Color Mixing Chart

Color-mixing chart with colored pencils

If you’ve done anything with watercolor at all, or even if you haven’t but you hang out on watercolor-related websites, then surely you know of Jane Blundell, queen of all watercolor mixing. Her blog is an unbelievable wealth of information on everything related to watercolors, especially paint pigments and what they look like when they’ve been mixed with other paints. Sometimes I go there just for the eye candy.

Several years ago when I took a brief watercolor class, I made a color wheel and small mixing chart for the primary palette we were using. I found the exercise interesting, but I didn’t understand enough about color temperature and other color properties to go beyond what we learned in class. And as much of a junkie as I am in terms of craving color in my immediate surroundings, I haven’t felt particularly compelled to make color-mixing charts for my vast quantities of colored pencils.

This week in the colored pencil class I’m taking, we focused on color mixing, and part of our homework is to make several color-mixing charts of the type Jane would be pleased by. Now that I’ve read a few art technique books and have some years past that brief watercolor class, I think I finally understand enough about color to learn from making color wheels and mixing charts.

An interesting aspect of colored pencils that we talked about in class is that their hues are mixed optically rather than physically. Unlike yellow and blue watercolor paints that are literally mixed together to make green, pencils are layered and remain independent hues, but our eyes experience them as a new color. The effect is closer to layering transparent glazes of watercolor rather than mixing liquid paints.

Shown above is my basic mixing chart (if you were expecting a neatly ruled grid, sorry – that would be Jane’s blog! 😀). I selected a warm and a cool shade in each of the three primaries plus green and then mixed them into the various permutations. The next chart I make will combine three primaries to achieve various grays, and mix each primary with its complement to make additional grays or browns.

If today’s sunshine continues into the weekend, I’m going to have a problem staying indoors to finish my homework! (But this part of the homework is so much easier than the second part – drawing a partly cloudy sky!)

Luna Park Café

2/14/17 brush pen, ink, water-soluble colored pencils

A few weeks ago after sketching at the Nucor Steel Plant, a few of us ended up at Luna Park Café for lunch. It’s a funky old place in West Seattle full of fun décor from the ‘50s and ‘60s. It’s named for an amusement park that operated for a short time at the turn of the previous century (and the park’s name was apparently inspired by Coney Island’s Luna Park). Vintage photos of the park and area hang throughout the café.

Greg had an appointment in West Seattle yesterday morning, so he dropped me off at the café first. While I nibbled on a cinnamon roll, I sketched a booth with a huge blue guitar above it. I was thinking about sketching the tiny juke box at my table (each booth has one) when Greg finished his appointment and joined me for brunch. I left the juke box for next time – I’m sure I’ll be returning to the fun.

A tiny juke box at every booth.

Vintage posters and lunch boxes are part of the fun decor.

Yeah, I ordered a whole breakfast after scarfing down half a cinnamon roll! Uff.
Look at Greg's egg and hash brown concoction smothered in Hollandaise!

Small Page, Big Picture

2/13/17 ink, brush pen, graphite, Field Notes notebook

The sun came out today, and I was eager to try one of the exercises we did in Gabi’s “Pocket Urban Sketching” workshop to firmly cement the concept in my brain. I took a 3 ½-by-5 ½-inch Field Notes notebook (same size as the Stillman & Birn we used in class) and hit the streets.

When I sketch a neighborhood street scene from my car, I usually choose an intersection and include a parked car and some trees – and that’s typically the horizontal scope of my view (using a 6-by-9-inch page). I found such an intersection today in the Bryant neighborhood, but instead of focusing on the usual view, I looked as far to the right and left as I could see easily through my windshield. Holding up my pen against the height of the house on the right plus the tall tree behind it to determine my measuring unit, I roughly measured out all the other elements that I intended to include in the composition – the other trees in the background and foreground, the parked vehicles, the utility poles and the house on the left. Imagine that – they all fit!

Mind you, that concept is not new to me; in fact, I use it all the time to gauge the relative size of one side of a building compared to its height, the size of a car compared to the tree next to it, or the length of a guy’s arm compared to his torso. But I never really pushed myself to use the same technique to make any scene fit onto any paper space – it just seemed easier to choose a narrower scope. Now I realize it’s not difficult at all!

While I don’t always want to squeeze this large a view into such a small page, it’s nice to know how to do it when I want to. Sometimes I want to include more detail, so a smaller scope is appropriate. But there are many times when I do want to capture a fuller sense of the type of neighborhood or general area by showing more context. It happens frequently when I’m traveling. Being able to do this easily and quickly will be a helpful sketching tool.

Pocket Urban Sketching with Gabi

Three small vignettes 

Gabi Campanario kicked off Seattle’s series of Urban Sketchers 10x10 workshops with “Pocket Urban Sketching” – an introduction to using the small sketchbook format. Going back to his roots, Gabi showed us some of the many small books he filled before he ever conceived of Urban Sketchers. The portable format enabled him to sketch whenever he found a moment to capture an image, and he encouraged us to do the same.

“A small, easy-to-carry notebook makes sketching less intimidating and is ideal to create fast drawings on the go,” he said in his class handout, and he spent this morning showing 14 sketchers how to put a large picture onto a tiny page.

Three small vignettes 

Amazon campus in the South Lake Union neighborhood was our workshop site. On this cold morning (I sure was glad I wore my down jacket and fingerless gloves!), our first exercise was to create a spread of three vignettes in varying sizes. Making a small-, a medium- and a large-sized image on the same spread gives visual variety and interest to the composition. White spaces can be filled with the date, journal writing and other notations.

Our second exercise was to make a single wide cityscape across the page spread. (This is my personal sketching challenge and the reason I took the workshop: I always feel like I need a large page to capture a large scene, and yet I know it’s just a matter of scaling. I wanted to learn how to fit it all in!) Standing on a street corner facing the Amazon spheres, Gabi demonstrated how he first decides the scope of his composition, then chooses a building to be the relative measuring gauge for everything else that will appear in the sketch.

7" x 5 1/2" page spread

As we started the exercise, my first inclination was to walk across the street to get as far away as possible from the spheres so they would become “smaller” in my eyes. But I wanted the challenge of the full, in-your-face view, so I stood close to the spot Gabi stood for the demo. I was pleased by how much I got into the spread (at left)!

I think both exercises – the three small vignettes and the wide cityscape across a spread – are ideal for travel sketching, because I’d be able to capture more small images in shorter periods of time. We were given 3 ½-by-5 ½-inch softcover sketchbooks (donated by Stillman & Birn) for the workshop, and I think I might use the rest of mine to practice these concepts before the next time I travel.

It was a fun and informative morning learning from Gabi, and it was also a privilege to take a workshop from the Seattle Sketcher!

Gabi demos how he fits a huge scene into a small sketchbook spread.

Gabi discusses the three vignettes exercise.

Chilly workshop participants listen attentively!

US Bank Centre

2/10/17 brush pen, ink, colored pencil

US Bank Centre, a retail/business office building in the middle of downtown Seattle, was a pleasant indoor space for winter sketching this morning for the small Friday sketch group. Three floors are open to the public with lots of art, seating, small tables and wide windows.

I picked a window on the second floor to sketch a couple of the globe lamp posts on Fifth Avenue and a tree between them. Then when I stopped to chat with Anne on the third floor, I looked down over the railing and spotted Steve Reddy sketching a small sculpture on the floor below. He’s a slow sketcher, so I thought I had plenty of time, but I must have caught him just as he was finishing up because I only had a minute or two to look over his shoulder, literally.

For the last few minutes before the sketchbook throwdown, I pulled out a pencil to sketch the back side of the stone archway on the main floor. (Apparently it came from the old Music Box Theatre.) Staying on the back side kept me from attempting all the ornate details.

2/10/17 ink, colored pencil

2/10/17 graphite

After lunch, a few of us got a bonus treat: David Chamness works on US Bank Centre’s 24^th floor and invited us upstairs. The huge lobby window faces west toward Elliott Bay. Kate and Vivian were happy to simply enjoy the view, but you know me – I couldn’t resist a quick attempt to capture as much as I could without a panoramic sketchbook. My thanks to David for letting me stay a few more minutes to finish up. (In April I’ll be taking David’s 10x10 Urban Sketchers workshop called “Freedom from Worry and Details” to learn how to do this right!)

2/10/17 graphite, brush pen, colored pencils

Mountains

2/9/17 colored pencil, smooth Bristol (work in progress; photo reference)

Suzanne Brooker has a systematic way of teaching landscape drawing. In the first class, we worked on the fundamentals of the three-dimensional form by focusing on a tree trunk in monochrome. The following week we used three colors to study a tree’s foliage. Last week the focus was on composition and perspective to show distance and foreground. Each class builds on the concepts learned previously, and we add more hues to our colored pencil palette.

This week the focus is on mountains. As usual, we’re paying particular attention to the way light and shadow describe the distant forms. After choosing an especially boring photo to work from last week, I made sure I picked a mountain photo with some visual impact. I’ve been working harder on getting darker darks with colored pencils, and last week’s image had only a small area of really dark trees, so the shadows in this photo seemed like a good opportunity to practice.  

Reference photo

It’s been raining cats and dogs almost continuously today, so I spent most of the morning on this exercise (taking frequent short breaks). I need to work on deepening some of the mid-values, and the sky needs more work, but I’m happy with the dark shadows I got. A little more work later this week, and I hope it’s done.

It All Counts

1/23/17 graphite

Yesterday I read an interesting blog post by Liz Ackerley, whom I had the pleasure and honor of working with in Manchester last summer when we both served as correspondents for the Urban Sketchers Symposium. She described her process of the past few years as she made the commitment to draw daily and how that process changed. Always interested in the creative process, I was especially fascinated to learn how similar our paths have been.

When I first began drawing, the philosophy behind urban sketching was so compelling and resonated so deeply with me that it’s all I wanted to do – draw from life, on location; tell a story with my sketches, no matter how simple; share everything I sketched. I still practiced a lot of non-location sketching at home – still lifes, from photos, lots of self-portraits and my own hand – especially during the bad-weather months. But all those other types of drawing felt like they were “just” practice and didn’t really “count.”

2/2/17 brush pen, gel pen

After several months of that, I must have realized that my line of thinking was ridiculously narrow and that, of course, all of it does “count”! Indeed, the practice I was doing at home – with time, space, and comfort on my side – was probably more constructive and beneficial in improving my drawing skills than trying to learn to draw while also battling the elements and other constraints that make urban sketching challenging. Once I widened my view that way, all of it became more fun – and as a result, I learned more.

That was the point that I began blogging. I realized a blog would give me a place to document my entire process – not just the stories of my urban sketches but also everything else I was learning along the way.

To this day, drawing on location is still the most compelling and personally satisfying type of sketching I do. At the same time, I fully appreciate the value of working in other ways – a studied colored pencil piece that takes hours of diligent work; a five-minute cartoon; a simple object on the street or on my desk without a “story.”

1/31/17 colored pencil

Liz concludes her post with a list of key tips for herself. Reading the list made me realize that I’ve developed a set of personal guidelines, which at first seemed remarkably similar. On second thought, though, maybe it’s not so remarkable; maybe many people explore creativity along a similar path. In any case, here are my current guidelines:

• Draw every day, no matter how small or simple (or complicated) the subject. It’s not the result that matters; it’s the process.
• Lower my standards about what is “sketch worthy.” A lamp post is as worthy as a cathedral.
• Sharing can be as quick and dirty as a “trophy shot” posted on Instagram; it doesn’t have to be a perfectly scanned image. Conversely, I don’t have to share anything if I don’t want to. As Liz puts it, “You don’t have to prove to others that you are a dedicated sketcher!”
• Have some kind of sketchbook available everywhere, always. No exceptions. It doesn’t have to be the same sketchbook, however. In fact, I’ve found it’s better to have several going at once – a primary one in my everyday-carry bag; a pocket-sized one in any other bag I might use; one in the car; one in every room. (Even walking upstairs to get a sketchbook might distract me long enough to keep me from a sketch!)
• Carry a variety of media in my everyday-carry bag for different circumstances and available time. At the same time, remember that a monochrome line drawing can be just as satisfying as full color. Just because I’m carrying it doesn’t mean I must use it!

Liz adds one last tip that I couldn’t agree with more heartily: “always always have fun and enjoy the process. If not, there was no point in it!” Here’s to fun and enjoying the process!