A Very Thin Woman
It was good to go to figure painting class today. The model was wonderful, she was older, had a soulful expression, and her thin limbs were interesting to sketch. Our goal was to paint directly on the paper without first making any sort of line with pen, pencil or paint. As we painted, we were to define the shapes using color, textures and amount of paint.
This is a gouache painting on black paper.
Spring Comes to The Homestead Trail
I took the photo that this picture is based on while biking on the Homestead Trail at Prince Edward Island National Park earlier this month. It was still pretty cold, at least to my California bones, and most of the deciduous trees were without leaves. The bare trees and their shadows dominated the forest trail and it was so gorgeous that I had to stop to take pictures.
I am working this week to learn how to draw from photos and today focused on getting a relaxed flow to the sketch. In contrast to the way I worked on the last few sketches, I began today by placing just a few marks in pastel before beginning to paint. I was curious if this might make the sketch feel a little looser than my other recent sketches, which were fully drawn in before I started painting. I don’t think it made a difference.
This is a gouache and pastel sketch on black paper.
Dining Room in Vermont
I continued today to use photos as the basis of my sketch. This is from the dining room of friends who live in Vermont. I liked the look and feel of the room and thought the way the sunlight entered the room from the lower left side set it off nicely.
I have been doing more analysis of the photos I draw from than I do of a scene when live sketching. There is something about looking at the photo that makes me worry about placing the objects down in a way that conforms to the photo. The photo has one point of view and that is all I see. When live sketching I turn my head and shift my view as I develop the composition from the range of what I see.
This is a pastel and gouache sketch.
Father and Child
On my second day of learning to sketch from photos I decided to do a companion piece from yesterday’s sketch, Mother and Child. I had a photo of the father cradling his sleeping baby while stretched out on the couch with his feet on the coffee table. I thought it conveyed how loved this child is and how much babies want to be held by their parents.
A challenge in using photos is the proportions can be odd due to the angle the camera is held at. In the photo I used today the father’s legs were way too short. I measured and matched the proportions in the photo to my sketch but thought it looked wrong. It took me several tries to even understand the source of the problem and then a few more to make the changes.
A second challenge today can be a challenge when doing live sketching as well. Sometimes the scene needs to be redesigned so the composition has more flow or rhythm. In today’s sketch I wanted a diagonal flow from upper left to lower right so the original round coffee table became a rectangle and the L-shaped sofa lost its side seats.
This is a pastel, gouache and Procreate sketch.
I always say I can’t draw from a photo, but I got to wondering if, after 23 months of daily sketching, if this is still true. I took so many great photos on our trip and would love to use these as a basis for some paintings. I imagine there are techniques that I could learn if I put in the time and research. This next week would be a great time to figure this out.
One problem I have with drawing from a photo is the photo is too small for me to see the detail. Today I used my iPad to enlarge parts of the photo when I needed clarity and this worked pretty well. I practiced drawing some of the unclear parts and then drew several complete sketches before painting two of them. A second challenge is it is tempting to copy the photo instead of using it to convey a message, which is one of my major goals for this blog. It took some time to get a natural looking sketch with rhythm and movement, but I am encouraged by the final sketch.
When we were in Chicago I drew this same baby with his dad as we sat in their living room. I wanted to get a sketch of the baby with his mom as well, but time ran out. In both sketches I wanted to show the bond between parent and child.
This is a pastel and gouache sketch.
In the series of travel sketches I just completed, I somehow skipped over Arizona, my home state. I want to fill this gap by posting this sketch that I made as we drove past the irrigated fields near Buckeye yesterday.
This is a pastel and gouache sketch.
Home Is Just Over the Laguna Mountains
After a month on the road the sight of the Laguna Mountains in the distance made me so happy. As you drive west from El Centro the mountains first come into view as a faint blue smudge and within 30 minutes transform into an immense purple structure. The larger the mountains became, the more my excitement grew.
During our trip to Prince Edward Island and back I sketched many views of the road ahead and wanted to end our trip with one more. The challenge of sketching while driving is that nothing holds still and it is easy to get a mess instead of a coherent view. I work around this by selecting some big structures of the scene and then use these to organize the sketch.
Today I began by outlining the road and the smaller blue mountain on the left. It made an interesting curve down across the page and gave places for the sky, vegetation and cars. I worked on these smaller sections, one by one, by sketching whatever was in front of me at the moment. I saved the sky for last. When I went to work on it the mountains appeared much larger and much more purple than when I began the sketch 20 minutes earlier. I decided to add a second layer of purple mountains using some of the space that the sky was going to go in. Then to connect the new mountains to the whole picture I put some of the purple color onto the highway.
This is a pastel and gouache sketch with some editing in Procreate.
Deliberate Sketching 