living, moving fish gliding through water that's real even though it was three splashy strokes with a soggy brush. Or three or four pastel strokes dashed in.

It's being able to change the photo plausibly. Take a photo of an old person and make a picture of the teen they used to be. Take a photo of a winter tree and dress it with foliage in summer rain. Art is visual fiction. It's not the same thing as what you paint, no matter how accurate your realism - and the best realists are using all the same simplification tricks as the concise loose painters.

They just do it with a different choice of tools. The edge of the cork board in the trompe l'oeil painting hasn't got as much contrast or interesting objects and there are pointers leading back in to get you looking at the clear push pin and the shiny keys. So go ahead and draw clear push pins in your art journal. Sketch birds from photos including blurry wings if the bird was moving. That will actually work in a painting too. Sketch and draw things from life whether it's junk on your desk or what's outside your window while you're doing something else.

Paint. Lots. Practice. Read books, take classes, read articles, try anything and everything. Only you know when you've had enough realism and want to leave the crossroads for the direction that's right for you. You might abandon it fast for a primitive style as you develop exactly your stylized way to draw grungy unshaved characters or wide-eyed doll-faced mermaids.

You're you and style is something like your handwriting. You have it whether you plan to or not. The more skilled you get at drawing and painting, the easier it is for anyone else to recognize your style in everything you create.

I change around what mediums I use fairly often, especially from among those that fit in my lap on sick days. It may depend on the weather exactly what medium I do, because some days I've just really got to get it done in five minutes or I'll never get back to it. Others I might have a whole hour. Others I might spend all day or several sessions to finish it - that's disability setting limits. One of the best Impressionists I ever knew was legally blind. She painted what she saw, literally, and leaped right to color and light because for her the world was that colorful blur that makes sense. The details that distracted me to perfectly rendered petals and stylized awkward leaves weren't there in her vision.

How tall you are affects it. How you feel today. What you like in art. What you like to read. What you like to eat and whether you have an allergy to any solvent or to pastel dust. Whether you love tramping around in the snow painting plein air in the mountains or you need to stay in the car to paint that winter scene.

And of course what you like to read and who you love and what you think of life and the world and your loved ones. Most of all what makes you happy or angry or sad, your feelings come into it. If you love something, spending fourteen hours gazing at it and slowly going over it in Prismacolors realism is a day well spent, a happy one. If you don't have the patience for it any more, like me, it's because something interfered to make that less fun - like chronic fatigue. A bit too sick and I don't want to paint any more. But when I was one stage less disabled, Prismacolor realism got me sitting still happily for a dozen hours at a time and the results were very textured, detailed, colorful and rich.

I loosened up, partly for love of Impressionism and partly because I now need magnifier glasses to see my previous level of detail. As a child I did inch wide drawings with a 6x0 Rapidograph and they were accurate if it was a subject I had enough practice with.

Be you, learn, enjoy and know the crossroads after you leave it. There's a point at which it stops being very hard and becomes something you can trust. It came for me more than once, subject after subject. Earliest was sketching my pet white rat in pen, I developed a good pen texture for white fur (outlined with little dashes that went the direction of the hairs), dotted lines for the pretty little pale nose and muzzle, outlined big dark eyes, outlines where the crease of the ear made a line, a slightly broken line for his tail and accurate tail gestures. I learned how to do his tiny knuckles and claws. It was practice and observation, so drawing from life is probably the best way to get there - but reading and looking at art and classes are good too.

There's more to learn about how to paint and draw than any one person can do in one human lifetime. More gets invented every year and you'll make discoveries or rediscoveries. That's what it is, it's not a zero sum game. It stays challenging and fun because you'll always keep getting better, moving from the crossroads in the directions you want to go. That's the key to a strong personal style - just be you and work in the mediums you love, subjects you love, ways that you love.

If that's realism, more power to you. If it's loose or abstract you will get there when you do, and you are the one more than anyone who knows it. You couldn't have convinced me to give up realism for impressionism in the 80s, but here I am doing it and loving it - and still going back to pen-watercolor accuracy every now and then because I still love that too.

Pacific Wave

Above is the best ocean wave I've ever painted in my life. It looks very detailed but I did it in ten or fifteen minutes without hesitation, without planning, just looked at the reference and made decision after decision to change it. I paint better than I used to but not as well as I will. 

Next week or month or year that'll happen again and maybe I'm ready to paint waves from life - they don't hold still for painters the way photos do.

Easy Pastel Demo - Pears

Materials needed:

Charcoal stick or pencil

Pastels (any brand) red, green, orange, blue, white

Charcoal or drawing paper with vellum or laid surface

Kneaded (putty) eraser

A pear, real or fake, to draw from

I created this project for folks who start out with little or no budget. I used Blick square student grade pastels on Strathmore lightweight recycled charcoal sketch paper. Student pastels are non toxic, safe for children, have a lovely soft texture and mix well. Their only problem is they're not lightfast. So if you do a painting in them that you really love, get some artist grade pastels and redo it on archival paper. As this project shows, it's not only possible to repeat the same drawing but it may get better the more often you do it!

Start with the charcoal pencil and draw the pear from life. Set it out on something flat and plain like a sheet of printer paper or white place mat, so the shadow shape is easy to see. Sketch fast and then smudge the drawing with your finger to get smooth tones and gradients. At a hard edge, just don't go over the edge while smudging, go near it and let it stay sharp.

Charcoal sketches to start

My first charcoal sketch is accurate, but I realized the pear looked ugly at that angle and turned it so that it'd look more like a traditional pear shape. Try different angles and move the light if you have to in order to get a good shape and a good design. Make sure the light is clearly from one side - most things look better and are easier to draw with light from one side and above.

Once I got the second sketch, I repeated it two more times on the page and then started using the pastels. I finished my bluesorange one first, but did the red-green one stopping half way to show that stage.

Red-Green Pear

No blending yet on this stage. I used the lighter color over the entire pear and shaded with the darker color, then used the darker color by itself in the shadow and background just like the charcoal. Then used the lighter color again to shade back over the shadow on this one to show how it looks blending with directional strokes instead of fingers. That can look great - think of a Van Gogh painting. 

So now let's carry this farther even if I'm using different colors. You can use any colors you like as long as one's lighter or darker, but complement pairs: red/green, orange/blue and yellow/violet all have a great combination and good neutrals where they blend. Other light-dark combinations like turquoise-dark blue or pink and purple may have brighter transitions. 

Blue-Orange Pear

First, I finger blended the background completely avoiding the stem. Then washed my hand and finger blended the pear, starting in the light color area and working toward the dark. After that, I went back over the whole pear again with the orange since the shadows looked too dark, and touched a little more blue in to rework from that - about 3 orange layers and 2 blue in the shadows on the pear itself. I darkened the shadow nearest the pear. After I went over the blended area, I only blended by going over it with the sticks. Finally, I used white to press hard and make white highlights on the light side of the fruit and went over the blue background with the white stick to lighten it and distinguish it from the shadow.

Finger blending makes a different texture than blending with an added color or the same stick. Stick blending makes a vibrant, almost sparkling texture with a lot of color intensity. Finger blending makes a softer shaded look but goes very easy and mutes color a little. Using both textures together can make a painting more interesting. 

If you do several of these on the same page it can look great! I put this up on my sketch wall because I liked the progression seeing them all together. It won't stay up long, as I do new sketches I take down the old ones and put them away. Always sign and date everything you draw!

"Warhol effect" pears page

If you spray fixative over the charcoal sketch before using the pastels, charcoal will be less likely to mix with your colors. I didn't this time and didn't mind the charcoal darkening the shadows, but depending on your color choices you might want to do that. Try this in many different combinations. Test different shading methods and techniques as you do, along with color combinations and even types of pastels if you have more than one brand available.

I might go back and do another version of this on archival paper with lightfast, artist grade pastels. But this shows you don't need those expensive supplies to start - you can get strong bold results with the cheapest supplies. The biggest differences are permanence, pigment strength and texture. All artist grade brands have different textures, but the one that most matches the smooth softness of student grade pastels is Blue Earth sticks from Dakota Pastels.

Here are some textures possible using student pastels on cheap brown Bee Bogus Recycled Rough paper - an inexpensive, wonderful brown paper very similar to brown paper grocery bags. With student pastels you might as well cut up grocery bags as they're not permanent and it makes a gorgeous middle value toothy surface! 

Chart of some mixing methods in pastels

Try all of these methods to shade the pears in your project. If you use a big sheet you could fill the page with six or 12 different pears, all in different colors and textures. The repeat of similar images with variations can make it a striking poster! Or you could fill several pages of a sketchbook with these studies.

Have fun and enjoy painting in pastels!

How to Shade Flower Petals in Watercolor

Shading flower petals in watercolor is easier than it looks. Controlling edges so that some edges are clean and hard while others are soft and gradual takes combining Wet in Wet techniques (for loose, soft flowing edges) and wet on dry - by a very simple process.

Below is a line drawing for a Bird of Paradise flower. I chose to use a Pigma Micron waterproof pen for the drawing so that it would scan easily and also to make it easier for readers to copy. Please feel free to copy my outlines or print this out to try coloring it. The lesson here is about shading, not about how to draw the outlines of a Bird of Paradise flower in detail. If you want to do a different flower, feel free to blow up the photo reference and trace outlines with a pencil, then transfer them onto watercolor paper.

I drew and painted this on my 7" x 10" Stillman & Birn Beta journal, which has bright white 180lb Rough watercolor paper. You may get good results with Cold Press (medium texture) or Hot Press (smooth) watercolor paper instead. The journal pages don't have the big dips and bumps that other brands of Rough watercolor paper do, just deeper dips and taller bumps. The smoother your paper, the easier it is to get a clean line with a pen or pencil - or the edge of your wet area.

The simple trick for shading flower petals is to just wet the area of one petal at a time. Get it good and wet so that it's shiny. Let it soak in and add a little more water so it's still shiny. Stay within the lines if you want those lines to turn into hard-edged forms, like the outside edges of a classic botanical painting against the white background.

Here, I'm using a Niji Waterbrush to wet just the big outer sepal, the leaf-like structure the flower springs out of, and the thick stem. There's a lot of shading in that structure and a variety of interesting colors flowing softly into one another, so that made the best example.

Below, I've swiped my Niji Waterbrush through the Payne's Grey pan and dipped into the Pthalo Green pan to get a greenish dark gray. I'm bringing the color all the way up to the edge of the wet area, but not over the whole structure. Just at the edge where I want that color to show. Be sure to pick up lots of color on your brush. Watercolors dry two steps lighter than they look when they're dry, so if it looks too light, add more color quickly before it dries. Don't be afraid to go too dark because it'll probably turn out fine.

Now I'm adding a band of the next color. I put a band of strong Pthalo Green overlapping the previous layer to make it darker, then I added a stroke of Olive Green right next to it to let the colors mingle. You can put rows of different colors, even complementary ones. A petal that's dark violet on the outside can shade gradually to almost white and get some golden yellow charged in right at the base. Or a rose petal can shade from pink through orange to golden yellow along its shape. Just paint each separate hard edged section as its own project.

When the petal or leaf is finished, let it dry completely before doing an adjacent one. I moved from doing this big petal to painting the orange petals, then while they dried I worked on the blue one, then I finally mixed a thinner mixture of Paynes Grey and green to shadow the waxy white structures connecting the orange and blue petals to the base.

Then I signed it with the pen. If you use a pencil for your sketch lines and work lightly, they can be erased sometimes after the paint dries. If you use a watercolor pencil lightly and do have color right up to the edges, you can dissolve the lines into watercolor and look as if you did it entirely without a sketch.

Another option is to use a light box. Put your line sketch under your watercolor paper and paint with the light box turned on. Then no outlines show under the watercolor and everyone thinks you've got miraculous brush control!

Enjoy this technique! Either try it with my Bird of Paradise sketch or try it with a simple flower that has several large, shaded petals. I will discuss other ways of shading with watercolors in later articles. For now, this is how to get smooth wet-in-wet color changes in a limited area.

Just wet only that area and paint whatever colors work for you. It really is that simple!

Pen Drawing Challenge

"A Page of Little Ari"
9" x 12"
Pitt Artist Pen - black brush tip (regular size not Big Brush)
Lanaquarelle 100% rag watercolor paper.
From life.

This page of life sketches of my cat, Ari, looks so simple. I've drawn this cat hundreds, maybe thousands of times, most of them while he's sleeping so I can get him to hold a pose for at least two minutes rather than two seconds or less in transition to a new pose.

Why this is a serious challenge is that I did it as an art trade with a professional artist, my teacher, Charlotte Herczfeld. Along with several of my pastel paintings, I answered her request for "A page of little Ari's, just the pen drawings you do in your sketchbook." She likes them. I post them constantly. I still suggest you choose something you really love, or someone you love, and sketch that beloved subject hundreds of times in your sketchbook.

Try to get used to drawing in pen without penciling or correcting pencil sketching first. It teaches boldness. Don't worry about mistakes. Don't plan it. Just start in your sketchbook page, draw what you see, keep it less than five minutes per drawing and do lots of them. If it's a pet or a person, let them move every two minutes so you get used to sketching a moving target.

Once in a while for fun, try drawing that subject from memory and compare to your life drawings.

The challenge of composing an entire page of life sketches in pen without corrections, preliminary penciling or using photo references is harder than it looks. The first few go on easily by habit. But laying out the space well so that the drawings create something like a visual path, so there's something of a focus in the whole and the page as a whole looks good - that's the big challenge.

I was inspired by pages of Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci's drawings all my life. Somehow these great artists filled the space perfectly. Sometimes the drawings overlapped but not in a way that obscured any of them. Leonardo combined subjects regardless of what they were - a human foot, a plant, a bit of machine, a pretty girl's face could all be on the same page and somehow make sense. A bit of a statue and a bird's wing would overlap and still make sense.

That's not what this page is. I just placed them carefully and varied the size within a range. The farther I got, the tougher it was to keep going with my original discipline of no pencil, no erasing, no corrections, no layout lines. I wanted the Page of Little Ari to have the genuine spontaneity of the many pages in my sketchbook that accumulated one or two or several Little Ari sketches.

Unless you've drawn your main subject hundreds of times, don't expect your page to be perfect. Just try it once in a while. It doesn't all have to be the same subject either - you can try to combine subjects the way Da Vinci did and it's fine to vignette just portions of a subject or overlap them in interesting ways. That'll be my next challenge. This wasn't my first page of small sketches on a large page that laid out well. I did dozens of line drawings of random fruit and flowers so that I could paint them with samples of Daniel Smith watercolor in a large Moleskine watercolor journal. I think it was close to 9" x 12" and some pages of it were on various watercolor pads that size.

I still haven't tried overlapping, but I will in future. Use any sort of pen you want unless you're going to sell or trade the page to someone you respect. The archival materials were because Charlie's going to frame and hang this Page of Little Ari - but yours doesn't have to be as permanent unless you want to frame it or it's for someone else. Just keep trying in your sketchbook for "a beautiful page."

Please feel free to post links to your pages and page layouts in the comments to this entry. A good place to post them is the Art Journals forum at WetCanvas, an art community where a number of my friends do absolutely gorgeous multi-image journal pages that inspire me. If you're new to the community, you need to join, be approved by admins in a day or two (it's big and they're busy) and then post three text posts before posting any images. Comments on other people's art are a good way to get reciprocated attention and support when you're a new member, so is an introduction post.

I'm very proud of the Page of Little Ari. I have a beautiful model whose soft foot rested on my shoulder a moment ago while he was grooming his luxuriant fluffy hair, and I have lots of practice drawing him. When you draw what you love, that's when you'll improve the most and be able to accomplish great things!

Breakthrough on New Supply Freeze

There should be a Latinate phobia name for this reaction. Artists from beginners to experts seem to run into it so often that it should have its own term. You buy something new and wonderful like Pan Pastels or Derwent ArtBars or Roche' pastels (the world's most expensive at about $16 a stick!) and then the happy package day arrives. You tear open the box like it's Christmas morning and you're seven years old again. Santa still loves you and wow, the fat man knew you loved color best of all.

Then comes the New Supply Freeze.

It's a sudden panic attack. How could I have bought 72 Unison pastels? Unisons! Those expensive hand rolled ones! In the fancy aluminum case no less! OMG these things are so perfect - how the heck can I ever get good enough to use these perfect hand rolled unbelievably awesome and expensive supplies. I tanked my savings getting them. I stretched my budget to the point of breaking. Now the magic brush/stick/pen is in my hand, I know I'm nowhere near as good as the artists I saw using them on YouTube.

That panic isn't just you.

Artists still feel this on up into their professional careers. Award winners sometimes feel this way about expensive brand-new supplies. The first page in a Stillman & Birn art journal or a Moleskine notebook, when you know you could've just got the cheap ProArt spiral bound one for sketching does that. Or the first use of an expensive sanded paper, or a new linen canvas with a fine portrait weave. Whatever it is, when you upgrade your art supplies to a new level, try a new medium and get the best available supplies, there's a natural terror that you're not ready for it yet.

Also, coming in from outside in a lot of social pressure surrounding myths like Talent, there's the panic that you may not be able to learn to be good enough to use the great new supplies. Support from friends and collectors can help shout down that panic. There are people besides your mother who love your art. There are teachers who knew you had potential and some of them brag on you. There are friends who paid you good money to paint something. Collectors who met your art before they knew you that became friends - and in that panic, you forget how they became your friends and think they only bought it to make you happy.

Naw. They bought it to make themselves happy. They fell in love with it. You really are good enough to use the great new supplies and they will help you to paint better.

Artist grade art supplies perform better than cheap stuff. Beginners are often discouraged because they see great effects done by professionals and experts, then try it with materials that can't perform that effect. No matter how new you are to a medium or to drawing and painting, you will actually get better results using the brand new artist grade expensive goodies than you would if you'd sensibly gone down the children's school supply aisle in the discount store for its equivalent.

I developed a method for handling that panic. It works for beginners as well as experts who just feel like beginners when facing a new supply or medium.

Start out by charting the good new stuff. Take out your sketchbook or a sample surface - if it's oil paints or something else used on canvas, use a cheap canvas board or canvas pad. Do swatches of it. Make test marks with it. Turn that into a simple left brained task. Label your swatches if you like, this will be an enduring record for when the new 'too good' supply is an old favorite and you run out of the color you use most. This really matters in dry mediums like pastels and colored pencils - when you have several hundred pencils or sticks, identifying the little nub with no number on it for replacement can only be done by going through the charts.

It works with paint too. You can tell the difference between brands sometimes, discover that blob of dried Ultramarine watercolor was the Daniel Smith French Ultramarine rather than the Winsor & Newton one. They have slightly different hues and textures, one will become a favorite.

Now you've broken the new supply's virginity.

If it's a new journal, take a back page and chart one of the supplies you use most in journals - all your ink colors, or a set of colored pencils, handy where you can reference the chart. Leave the front page blank so that later on when you get a good idea for an opening page you can create it. Or design the opening page on printer paper and then redo it on the first page carefully.

There's nothing that says your first painting on expensive Kitty Wallis pastel paper has to be alla prima off the top of your head, from memory, on impulse.

That's the other practical tactic to beat down New Supply Freeze.

First you chart. Then you chart mixtures, obvious common mixtures you've used often in similar supplies. See how the new supply handles. If you've never tried acrylics or oils or something, you'll start to get a feel for how they mix. Obvious beginner mistakes like trying to mix a light green by starting from a strong blue can happen on the mixing page instead of on your first painting. You can put "blue first" next to "yellow first" and see that you got a better green going first with the yellow.

By now you're starting to get a feel for how they handle. There's still the question of whether you can do a painting good enough to justify the expense.

Fight fear with reality checks.

Start doing thumbnail sketches. Do notans. Plan your painting. Do small color studies testing the material on its intended surface. Try out techniques in a small way and plan a serious painting by doing all the preliminaries. No matter what your skill level is, you'll come out with a much better painting doing all the planning studies.

Thumbnail sketches eliminate a lot of composition problems right at the start. Don't just do one. Take a sketchbook page and something common like an HB pencil or a free ballpoint pen from the grocery store and draw a dozen of them. Spend only a minute or two on each thumbnail. Pens are good because you can't go back and fix mistakes, you have to start over if a dark mark goes where you wanted light.

Choosing the best of the thumbnails, work out a value sketch in a bit more detail. Refine your idea.

Then do a color study, not full size, just work out the mixtures and exact hues and textures you'll want in the final painting.

Scale that up to your full planned size and wow... all of a sudden the first page in that Stillman and Birn Beta watercolor journal has a gorgeous watercolor or acrylic landscape on it. Your first pastel painting on sanded paper has depth and richness, it's a worthy painting. You look like a better artist than you really are.

Or rather, your skills shine at their best, because the really good artists out there are going through all those preliminaries when they do the knockout contest entry paintings that left you feeling so awed. They have sketchbooks with thumbnails in them. They have notans that were not worthy. They did color studies that came out ghastly and drew things misproportioned and goofed up putting in a cloud that looks like a horse when they didn't want a surreal flying horse fantasy painting.

Or they got that by accident in the color study and decided having a horse materialize out of a cloud would be a lovely spiritual or fantasy painting, ran with it and used the idea the mistake gave them. Mistakes are serendipity. Every stage of the process of breaking in your new supplies will teach you more about using them until your first piece with them is not only your best painting, it's better than you even thought you could do.

Reality Checks always trump the New Supply Freeze.

There's a reason it cost that much. That's care in its preparation, finer milling, greater pigment load, more expensive valuable pigments, unique effects that only that brand has in its proprietary chemistry and methods. The good news for self indulgent hobbyists who buy the best is that they will learn faster and consistently get better results.

High quality art supplies pay for themselves, including with shorter learning curves.

If you're a beginner starting watercolor, choose a smaller palette of colors and get expensive artist grade paint. It's stronger. You'll find out the small tube of artist grade paint will thin out and cover a larger area than the big tube of cheap student paint. You'll get effects with it that don't work as well with the student grade paints too.

My example is my first test with Derwent ArtBars. That is not actually a painting under the color chart. It's an idea for a painting, a quick color study done with Derwent ArtBars where I tested dry over dry color mixing and then washed it, tested wet in wet color mixing, swiped a wet brush over the watersoluble sticks to see how it handles as paint, did all sorts of things with it. Because I worked over some of the tests they're not as neatly organized as the examples I'll use in my review of the product. Because I just made up some of the rocks, they don't look as good as they would have if I'd set out some pebbles on my desk to sketch them from life.

It doesn't matter. That page let me find out how to handle my Derwent ArtBars and thus when I do the final version of ArtBar examples, they'll make more sense to my art supply review readers. That one was for me. The sticks aren't virgin any more and have now joined my sketch supplies. I will probably do more muted mixtures in the good example painting that I create for the review - but this one has the necessary mistakes to make my review illustrations look more professional.

Enjoy your new supplies. Just play with them and don't take the playful results that seriously - your first real painting with them will thank you for all the preliminaries.

Colored Pencil Shading and More

Today's art lesson is on colored pencil shading, especially skin tones and cylindrical objects. What do a brick silo and someone's face have in common? Well, both of them need to look three dimensional in your drawings. You'd be surprised how dark the shadows are compared to the highlights.

Your box of colored pencils usually gives you a light peach color that may be labeled Flesh on the assumption that anyone whose skin is Burnt Sienna or Cinnamon or Raw Umber will just get the artist pigment. So you're drawing someone pale and you fill in the face with that color. Fine. If they're a cartoon with black lines, you're done. Fill with flat color. But even in a cartoon, a well defined tan shadow will give that flat face a three dimensional look.

When you're trying to draw realistically, it'll be frustrating to look at that outlined face and get the color right but somehow be left looking at a pink cartoon instead of a three dimensional person. It's one of the huge mental flips every artist goes through in learning to draw - shadows are darker than you think they are. Things are not the color they are. What the heck kind of color is Flesh anyway, it looks like a plastic band-aid compared to anyone's real skin even if they're pale!

"Flesh" or as it's sometimes labeled more accurately "light peach" or "orange tint" is a highlight color. It may sometimes be a midtone color for a very light complexion where you'll use Ivory for the highlights or best of all, go very lightly with it and then burnish over it with Ivory.

The key to shading with colored pencils is not to go heavy till the last layer after you establish your shadows and mix your colors. The first illustration at the top of this lesson is some mixtures I created with a 12 color set of Derwent Inktense. I can do a dark or pale skin tone with any colored pencils I have in hand. It's a matter of pressing lightly and going over the shadow areas more than once with different colors.

Try this at home. Get out your colored pencils. See the shading bars. Do those with every one of your pencils - start out with a heavy application on one end and then color in pressing a little lighter as you move across toward the right. Or do them in reverse - start by barely touching the paper with the point of your pencil and gradually apply a little more pressure.

Below the first shading bars are the ones with the refined technique of Little Circular Strokes. This technique you just don't ever press hard. You just go over it again and again till it gets dark. Best to start from the light end and then work over and over it till you get to the far end.

Look at how most of those examples have lots of little flecks of paper coming through. You probably hate that. I did when I started with colored pencils. I ground down hard to get rid of them. You will, later, with a colorless blender pencil or a white pencil. This is how your colored pencils shading should look right up till the last burnishing layers if you want to expand your color range by combining colors.

These are light tonal layers. The shading bars demonstrate the variety of tones you can get with that color. What a very light application of Baked Earth looks like is quite a bit like Flesh, isn't it? Close to that light peach that people with pale skin have? If your set has at least one reddish brown like Sanguine, Henna, Baked Earth, Burnt Sienna, Cinnamon... then you have an easy one-layer skin tone base much better than using the Light Peach highlight color as your mid-tone.

The simple easy way to do skin is to use a reddish brown to create a value drawing of the person as if it was a shaded graphite drawing. Then go over that with the Light Peach as a burnishing layer. It's plausible. Not very exciting and we can get much richer skin tones paying attention to reflected color and shadow colors and so on, matching the person's exact complexion, the color of the light and the color of anything reflecting into shadows in true colored pencils realism. But if you just want a nice drawing that reads as a pale skin tone - that will do it. Maybe with a touch of dark brown in the deepest darks.

Practice those shading bars to gain control of your hand pressure. They make a great doodle. Keep a few stubs of colored pencils in your pocket or purse when you're at work and put shading bars on sticky notes, on used envelopes, on any scrap paper laying around. Anytime you're on hold, play with the pencils and try to control exactly how dark you get by pressure alone. The control of being able to create any value you want with a colored pencil is what will let you layer Fuchsia and Leaf Green (muted dark green almost a gray green dark) and put orange over that and somehow get a rich natural skin tone instead of a murky mess. My test swatches above are simple combinations.

Light tonal layers are the basis of colored pencils realism.

You'll find this technique in every good colored pencils instruction book. Exactly what strokes the artist uses to get soft gradations and smooth flat tonal layers will vary. Several of the professionals prefer keeping the pencils very sharp and doing tiny circular strokes.

I personally developed a habit of wearing down the pencil to a blunt point and letting it glide lightly over the paper in random directions, larger strokes. I go over a flat tonal area more than once touching on any patch that looks lighter than the rest. The only advantage of my self-invented Blunt Pencil method is that it's faster than sharpening it to a fine point and very delicately touching that fine point to make a smooth gradient. It took a little more pressure control to keep it from being blotchy, but I don't have to stop and sharpen the pencil as often.

Use what works for you in terms of sharpness, what direction your strokes overlap, how you keep them from forming accidental patterns in the smooth areas. Try for shading bars and also for flat areas of color - color in doodles with smooth tonal layers. Try to create three different middle values with one dark pencil - light, medium and darker medium - not counting "press hard and fill in every speck" as one of them.

Coloring books are a good idea for colored pencils artist. No, I am not kidding. Get one with good drawings and a theme you enjoy - flowers, tropical fish, stained glass patterns, dinosaurs... whatever you think is cool and wouldn't get bored coloring in. This is not just a child's toy. It's a grown artist's practice in controlling color and pressure without bothering to go through sketching the outlines first or planning a painting. It's color study at its finest.

For additional benefits, find the Human Anatomy Coloring Book that is still used in medical schools. You'll come to understand the human body better from studying how the bones fit together and the muscles fit on the bones, where veins run closer to the skin, the shapes of eyeballs - there is a lot you can gain from an anatomy book on how to draw human beings even if most of the illustrations are cutaways.

Also it's fun to make up your own colors. You could shade each little bone in the human hand three dimensionally as if it's a different color of fluorescent plastic. Tip - shade with a dark version of the color and then burnish with a light fluorescent color. Or trace that one out on good paper after you've planned the colors, fill in the background with black and actually hang the Fluorescent Human Hand Bones on the wall as a fun poster. You can get creative with coloring books.

Or go completely against what the subject is. Take all your browns and accent with spectrum colors, turning a book of butterflies into human skin colored butterflies. Give your dinosaurs human complexions. Whatever you do with the coloring books, it's less boring than just doing little square swatches.

Except when you have a painting in progress.

That's where leaving several inches of margin on your good Stonehenge or watercolor paper will let you test color combinations for specific areas of the painting - the way the green shirt reflects up on the underside of someone's earlobe is a good example. Or exactly how the colors shift in a pearl earring and how much easier it is to get that with overlapping tonal layers than just reaching for the French Grays in your Prismacolor set. The pearl will be more iridescent if you use the grays to establish value and then overlay different pale colors with each other to create varying, subtle and spontaneous grays by mixing complements. Pink and a light mint green make a good gray!



Here in this illustration I rapidly sketched a girl with the darker brown, Bark. Here's those tonal layers in action. The first layer, use the darkest color to lay in just the areas where shadows are deepest. This layer establishes value. Using the darkest pencil very lightly helps unify the shadows too, it isn't that obvious once the colors are mixed but it keeps the drawing from looking monochrome.

Then I sketched a similar head with the same values in Bark and went over that with the Baked Earth warm reddish brown. Any russet or rust color will work for this. Just use less pressure if it's a darker rust color and more of the darker color under it if you want it deeper than the value of the pencil used full blast.

This is the simplest skin tone mix - dark brown and rusty color on paper, using the white paper for the highlight. I did this on a cream colored page in my Stillman & Birn Delta art journal, so it's got a natural highlight color. If I were working on bright white paper I might have extended the Baked Earth all the way into the highlight but barely touched the tip to the paper, fussed over getting exactly the very light value of "bright sun on skin."

But back up in the swatches I tried some other combinations. Dark Indigo or some other deep blue or violet in shadows can look natural too. The color of the sky reflects into shadows. Using cool deep colors like violet, blue or green in the shadows of faces can make the skin color richer and more natural.

The old Italians, both the ancient Romans and the Renaissance painters, used green for the shadows on skin and went over that with the pink highlight color. This produces a rich skin tone and takes advantage of the effect of complementary mixing. Complementary colors are what's opposite on a color wheel - complementary pairs are violet-yellow, red-green and orange-blue. Mix them in the right proportion and you get gray. Mix them unevenly and you get a muted cool color or a nice brown.

It's that nice brown that often works well in human skin tone shadows. It'll be cooler than the highlight color. One thing I always did in Prismacolor painting was to intensify the light with Cream (Ivory in some other brands) by using it as the burnishing color on all the sunlit areas of the subject. Then I'd use Deco Blue or Lavender as a burnishing color in all the shadows. Bang. You do that over the local colors and all of a sudden the sunlight or indoor light is warmer and more intense. It doesn't change the local color of the subject. It just makes the light a little more obvious and the painting a whole lot richer.

For practice getting the values in someone's face right, use any dark color you please or a graphite pencil. Draw a tonal drawing from a photo or do your own left hand from life. Don't outline anything. Look at the edges between light and dark that are sharp edges, like the edge of someone's cheek against dark hair. It helps to take your photo reference and put it in gray scale on the computer so you can see the values clearly. Or just use a black and white photo, vintage photos are great for this.

Draw monochrome people until you're used to doing them as masses of tone. Then do a tonal drawing in your base dark color - deep brown, deep green, deep violet or blue, whatever you like. Shade up with tonal layers of rusty reddish brown and other colors until you have the skin tone colors right.

One artist who did beautiful realist portraits used to underpaint her Prismacolor portraits with bright pumpkin orange. Yep. Screaming orange. The translucent pencils modifying it produced beautiful rich skin tones in the half dozen or more layers she used to build on that orange layer. The orange wasn't that visible - but white over the orange used heavily made a good highlight. Cool colors over it instantly turned brown. Try that on watercolor paper - you can combine this with practicing a specific feature like ears or noses to get still more practice with tonal colored pencil drawing and color mixing.

Onward to the bonus lesson!



A friend of mine had trouble with a farm scene that had a brick silo in it. The barn was in gorgeous perspective and looked three dimensional, the silo looked flat because it wasn't shaded. Also the lines of bricks going around it were drawn more or less straight across, like it was one side of a rectangular silo instead of a curved plane. Curved planes are tricky.

But if you want to draw people, curved planes are essential and silos are a good place to start because they're a cylindrical object like limbs are. Bricks and sunburned faces are about the same hue if not the same value, you use the same brick red, russet, rusty red for both. Since I had the pencils out I just sketched how the perspective works for bands going up and down a cylinder in perspective.

This matters a lot. Pay attention to it in still lifes too. Vases are cylinders. Glasses are cylinders. Cans are cylinders. There are some geometric ways to calculate the exact curve, but I'm lazy and I freehand things. I eyeball it. The trick to eyeballing it is to know what to look for.

Practice drawing cans from life. Peel the labels off or wrap printer paper around them so that you don't get distracted by the lettering - or turn them so that the lines of lettering form curved lines going around the three dimensional surface.

When you're above the can, the top is an ellipse and the bottom a quite deeper ellipse. Set the can on the floor or a low table and look down at it. Got that? Sketch it from life that way, trying to get the curves accurate for how deep the ellipse is on the top and the exact curve of the bottom of the can.

Don't feel bad if you don't get it on the first try. An amazing number of otherwise brilliant painters reverse those proportions and destroy three dimensional accuracy when they do. People who charge hundreds of dollars for their paintings cleverly put flowers or something in front of the bottom of the vase so they don't have to deal with the ellipse. Or it's off by a little but you're so distracted by how beautiful the flowers are that you don't care.

Now try putting the can above your eyes. Hold it up, or sit on the floor next to a glass table looking up at it. You get the same thing in reverse - a simple oval of the bottom, a much rounder section of an oval at the top. If you use a clear cylinder like a water glass you will see the whole shape of the oval at the top doing this. With an opaque can, you'll see a section of that top oval.

Now back to the silo. Because it's a big cylinder taller than the artist, your eye level may fall right in the middle. What this kind of perspective does is tell the viewer where your view point is! There is no exact right way to do it in all instances. There's choosing that eye level to create the way the silo looks if you sat on the ground or stood up or stood in a ditch looking up at it.

The curves go in opposite directions if eye level is in the middle of the cylinder. Get out a mailing tube and put that on a table if you want to see this in person. Look up at the top - the ellipse will curve away from you at the outside, highest in the middle. Look down at the bottom - in this example, hidden by some foliage. The middle is the lowest part.

In between, any bands like lines of bricks or the ridges around the middle of a clean empty soup can without its label will become less prominent as they approach eye level. The line that's exactly at eye level will go straight across and not curve at all, if it's there. It's a little more esthetic to arrange the ridges so they curve slightly up and down around a space rather than a straight line, but either will work. I did the straight line version on this example.

Try this at home. Bare soup cans are very good for the exercise. In the case of photos of buildings, the camera can sometimes add extra distortion, which is why it's important to know how it works. Get the perspective on cylindrical buildings right and your towers, silos, flag poles and other cylindrical objects will look three dimensional even before they're shaded.

Look carefully at the direction of light or decide it if you made up the subject from imagination. More shadow will show curving around the side away from the light than the side near the light. But a little shadow will usually show even on the light side as it curves away from you.

Practice drawing short pieces of plain white PVC pipe to get cylinder shapes. This is also good for realizing just how dark shadows get on a white object - they will surprise you, going all the way down to an exact middle value or even darker depending on how stark the lighting is. Don't be afraid to push the darks. This doesn't change the impression that it's a light colored object.

What it does is show the viewer that strong light is falling on that white thing and it will still seem white even if the only bare paper is a tiny highlight on the vase that makes it look glossy. But that's another article - shading white and light things is its own study. For now just practice cylinders and skin tones, have fun with it and be sure to have extras in that rusty color because the more you do people, the faster it gets used up!

What Is Plein Air?

A good friend of mine on WetCanvas just asked me something in a note that gave me a good topic. A good free online course on Plein Air painting by Larry Seiler just started. I wasn't able to attend because I have conflicting commitments on the evenings he teaches, but my friend's question made me think.

"What do I do when I can't get out to paint plein air?"

First off, "Plein Air" really means "Paint Scenery from Life."

You don't have to get Out in order to do it. You can sit in front of your living room window and look at the scene you see every day, sketch it throughout the seasons or choose parts of it to do a painting. Snow, rain, sun, green or brown, you'll see different things every day following the same window and this does not demand having transportation, mobility or the stamina to bundle up and get out doing snow scenes in subzero weather.

You can even do interior paintings instead of outdoor landscapes and paint from life. That's still scenic, especially if a window's scene is part of the scene. Most contests list "landscapes and interiors" in the same category. So the room you live in can become as interesting as Vincent Van Gogh's little yellow room in Paris when you simplify it and choose the right viewpoint to show perspective and organize the painting. It takes the same skills as doing it outdoors and the light will still change in a few minutes, steadily, all day.

You can look at the scenery on your street instead of driving out to the wilderness. Urban landscapes are still plein air. Or drive out to the wilderness or get a friend to drive you - but then stay in the car painting through the window so you don't freeze and your paint doesn't turn into a solid ice cube.

There are also ways to simulate it for places you can't travel. One of the more interesting ways I've found to practice for plein air sketching is to put a nature video on television or on my computer and try to sketch something from the background of the video while it's running. It's all right to play it a few times over and over to really get in everything you want, but that's a good simulation of dealing with real wildlife. They're moving. So is the camera angle. So is the light.

You're not stopping to exactly copy nature drawing from a video reference. You'll have to average where the branch of the tree is when the wind's moving it around, instead of measuring it from the reference.

You can also ask a friend with a camcorder to go to a good location and take videos for you to paint from. That can help too.

What are the real advantages of plein air? They are the same as painting or drawing anything from life. If you have to rely on photos, it helps a lot to go outdoors and look at similar things. Set up some pebbles on your balcony or patio to look at the real color of their shadows on sand, maybe in a little dish of sand. That will help you compensate for the color and value distortions of photography.

The main point of plein air painting is to get accurate colors and values, a truer look at what you're painting than you'd have if you were painting just from the photo. So don't forget that you do have a memory.

I did the watercolor painting above, that little waterfall, from a reference. I supplemented it from memory though. I could not help remembering details of places with small creek waterfalls that I saw as a little kid on family road trip vacations out West. I remembered waterfalls I saw in my twenties when I couldn't paint but spent hours staring at them trying to remember how they looked. I remembered an artificial one in a conservatory set up to show off various mosses and how natural it looked - how perfect it was compared to the one shaded by trees that I'd seen as a little kid. I remembered all sorts of times when I saw white water in person.

The more I learn to observe from times I'm looking at it in person, even if I don't have any sketching tools in hand and before I was able to render these subjects, the truer my paintings are when they're done in the studio. Plein air painters usually bring home their small works and color studies. It's a comfortable size to paint 8" x 10" or 9" x 12" outdoors and then develop it into a much larger, more detailed studio painting later with the photos taken at the time on the trip.

Remember, you don't have to treat nature as if you were a camera. If there's an interesting little corner where weeds grew up through the concrete, you can just turn the concrete into dirt and leave out the rest of the city. Draw that little weedy bit and you might as well be out on the prairie. Intimate Landscapes are often easy to find in urban and suburban areas, especially when anyone's yard or garden has been neglected.

If you have a balcony or patio, you can get large pots and do deliberate plantings to give yourself something to paint just the way Monet designed his gardens. So what if it's no larger than a two foot wide box? It's still beautiful, still worth painting. Doing something like that at home has the advantage of returning to the spot day after day, season after season, to know it well in all its changes.

The little watercolor I posted with this entry was painted under similar time constraints as if I was painting plein air. It's a copy of a demo painting by Johannes Vloothuis. He edited his video, there were many passages that he cut past repetition of what he'd just done to get to the next bit that needed explaining. Or let paint dry offstage between cuts. So I worked smaller and worked fast to get it all in before the video ended, while I could still look at the broadcast.

Anytime you turn on Animal Planet and paint something in Africa or Australia or the UK or the USA, somewhere you don't live, try to finish a small study before the video ends. That's your best practice for actually painting outdoros under changing conditions. My painting did not turn out as a copy of Johannes Vloothuis's painting, not even a miniature. I changed a lot of things to simplify the scene and make it work.

Surprise, when you're out looking at a real mountain from a car window, it's okay to leave out the telephone poles or leave out that inconvenient ugly tree, or move it to the other side of the road. You're creating a painting, not snapping a photo. While most plein air painters are trying to record the scene for later use as a reference, others create beautiful paintings on the spot that are composed as much as a Hollywood set. The world inside the painting doesn't have to match the world outside. It only needs to be a good painting that pleases you and serves its purpose - and sometimes that's just remembering what color the sun on the trees was and the real value of shadows that turned black in the photo.

It's frustrating, especially if you haven't got a car or have mobility problems, to look at these happy hikers heading out with French Easels to trek over miles of rough terrain and come back with grand paintings of dramatic scenery. But if you can't paint the scene you love, paint the scene you're with...