Getting Over the Color Barrier

3/17/17 colored pencils

Whenever I see the work of artists who liberally interpret hues in lively ways (and here I’m talking about urban sketches and other realistic work, not abstract art), I’m awe-struck with admiration. Grass and trees don’t have to be green – whaaaat?? My eye is delighted, and my brain accepts it, yet when I try to do it myself, I feel stumped. Ummm, those trees look green. What color would I make them, if not green?

The colored pencil class I’m taking is helping me “see” many more hues in those trees besides green, which is essential for rich shading and modeling, so I’m hoping my exploration of color eventually expands into my urban sketching, and I won’t be such a slave to “actual” hues. Because of the class, I’m also getting a bit braver about using color complements to help with and even direct the hues I choose for shadows. I’ve been doing this a lot in the class exercises I’ve been showing the past few weeks, but it’s not always obvious because so many colors are blended together. It’s not a new concept to me – in every book I’ve read about painting and watercolor, the color wheel is shown, and invariably the author discusses how a palette can be made more complex and yet cohesive by using complements. But understanding it and doing it are very different things!

The limited primary palette I started experimenting with even before taking the class has helped me tiptoe in that area, too. I’m not at the point yet where bananas are blue, but I tried this still life using only three primary pencils plus a complementary purple for shading. I have to admit that the addition of purple makes this simple still life richer.

Frankly, I’m not intending to make blue bananas – that’s moving more into the world of imaginative or abstract work that I’m not ready for! – but color is a wide realm within the range of what the brain accepts as believable and “real.” I want to be bolder about poking around in that range!

A Sunny Recycle Day

3/16/17 ink, colored pencil

It’s not often that I can get a yellow fire hydrant and a row of blue and green recycle bins in the same sketch. And please note the blue sky and shadows! Although the stiff breeze kept me in the car, it still felt good to get out and put my urban palette to work.

I sketched this yesterday but saved it for today so that I’d have a bit of green for St. Patty’s Day! 

Sunrise at Bryce Canyon (Plus Splender and Paper Experiments)

3/16/17 colored pencil, Strathmore Bristol vellum paper (photo reference)

When we visited Bryce Canyon several years ago, the highlight of our stay was seeing the sun come up behind all those strange hoodoos, which cast amazing, rapidly changing shadows. We woke at 4 a.m., drove to the park, jockeyed for space in the best viewing area (several busloads of tourists were there, as well as dozens of photographers with their cameras on tripods all pointing in the same direction) and waited for the sun, shivering in the sub-freezing temperatures.

For this week’s colored pencil class assignment on sunset or sunrise skies, Suzanne said we could bring our own reference photo, so I chose one (bottom of page) from the many Greg took at Bryce that morning. I recomposed the view a bit liberally; since the lesson was sky colors, I didn’t want to get distracted by silhouettes of too many trees.

Unlike a couple of weeks ago when I kept procrastinating in getting started on the homework, this time I jumped right in and finished it in two sessions (about four hours total for this 6-by-7 inch piece). I felt a bit more inspired and motivated because the photo image was meaningful to me. And of course the color junkie in me was excited to use all those oranges and lavenders that I rarely get to use as an urban sketcher. It took me quite a while to choose a cohesive palette that was bright but not garish.

I’m happy with my pencil choices but not with the paper I used. For the previous class exercises I had been using Canson Bristol smooth paper, which is like hot press watercolor paper or Stillman & Birn’s Zeta series in texture. Although I like the smooth finish that can result, I’ve also been frustrated by how difficult it is to get a really dark value on it. After multiple layers of colored pencil pigment, the Bristol smooth paper’s fine tooth seems to flatten, and it’s almost impossible to apply more pigment.

When I make small still lifes at home, I’ve been happy with Stillman & Birn’s Alpha paper, which has a surface similar to cold press watercolor. I happened to have a pad of Strathmore Bristol vellum, which has a similar tooth, so I thought I’d give it a try. I don’t mind the texture that appears on the sky, which makes the work look a bit like pastel. But it was hell trying to get the dark blue ground to be a solid flat hue. I must have put on something like 10 layers, and I can still see the white specks of the tooth. It reminds me of the crayon drawings I used to do in elementary school! 😕

One new thing I tried for this assignment is a Lyra Splender, a colorless blending stick that Suzanne recommended. On my own, I’ve tried a Caran d’Ache Full Blender Bright, which is a hard plastic tool that intensifies colored pencil when it’s used after all the pigment has been applied. I think the result is that it flattens the remaining paper tooth, because after using it, it’s almost impossible to apply more pigment. So you can’t use it until you are certain you don’t want to apply more.

Bryce Canyon, sunrise, Sept. 2012

The Splender stick, however, looks like it is made of wax or some other binder material similar to what colored pencil cores are made of (but without the pigment). After applying several layers of colored pencil, Suzanne suggested applying the Splender stick with a fair amount of pressure. Counterintuitively, the application of wax (or whatever it is) primes the existing pigment layers so that they can take even more pigment. I ended up going through several cycles of pigment/pigment/pigment/Splender to try to get that ground as dark and flat as possible, but I still wasn’t completely successful.

As with watercolor or any medium that is applied to a paper support, the choice of paper is just as important as the medium, and the relationship between the paper and the pigment makes a huge difference in the result.

Past Due

3/13/17 brush pen, colored pencils

Some people in my ‘hood still have Christmas lights up on their houses, so I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised to see this ornamented tree in a traffic circle.

It’s a good thing I went out in my mobile studio yesterday when I could still see between the raindrops on the windshield to sketch this (I stuck my finished sketch out the window for a second to catch a bit of local DNA). Today the rain is pouring down in sheets, not drops.

But I know those of you in the East and Midwest are shoveling again, so I’ll keep my mouth shut. Stay safe, everyone!

Preparing My (Optimistic) Urban Palette

My optimistic palette

Shown below is the five-day forecast, and it looks very similar to the previous five (or more) days. I’m still sketching from my car, but continually turning the wipers on and off gets tiresome. Sigh.

In the meantime, I’ve been shuffling around the water-soluble colored pencils I carry in my everyday bag. Shown here is my freshened “urban palette” – a fairly standard range, plus the more unusual “construction zone yellow” and “recycle bin green.” I was about to take out the pink pencil, which has been in my bag since the Women’s March, but then I thought about the cherry trees. Exactly one year ago today, Urban Sketchers Seattle met at the University of Washington’s Quad to sketch the blossoming sakura. What a difference this year is! The leafless, budless trees are nowhere near blossoming. Sigh.

Trying to be optimistic, I left the pink pencil in.

Any signs of spring in your neck of the woods? Send some my way!

Sigh.

100 Apples This Week, Anyone?

Fed up with people, I’ve gone back to fruit. 😉

3/11/17 colored pencils

104 Total for #oneweek100people2017 and Learnings

3/6/17 brush pen

Yesterday I asked whether you were sad or relieved that the #oneweek100people2017 initiative was almost over. Now that it is over (I hit 104 today!), I have to say I’m a little of both. I really did have so much fun that I felt like I could continue making 20+ sketches of people every day indefinitely and enjoy it. But a smaller part of me was relieved to be done because I enjoy sketching many different subjects, not just people, and it’s hard to make time for anything else if I’m counting heads all day! I’m happy I participated, and I look forward to next year’s One Week 100 People. (Based on the inspiring worldwide participation I saw by viewing the hashtag, I told Marc Holmes it’s going to have to become an annual event!)

3/6/17 brush pen

In his introductory blog post, Marc said that if you make 100 sketches “over a whole week, at least ONE will be amazing.” I don’t know if I ever achieved “amazing,” but I definitely had a few favorites out of the 104, specifically those that best met my personal goal of evoking an individual – not a generic symbol – with as few marks as possible. I’ve shown those favorites here. (A collage of all of today’s sketches are in my Flickr photostream and on Instagram.)

One of my favorite viewpoints today also turned out to be my most challenging: looking down on the curving line of people at the Assembly Hall Juice & Coffee counter (below). Such perspectival trickery! But it’s the sketch that got me to 104.

3/10/17 ink

Here’s what I learned from taking part in the challenge:

3/7/17

Even if the sketches are fast and gestural, it really helps to be able to see the subject well. I know this seems like a no-brainer, but I didn’t really think about it until I started looking over my sketches from days 1 and 2 and compared them to today’s. I had much better lighting at Zoka Coffee and the Northgate food court, and it shows in my sketches. Today it was much darker at the Via6 apartment/retail complex in South Lake Union, which was an outing with Urban Sketchers Seattle. Except for the few I did on the bus, I sketched most of my subjects looking down on them from the complex’s upper level, so they were quite a distance away and usually backlit. I found myself trying to guess at lines I couldn’t really see, and that usually yields mediocre results.

3/7/17 brush pen

Liz Steel mentioned on her blog that taking part in One Week 100 People has made her much more confident about sketching people. While I can always benefit from the practice of sketching 100 people in a week, it occurred to me that it’s not a challenge I really need because I sketch people regularly anyway (at least in the winter months). What I really should be doing, I commented to Liz, is sketching 100 buildings in a week! OK, that might be too aggressive. But maybe 10 buildings in a week, or at least one a day for a full week? That kind of concentrated, regular effort might make me more confident about sketching architecture in the same way that this challenge has benefitted Liz. I am going to think about that for the summer!

After I finished my 104, I had only about 15 minutes before the group sketchbook sharing, so I wandered around the Via6’s main floor, looking for a subject that wasn’t people. But wouldn’t you know it – people were everywhere, so I resigned myself to one more peopled sketch, this time in front of the fireplace near the entrance.

3/10/17 brush pen, ink, colored pencil