Reflection

9/17/20

Living through a pandemic seems to make some people introspective and reflective. I’ve read a number of articles and essays to that effect. My own journal has been somewhat introspective, but I haven’t been big on naval-gazing since my 20s and 30s. Perhaps where I’ve expressed reflection more directly (and literally) is through self-portraits.

You saw one of them (plus a couple of modified blind contours) a few months ago. Here are some more. I’m not sure any of these captures my likeness or even my essence, but they are drawing exercises just like any other. 

One thing I did enjoy about these was using toned paper (a beige Stillman & Birn Nova sketchbook) with a white pencil for highlights and a dark pencil for shading. I’ve taken this simple yet continually challenging approach with many of my hand drawings, and it has taught me to observe form more keenly.

5/17/20

6/9/20

Boku-Undo Fun

9/16/20 Boku-Undo sumi ink on Canson XL 140 lb. paper

I’m still not over the shock of using a wet medium again after several years of sketching mainly with dry ones, but it didn’t take long to see the fun in Boku-Undo tinted sumi inks (see yesterday’s post for my initial shock). A blend of traditional sumi inks and dyes, they come in a lovely range of “shadow black” colors that granulate beautifully. I love these intense off-blacks. (My full review of Boku-Undo will be published at the Well-Appointed Desk, but I’ll be playing with them for a while, so you can consider these sneak previews. Updated 11/30/20: The review is now live!)

In yesterday’s post, I played with purplish-black and brownish-black. The value studies shown here were made with bluish-black and greenish-black. I haven’t tried mixing them with a full palette of traditional watercolors, but I bet they would all make interesting shadow colors to complement them.

 

Boku-Undo's "shadow black" colors

Yesterday’s tomato got eaten, but I needed a third thing in my still life for the darkest value, so I grabbed an avocado from the counter. Aside from the basic challenges of using watercolors again (it’s not like riding a bike; I did forget!), I realized after I’d been working a while that I was unconsciously going direct-to-paint without drawing first! What??! I didn’t intend to make it so hard on myself, but once I got my brushes wet, I guess I lost my mind.

That’s what made these exercises so much fun, though! These tonal studies are diametrically different from the much slower renderings of form that I have focused on for several years now. It’s good for me to shake up my brain now and then with something entirely different.

If you’re curious about my brushes, I’m enjoying using my Escoda travel set that I purchased shortly after I began urban sketching. Fairly soon afterwards, though, I was seduced by the convenience of waterbrushes and never looked back, so I’ve only ever used these at my desk.

(The ongoing thick wildfire smoke is distressing and oppressive, but it is keeping me in the house with an opportunity to try new things. A tiny glass of sweet lemonade made from horribly bitter lemons.)

It's been a long time since I've made this kind of mess!

Value Studies with Sumi

9/15/20 value studies with Boku-Undo sumi ink

Whoa, it’s been a long time since I used any kind of liquid medium!

I was in the mood to use a new tonal material to make value studies. I have some ArtGraf water-soluble graphite blocks that I bought in Portugal a couple of years ago that I haven’t tried yet. And I just got a set of “Shadow Black” tinted sumi ink called Boku-Undo. Both products behave like cake watercolors but are very intensely dark due to the addition of graphite (the former) and sumi (the latter). As expected, they are excellent for making value studies because they are easy to dilute or use full strength. But it’s been so long since I used watercolors that my first brush strokes blew my head open!

My still life had included a tomato, but struggling with the sumi took so much time that I had to use the tomato for lunch. By the time I got to using colored pencil, all I had left with were the garlic and lemon! I’m not done experimenting with these sumi inks, though, and I’m going to try the ArtGraf blocks, too. (The smoke is still hanging over us oppressively; it’s a good time to play indoors.)

9/15/20 F-C Polychromos colored pencil in Stillman & Birn Nova sketchbook
(I tried to enhance the highlights with a white Posca marker, but I don't like
the lack of integration with colored pencils. Paint markers are fun when used
with other markers, but they are the opposite of colored pencils in terms of subtle gradations.
Paint markers are like plastic while colored pencils are like wood.)

Vintage Colored Pencils: BO-FIM Cow Boy

Vintage Cedro Cow Boy colored pencils that  probably didn't come in this box originally.

Here’s a small set of colored pencils that I picked up on eBay a while back purely out of curiosity: Cedro Cow Boy. At least, that’s what I’m going to assume are the names of the manufacturer and brand because they are stamped on the pencils themselves. The plastic box they came in, however, says “Color-Graph” and “made in Italy.” Somehow I suspect these pencils did not come in this box when they were originally purchased. But no matter – I thought both the box and the pencils were curiosities, neither of which I’d heard of. 

A quick search on Brand Name Pencils (always my first stop when researching vintage pencils and also a great source for purchasing them) turned up a couple of specimens produced by an Argentinian pencil company called Cedro with a logo that looks somewhat similar to the one on my pencils. I could find no other information about either Cedro or Color-Graph pencils. What an interesting mystery!

The Cow Boy pencils themselves are typical of many older colored pencils I encounter: very hard and brittle and containing little pigment. Needless to say, I didn’t try making a sample sketch. This is more of a pictorial review of an unusual specimen. If you know anything about these pencils (or, for that matter, the box they came in), I’m all ears!  

Edited 9/17/20: After promoting this post in the Erasable Podcast Community group on Facebook, I learned that the box and the pencils do, indeed, belong to each other! In fact, “cedro” is simply the Portuguese word for cedar and not a brand name at all. Bobby Truby (of Brand Name Pencils) believes these are BO-FIM pencils made in Italy. His site shows an example of a different pencil made by the same company. I’ve changed the title of this post to reflect the corrected brand name.

I sure would like to get my hands on some of those “silk-touch” pencils that came in this box originally!

"Super-BO" -- clearly an important feature! I love the dingbats on either side of Cow Boy.

Milkvue Donuts

9/10/20 Clockwise from left: Fruity Pebbles, Matcha Tea and Ube donuts from Milkvue

Seattle Fish Guys, purveyor of fresh fish and readymade seafood meals, have been our life saver during these monotonous pandemic months when an occasional takeout meal is our only change of pace. We used to get takeout from the Guys often even in the Before Times, but we’ve found ourselves there more frequently since they started offering meal “kits” during corona times: all the seafood-based ingredients and accompaniments for complete meals, including easy instructions that even I can follow.

Nom-nom! I polished off the green one as soon as the sketch was done!

Last week when we picked up our kits, I was surprised and delighted when I was handed a whole box of Milkvue Donuts! The kits usually come with cakes or cookies made by local bakeries that Fish Guys have partnered with, but we’d never gotten donuts before. Milkvue, a small Gig Harbor shop, uses a blend that includes rice flour, which gives the donuts a softer, chewier texture than typical raised donuts. You know me – I’m always too hungry to put a sketch between myself and food (for example, have you ever seen a sketch of those delicious seafood meals I’ve just been talking about? Of course not). I scarfed a donut down immediately, but I had enough forethought to save the prettiest ones to sketch the next day.

I’ve eaten a few donuts in my life (and even sketched some), but I must say that these Milkvue donuts may be the best ever – and certainly the most gorgeous. It’s possible that this still life took more colors than I’ve ever used in a single sketch.

More Towels, Less Clothes

Out of curiosity, I ran a few Quicken reports to see how our spending during the past six months compared with the same period in previous years. Of course, the big difference is travel – we haven’t spent a penny on that this year, and very little on auto fuel. And clothes – not a stitch, not even socks or underwear. Well, that’s not entirely true – I did buy one T-shirt.

We bought a lot of towels – a lot. With all the handwashing at all of our sinks and constant cleaning of countertops and other surfaces, I decided it was time to replace all the towels in bulk quantities. In fact, I’m finding joy and satisfaction in replacing ordinary household items that were worn or not working well. We are in the habit of using things long past their reasonable life because we were both raised in thrifty families. But in these troubled times, why not use fresh, colorful towels or high-quality scissors that make our daily lives a tiny bit better?

I also bought several small works of art, mostly from friends, mostly impulsively. During uncertainty, there’s no reason to hesitate.

We’ve spent zero on professional haircuts, but I sprang for a pair of hair-thinning shears that makes it easy to trim my own hair in front and on the sides. As for the back, we give each other buzz cuts – fast and easy. We may never go back to a barber or salon again.

Then there’s the matter of hobbies and art supplies. Hmmm, I may have spent a bit more than in previous years; perhaps I seek solace in colored pencils and notebooks. And three new bags from Rickshaw! OK, possibly excessive, especially since I rarely travel more than a mile. But I am about bags the way some are about shoes: They always fit, and you can never have too many.

Sadly, I’ve spent nothing on lunch or coffee dates with friends.

What are you spending more or less on during these pandemic times?

My only clothing purchase this year. . . or should I put this
expense in the "hobby" category?

Pink Disc, Yellow Sky

9/12/20 Maple Leaf neighborhood, early afternoon

Although we have our own deadly fires here in Washington State, the Seattle area has been covered by a blanket of smoke since Wednesday that originated with Oregon’s equally devastating wildfires. The smoke here is not nearly as thick as it has been in Oregon and California; photos and sketches of those areas show the sky as dark orangey-brown. Here in the Puget Sound area, the sky is more yellow than orange.

On Friday when I tried to look at the sun, it was still too bright to see with bare eyes, so I knew the smoke wasn’t too bad yet. I recalled the thick smoke we had two years ago from fires to the north, when the sun was an orange ball that was easy to look at with unprotected eyes.

By Saturday, the expected “super-massive plume” had fully arrived. I kept looking for the sun, but behind the smoke, the sky must have been partly cloudy, because it was nowhere to be seen most of the day. I stood at our bedroom window in the early afternoon to capture the weird yellow light and low visibility. The “unhealthy” Air Quality Index was 185 (under 50 is considered “good”).

9/12/20 the sun is finally visible around 2:40 p.m.

By mid-afternoon, the clouds behind the smoke must have parted because I suddenly spotted the sun – a coral pink disc that, by contrast, gave the yellow sky a bluish-gray cast. Under any other circumstance, I would have called that pink “pretty.” It’s not often that I can sketch the sun by viewing it with unprotected eyes: Other than the smoke two years ago, the only other time was the moment of totality during the 2017 solar eclipse.

This smoke is terrible, but it’s not nearly as terrible as fleeing for my life as so many are from fires engulfing many parts of the West Coast. I’m grateful to be safe. I’m grateful for all the firefighters working day and night to put the flames out.