Found a beautiful book, The Art of Movement by Ken Brewer and Deborah Ory. It’s a collection of dance photography. It’s a great book to study figures and motions. I did some sketches and drawings from it:
Dancers, watercolor on paper, May 2020Couple Dancers, watercolor on paper, May 2020Infinity, charcoal on paper, 18 x 24 in, May 2020
The last one is a strange pose. It has an enclosed and squarish quality and a lot of symmetry. The lighting is mainly top-down, making it more grounded and static. It’s not a composition that I would normally choose to work on. On the other hand, there’s a nice contrast between the infinity loop formed by the arm, and zig-zag pattern formed by heads, torso and the legs in the middle. There’s tension and connection between the two dancers at the same time and that’s what I was aiming for when starting the piece. However, as I worked on, and as always, I was distracted by the details, and lost my focus. I think the zigzagging is there, but the details of the hands cut in the flow of the loop. I also think the value contrast is not enough and shapeless. I think this is mainly because I am still copying what I see instead of using it as a reference to create. I hope when I have a better grasp of human figure, I could look beyond the photo and draw my interpretation.
I changed the title of the previous post for better record keeping. I am still staying home, still doing art.
This week I tried triads – 3 colors evenly spaced around the color wheel. A word on color wheel: I use a commercial one from The Color Wheel Company. Many artist make their own, especially if you work in watercolor, because different brands of colors do differ slightly. It makes sense to lay out your frequently used colors in a circle, add shade and tint, or even make a value chart for each of it. You can also make a list of the complementary, analogous and triadic color schemes. I think this kind of work may help you to understand your color better, and I always feel like I should do it, but … What can I say? I am lazy and unorganized.
Back to triads. They are somewhere between analogous and complementaries. Much more vibrant than the former, and less contrasting than the latter. More importantly, the color spectrum yielded is much richer – if you mix them properly, they can give you almost everything.
That caused a problem for me. As you can see from my first try, I used red, blue and yellow, and I mixed them, got everything, and confused myself. What’s the difference between using a triad and using everything then?
Portrait of a Young Woman, watercolor on paper, 7.5 x 10 in, April 2020
So I tried to separate the colors in later attempts:
Portrait of a Young Woman, watercolor on paper, 7.5 x 10 in, April, 2020Portrait of a Young Man, watercolor on paper, 7.5 x 10 in, April, 2020
Of course later after a few minutes of googling, I found out that when using a triad in a design, you usually choose a dominant color and that’s how to differentiate it from using everything.
So far I’ve tried some of the most commonly used color schemes. These are things I learned from doing these studies:
Limiting palette helps me to explore the potential of each color more extensively.
It also forces me to pay more attention to value.
Colors are very distracting, so it’s good to have a strategic approach. Do I want a harmonious piece or a contrasting one? Do I want the solemnness or the richness? Etc.
Restrictions spur creativity.
There are more color combos one could explore: tetrad – four colors consisted of two sets of complementary; split complementary – choose one color, and add the two on each side of the complementary (a narrower triad) etc. Maybe I’ll come back to these in future. Maybe.
Based on my very limited survey, this is how people around me spend their time nowadays: cooking; shopping online for groceries; cleaning and reorganizing their homes; zoom meetings. I have my fair share of cooking and shopping everyday, and decided to do some house keeping for a change. And these are the thing I dug out:
Sorry for the weird shadows in the pictures. Obviously the person who took the photos for me also wanted to sign the paintings with his shadows. To some extend, this is a Chinese tradition among art collectors. In some old Chinese pieces, if you see many seals filling in the empty spaces, many of them are not belong to the artist, but the collectors (a way to say “this is mine!”).
Most of the paintings above are done by copying old masters. This is the way of learning traditional Chinese painting through time. In some of these pieces, I combined elements from different paintings and I remember the teacher was quite surprised by that “Oh, you started creating already!” Composing your own piece usually follows years after years of copying, and it’s not a common thing for beginners. Since Chinese paintings are usually signed and dated with Chinese calligraphy, that’s another thing you are supposed to practice for years by copying masters.
Staying home is a good time to copy and study old masters. This is probably the most efficient way of improving skills, but if you only do that for longer period of time, the side effect might be daunting your creativity. Strike a balance.
I know the title “Stay Home Doing Art” is a bit misleading this time. It is actually stay home digging out art. Hope next time I could post “doing art” for real.
J. W. Hill (1812-1879) was a British born American watercolorist and lithographer. I came across his work in a still life anthology and was taken with soft, serene and tangible feeling he created with watercolor, quite different from the wet-in-wet method I was taught in. Upon close-up examination, it is full of tiny strokes, like an engraving. Some of the strokes in the background created interesting patterns and was applied in a very painterly way. Maybe that’s how you do impasto with watercolor! 😁
In my copy, I didn’t go for the strokes. I was at a moment that my colors often ran wild. I think Hill’s Study of Fruit is a good example of unity and harmony with colors, and that’s what I went for.
I almost missed this: obviously yesterday was J. W. Hill’s birthday. So happy birthday Mr. Hill! 🎂
J.W. Hill, Study of Fruit, 1877. Watercolor on paper, 6.13 x 10.63 in.
This was an assignment from a painting class (acrylic) a while ago. The purpose was to learn impasto. I chose ginger because I thought the bumpy, textured surface might go well with the technique, and also I usually bought them in bulk from Costco.
It’s a small painting with a single object, and I figured I could get it done in no time. I was so wrong.
There were two things that I couldn’t get used to. First, as someone who started painting first with watercolor, I wasn’t used to putting a lot of paint on canvas. For the purpose of this assignment, we were supposed to achieve a measurable thickness. And acrylic, a water-based medium, dries flat! I ended up working in layers, waited for a long time (longer then usual acrylic time at least) for the paint to dry, and went back to add more and more.
Another thing was the purpose of impasto technique itself. It supposed to be more about expressiveness than rendering, and I had trouble leaving my strokes in and my details out. So I kept going back and forth adding things in and taking them out. I have done so many paintings on this tiny canvas, and what a heavily loaded ginger! 🙂
I posted this landscape in acrylic before, and I recently uncovered a watercolor version of it. So, sorry for repeating myself, but it’s interesting to look at them together:
Path, acrylic on canvas board, 12 x 16, 2015Path, watercolor, 2015
I like the less defined forms and more spontaneous color ranges a wet-on-wet watercolor creates, but I also like the dark values the acrylic painting can bring out. The reference I used for the two is the same, and whatever difference you see from the these paintings are not by design. It seems the mediums just lead me there. How bizarre!
