The Hatching Game

2/26/19 Green Lake neighborhood

Still sunny (which we are grateful for here in typically gray Seattle), the days have been cold and bitterly windy. Eager to take advantage of the sunshine, I was driving around the Green Lake neighborhood, trying to find things I could sketch from my mobile studio. I remembered a parking lot that faces a residential block on one side. If I can get a spot on that side, I have several cute houses to choose from, like this Tudor.

I need to up my hatching game, and this house was a good opportunity. I don’t have a problem with small areas of heavy hatching, but when I have a large area, like the side of the house, I start to get impatient and messy, and I don’t like that look. It’s ironic that I seem to have a fair amount of patience when applying layers of colored pencil, but I lose patience with a ballpoint pen.

As I mentioned a few days ago, I’ve recently been using a Stillman & Birn Zeta sketchbook as my daily-carry. My default for a subject like this house would have been colored pencils, but with that smooth Zeta book in my hand, I found myself reaching for a ballpoint instead. Toothy Canson XL watercolor paper, my typical everyday-carry, would never be my choice with ballpoint, so the Zeta paper is opening more options. Perhaps it’s not as much of a compromise as I had thought.

The Main Attraction

2/25/19 Maple Leaf neighborhood

It was too cold to get out of the car, and not much was going on here in the Maple Leaf neighborhood – just the usual trees, poles and power lines. The main attraction, though, was that blue, blue sky and sunshine – both very welcome in these parts.

Calling the Dog’s Palette

The colored pencils I use most. At left is a full-length Caran d'Ache Museum Aquarelle shown for comparison.

There’s a concept for making decisions called “calling the dog.” I am unclear as to its origin, but apparently it’s a fable about two people who both claimed a dog as their own. They both called to it, and let the dog choose. Applied to real-life situations, the concept is that if you are trying to choose among a few things, and evaluating their attributes has caused confusion, you stop analyzing and just look at which one you tend to go to intuitively. In other words, you are the dog, and you “choose” the one that calls to you in some way.

Recently, I was going through a mug in which I store “shorties” – the pencils that are getting too short to comfortably carry in my Tran Portfolio Pencil Case (when they get pushed down near the elastic, they’re difficult to pull out quickly). The photo above includes some multiples of colors I use especially often. I don’t waste the shorties, of course – I just retire them from my daily-carry bag and use them in the studio. But looking at the pencils that I use most often made me realize that a color palette has been made for me by calling the dog.

With duplicates and near-duplicates eliminated, the palette is shown below. The mid-tone green is an unessential convenience, but the other six are a strong palette of the hues I use most in an urban environment. If I added sky blue (not often used in overcast Seattle, but essential on the occasions when I do need it), those seven pencils would probably cover 90 percent of my sketching needs. While I’d feel uneasy going out with nothing but a secondary triad or even a primary triad palette, I think I’d be perfectly confident with this dog-called palette for everyday use. And with colored pencils, my dog palette makes more practical sense than a primary palette, which is based on paints that can be mixed much more quickly than pencil pigments.

My palette called by the dog.

All this palette needs are the few other essential items from my idealized pencil box sketch kit – a graphite pencil, a brush pen, a waterbrush, an eraser and a sharpener – and the vast majority of my sketching needs would be met. I may be on to something. . . what do you think?

Half Mojo

2/21/19 20-min. pose

After the previous week’s missing mojo, I went to life drawing last Thursday wondering if I’d feel it this time. Although it wasn’t quite as bad as last time, I was still a bit sluggish. By the end of the session, I felt like my hand and arm were finally fully connected to my brain. I had maybe half a mojo.

It always helps to have a strong, experienced model, and Randy is one of the best. A Gage Academy model for more than 15 years, he is certainly one of the most experienced models I’ve drawn. To honor his years of service to Gage (he’s possibly the most-often drawn, painted and sculpted person in Seattle!), the school is going to host a “Randy show” next month. The entire exhibit will consist of works that he has posed for – even sketches from life drawing sessions – by instructors and students of the past 15 years.

 

2/21/19 5-min. poses

2/21/19 5-min. pose

2/21/19 5-min. pose

2/21/19 2-min. poses

Overworked

2/23/19 Caran d'Ache Museum, Derwent Procolour pencils in Stillman & Birn
Beta sketchbook

Shown here are two sketches of the same heirloom tomato, before and after Greg cut a wedge for his salad. In the first sketch (below), I was trying to take the painterly approach that I’ve been studying lately: using more water and fewer applications of pigment. I don’t like the results at all – the colors are muddy, and it was extremely challenging to paint around all those reflections on the tomato’s lobes when I had a juicy brush that I was trying to move quickly so that the water wouldn’t pool.

A couple of days later, I tried again (above), and the cut surfaces of the tomato presented all new challenges that I’d never encountered before (obviously I need to sketch incomplete tomatoes more often!). Getting the hue of the shaded side of the cut gave me the most difficulty. Although overworked from many cycles of dry-wet/dry-wet watercolor pencil applications to try to get the colors and textures right, I thought that taking the painterly approach worked well on these cut surfaces. Blending colors wet-in-wet looks more convincing than trying to draw the organic color changes with dry pencils or with a more methodical approach.

By the time I got to working on the smooth, uncut surface of the tomato, I had sort of forgotten about practicing more painterly techniques and fell back on the more methodical, multiple-application approach I had learned in class. It was much easier to keep the hues from muddying by using less water. I’m finding I also don’t like the look of a large area of one flat color when activated with water (the tomato’s shadow, as in the sketch below)  – the brush strokes show, no matter how carefully I work. So for the second sketch, I left the shadow unactivated. I prefer the interesting contrast between the smooth tomato and the textured shadow.

2/21/19 Caran d'Ache Museum, Derwent Procolour pencils

One experiment that is working well is using traditional (non-water-soluble) colored pencils for certain lines that I want to retain sharply, such as the ones describing the “cleavages” between the tomato’s lobes. If I draw these with watercolor pencils, I lose them all when I apply water, and then I can’t see them anymore when I need them to guide the highlights. When I draw them with non-soluble pencils, I can still see them through the transparent activated color.

Both sketches were done in a Stillman & Birn Beta sketchbook, and I gotta hand it to this paper: It takes everything like a champ. My overworking demanded many sequences of wet/dry, lifting color with a paper towel, and finally erasing back in a few secondary highlights that I lost during the overworking – with an electric eraser! The paper’s surface shows no signs of pilling or other damage.

Zeta Testing

2/19/19 7th and Westlake 

Thinking about a sketch kit so small that it would fit in my pencil box has gotten me interested in (OK, obsessed with) the whole sketchbook/paper question again. My love for graphite, awakened by the workshop I took with Eduardo Bajzek in Porto last summer, prompted me to rethink my everyday-carry sketchbook paper. Up to that time, I had been perfectly happy with Canson XL 140-pound watercolor paper with all media that I typically use – but with graphite, it’s just too toothy to use in the softly toned manner that I enjoy so much.

The many papers I tested last fall, trying to find one that would
meet all my media needs.

After hemming and hawing for quite some time, my solution was to stitch a signature of smooth Strathmore Bristol and carry it along with my usual signature of Canson XL. It’s been working out OK, but it’s one more thing to carry, and I also don’t like that sketches will be out of sequence when I eventually bind the signatures. (If it ain’t one thing, ‘tis another.)

Is there really no paper that would meet all my needs if I’m willing to make some compromises? After all, even my everyday-carry Canson XL watercolor paper is a compromise: With all other things being equal, I prefer Stillman & Birn Beta’s weight and texture for wet media. And Canson XL has the annoying “feature” of being slightly less toothy on one side than the other (not surprising for student grade). But for the price and convenience of the pad size (9-by-12 inches, which folds into an ideal 6-by-9 inch signature size), I’ve decided those are reasonable tradeoffs.

If I were to fully reopen my mind, would a single paper option exist . . . .?

After mentally reviewing all the sketchbooks and papers I have tried, I landed on one possibility for meeting all my media needs: Stillman & Birn Zeta. The heavier version of Epsilon, Zeta has a hot press surface that is not quite as smooth as Bristol but is adequately smooth for the graphite techniques I use. In fact, Epsilon was one of my favorites with graphite among the contenders last fall, but I rejected it because its 100-pound weight couldn’t hold up to the spritzing I often like to do with watercolor pencils. I must have forgotten about Zeta then, even though I’ve had a book on my desk for a couple of years and use it occasionally with markers, ink or colored pencils. With the same 180-pound weight as Beta, Zeta can certainly take even a heavy wash and spritzing. The proverbial light bulb blinked on!

Headed downtown for an errand last week, I grabbed the Zeta sketchbook. From a Starbucks window seat, I made the sketch above. I didn’t apply large areas of watercolor pencil, so it wasn’t the best test of Zeta’s water tolerance, but I thought the activated areas were satisfactory.

Later at home, I gave Zeta a more rigorous workout – and put it head-to-head with Canson XL. (Caran d’Ache Museum Aquarelles were used in all tests.) Since I tend to use my spritzing technique with foliage, I sketched a couple of quick trees from imagination and spritzed them. Although the two papers tolerated sprayed water equally well, I really miss the texture that the Canson XL imparts – the spritzed foliage on it just has a leafier look.

2/20/19 S&B Zeta

2/20/19 Canson XL 140 lb. watercolor paper

Next I sketched an apple on both Zeta and Canson XL (also shown here for comparison is a still life I made a few weeks ago on Stillman & Birn Beta). Although I usually take more time with still lives, for these tests I deliberately emulated a more on-location approach by slamming down the pencils fairly hard and fast (methods not recommended by traditional colored pencil artists). I also used more water than I typically might in a careful, more methodical approach.

2/20/19 S&B Zeta

Canson XL 140 lb. watercolor paper

2/8/19 S&B Beta

Again, both Zeta and Canson XL held up to water equally well. Zeta’s sizing, however, is different, and the pigments don’t look quite as rich when activated as they do on Beta or my daily-carry Canson. Maybe it’s just the difference that painters experience between hot press and cold press papers, but the colors seem a little flatter on the untextured surface. What do you think?

The results of my Zeta testing come down to two qualities: texture (or lack thereof) and color intensity. Are they reasonable compromises if the benefit is being able to carry one type of paper for all my media needs? Or are they deal breakers?

There’s only one way to find out. I have a little more than half the pages remaining in the Zeta sketchbook. I’m going to use it exclusively on location until it’s full. By then, I should have the answer to those questions.

(And yes, I do see the irony of searching for the ideal paper when I just got through sketching on papers from my recycle bin!)

Selfie Sunday

2/18/19

Shortly after I began sketching in 2011, I decided to give myself the challenge of drawing one hundred self-portraits. Describing that experience was one of the first blog posts I published. I’ve done a few more here and there since that project, especially in winter when sketching subjects must be indoors.

Apparently there’s a Facebook group called Selfie Sunday (though I haven’t joined), whose members post selfies every Sunday. Then Roy DeLeon decided to simplify the challenge by inviting a few online friends to make selfies whenever and share them with the hashtag #sundayselfiesketches. I don’t know how often I’ll participate, but I admit that when I can’t find anything else better to draw, it’s easy to simply look in the mirror. And if you’re ever feeling cocky for any reason, nothing is quite so immediately and thoroughly humbling as making a self-portrait.