Esoterika

After all the previous doodles, in December I decided I wanted to do some that were a little more complex/ challenging (something I hadn't been able to handle for a while). I also wanted to do something different with the background. Me and my bright ideas... The contorted clouds in this one seemed to take forever. But I like the result very much.

*********
I'm amused that this one, an attempt to vary the curvy and flowy tendencies, ended up looking a lot like heavy metal album art. I had a hard time keeping the dark pigment dust out of the light areas and vice versa, and the paper began to get overworked from all that 'scrubbing'. Turns out this paper does have an eventual limit of how much pressure it can handle, though it takes a while to get there.

********
This one is a bit different, and I love its exuberance: a Scythian-esque fish, amid Celtic-esque waves. I was stumped for a long time on what to do in the background that wouldn't get overly busy and compete with the waves. Finally I found a color scheme that was muted enough to work, partly inspired by rediscovering pre-Raphaelite/ symbolist artist John Duncan. I atypically kept the strokes in the sky loose, not fully blended, to make it more energetic and ethereal. Although the waves are mostly saturated, there too I avoided taking it to the ultimate polish, because I didn't want to lose the vigor and spontaneity of the colors. It's also a good break from my default color scheme.


All these were done with mostly Prismacolor brand pencils, on Stillman and Burn gamma series paper.

(In general, this medium photographs really poorly. I get truer color using flash, but then I end up with unwanted shine on the glossy surface. The fish photo is unsatisfactory in that regard, but still the best image I have, and the edging of the top one should be a darker blue.)

Every time I use this technique, I find myself wondering why I do it--why spend so much time building up layer after layer to achieve full color saturation, when I could just squeeze brilliant red or deep blue right out of a paint tube? Plus it's MUCH easier to cover mistakes and restore highlights in acrylics than in colored pencil, which requires more strategic forethought, reserving the lightest areas and laying in the darkest ones cautiously. But working with a pencil or pen has always seemed much more intuitive to me than working with a brush. Sure, I can do good stuff with a brush, but the color rendering just seems to take more mental translation. Also, pencils are extremely consistent: x pencil used at x pressure gives the same color every time. Paint has a lot more variables: how thick or dilute, ambient temp/humidity affecting drying time, proportions used in mixtures, amount of paint on the brush, shape and material of the brush, how absorbent the surface is, whether the layers and strokes blend or stay distinct, etc.

Above all, what I have finally realized is that I use this technique because I enjoy it, even when it seems to take forever and makes my hand hurt. The very fact of going over and over an area is part of what I like about it... getting the enjoyment of creating a shape not just once but repeatedly, making it emerge almost sculpturally from the page. It allows me to savor the creation, like slowly unwrapping a present or sipping a delicious drink instead of gulping it. Because it goes gradually, it is also less likely to abruptly go wrong. And although pencils are predictable, there is still a certain amount of mystery in determining what layers to lightly apply so that the right color and texture will emerge when the final burnishing blends them all together. It's the kind of enjoyment many people get from a crossword or sudoku, except at the end, I get a drawing!

Still, I do have a tendency to lose interest at the very end, when the discovery is past and it's just a matter of filling in all the last unwanted spots of white paper. These were all started in the winter and then ignored for a while, so when I got fired up about drawing again in March and April, I decided I should finish them before I started something new.

A few weeks ago I did a demo at work trying out the Pentel Pocket Brush Pen and the Pentel Hybrid Technica fine point pens. I drew these big cats using a National Geographic poster as a reference. Since I was just experimenting, I didn't pencil anything first.

Snow leopard. Rawr.


Leopard. I deliberately did this one with few outlines, trying to convey the contours with the spots.


The tiger in the original photo really did look this morose. It must have been having a bad day.

The above were all drawn with the Pocket Brush Pen on smooth Copic paper. The PBP is a smaller version of the well-known Pentel Color Brush pen; it's the size of a normal pen, and refillable with cartridges. Like its bigger sibling, it has actual nylon bristles (rather than a felt nib) and a nice inky feel to it, much like using a real brush dipped in ink. If you press hard, you can get a scratchy drybrush texture (depending on the paper), which surprised me, as ink pens don't tend to deliver enough liquid to smear around like that (cf. for instance the loose dark areas around the snow leopard).

For me, this brush pen wasn't a keeper because it just didn't give enough resilience and control in the middle line weights; it felt too soft and mushy compared to the type of brush I like. (The only brush pen I've liked so far is the Pitt pen, whose springy felt nib gives a surprisingly good mimic of an actual sable brush, for juicy thick lines or tiny thin ones.) But I can see how someone with a looser, more sumi style would enjoy the Pentel, and of course it would be ideal for Asian calligraphy. It's also handy if you want to quickly color in a large area of black.


And then there's the sort of dragony critter I draw when I can't think of what to draw. I used both pens on this, on vellum finish bristol which, despite being fairly smooth, gives the lines more texture. The broken lines of the belly and tail are an example of unintentional drybrush dragging; I did this drawing first and then switched to the smoother paper, but the effect could be used deliberately.


For this lion I mostly used the Hybrid Technica, using the PBP only where I needed a dense black area. The Hybrid Technica comes in four sizes, all of them EXTREMELY TINY (I used 04 and 06). If you like cross-hatching ("For me, drawing is just an excuse to do some cross-hatching" -R. Crumb), which I certainly do, you will enjoy this pen. I also like that it has a metal tip rather than a felt tip in a small metal cylinder, like Pigma microns. For some reason my hand angle has never gotten along with the micron-style nib; also, the tiny felts can be easily bent or worn down. The Technica's metal tip delivers satisfyingly black ink like a teensy rollerball, not the unsatisfying grey of ballpoint. The only thing the Technica lacked for me was the ability to scribble out a dense black the way one can with a rollerball such as my favorite drawing pen, the Tombow Object. Once you start to layer lines densely on top of each other, the Technica's metal tip starts to scratch at the ink like a ballpoint. It's definitely a pen I would like to own and use again; I'd just use another tool for dense black.

I did this painting last August, just hadn't gotten around to scanning and posting it. I was camping on the south McKenzie for a long enough stint that I could spend a few hours doing a real plein aire painting. I had been pondering for a while that one's programmed instinct is to depict water as blue--but the river up there isn't blue at all. It's crystal clear, and the rocks beneath the water are mostly gray-green or rust-colored, while the depths take on a green tinge. So how to paint that without it looking murky and dull? That was my experiment.

This was a good learning exercise for me in many ways. For one thing, I tend to be more interested in depicting figures than backgrounds, but in recent years I've been grappling with some concepts of color and lighting and with the desire to paint complete scenes with directional light instead of just isolated figures of interest in objective color. So a river/landscape isn't something I would normally set out to paint. I also may not have ever done 1. a complete painting (not a sketch; not a drawing) of 2. this type of outdoor scene 3. in situ (not from a photo or imagination).

(click to see the whole thing)


Given all that, I was fairly happy with how it turned out. It took me three hours. I deliberately chose to paint a section of river that didn't have any really striking features of distinctive rocks or trees; the painting would have to work in terms of my rendering of light and color, not because of dramatic composition. And I would not use any pure blue.

If anything, I went a little too far to the green side, vs. the more muted gray-green, but I really didn't want it to be murky. The rocks got a little too yellow, I didn't entirely capture the translucence, but I feel it was a good effort. I used Yarka's cheap yet wonderful semi-moist watercolors plus a little opaque white, on a cheap 7x10 watercolor tablet.

For reference, here is a photo of approximately the stretch I was looking at, though the light had changed a little, and of course I simplified the background. (I did not paint from the photo, I just took it for later comparison). The photo doesn't really convey how much movement was in the water.


And here's a closeup of the water. Not easy to paint!


This was probably also good for me in another way... I've been noticing that left to my own devices, I really don't use green much in my artwork!

8/23 Today I aimed to finish the painting so it would be ready to show in a video interview the next day. My hand was steadier than in the previous session, but still not as steady as I would wish; touching up the gas giant rings was a challenge. I painted fine dividing lines in phthalo blue, then phthalo glazes on the back side of the ring to make it recede. The yellow half was so crooked, I had to completely paint over it with indian yellow, paint it back in white and naples yellow, then glaze the shadowed part with red transparent iron oxide + burnt sienna. To clean up the planet edge, I painted a smooth edge with white, glazed it with indian yellow, then added other color touchups as needed to make it match.

( More process and pictures )

The final result: (I'm hoping to replace this with a better photo; the light in this is a bit dim)

It took me about 30 hours total to paint. If there hadn't been the deadline and requirement to produce it for someone else, there was a point when I would have given up and walked away, maybe never come back to it. Instead I had to keep pushing till I made it work, and I did. That experience was extremely valuable.

I feel I've created a compelling image, one that helps define the project. I wanted to create an image that would make viewers curious, without giving too much away. I wanted to keep a certain ambiguity and tension between these characters, because that is important in the script. What's going on with these two? Is this help or threat, rescue or murder? Is the yellow man dead or alive? I'm pleased that it provokes curiosity about what happens before and after this moment. When I showed it to people who didn't know the story, they were immediately asking questions: "Is that guy alive? Will they fix their ship? What's going to happen to them?" That is exactly what I hoped.

Now here's hoping the filmmakers can raise the money they need and actually get this movie made...

8/18 Today would normally be a writing day, but I needed to spend all day on the painting in order to have something I was willing to show T. the next day.

Continuing to paint the planet: I used titanium white, cad yellow med. & deep, titanium buff, and naples yellow to make it more yellow and give more distinct bands of striation (though I liked the striation enough that I didn't want to fully cover it!). Then I remembered Indian yellow, another transparent warm color, which gave the more golden quality it needed. I used more transparent iron oxide glazes and a little burnt umber to create a sense of depth in the surface layers, and to create the shadow to make it look like a globe not a flat disk.

As I worked, more visual logic questions assailed me: would the planet look that large in the sky, and that visible in daylight? No clue. Shouldn't it be casting a lot of yellow light on the snow also? Probably, but I really wanted to keep the ground as cold and stark as possible, and I already had a lot more color in this than T. and I had discussed. Sometimes design wins over logic.

I did some more work with cloud greys. How do you model clouds but not make them look dirty? It remains a problem. Then I tried some pale yellow on the inner ring of clouds, where the planet would cast warm light... no good. The pastel yellow was too sunset-pretty.


To make it more lurid and ominous, I added cad orange and Indian yellow. My tentative logic was that the light is on the rim of the clouds; the darker cloud system is closer to the viewer...but I suspected the dark rims should actually be light too. To quote Joni Mitchell: I really don't know clouds at all!

Avoiding the cloud problem, I put mountain shadow on the frozen lake and the snowy slopes around it, using the same blue/grey mix as in the clouds, then glazes of phthalo or white as needed to soften the edges. Adding that small amount of modelling really helped this feel more like a scene to me, a coherent receding space. Heading diagonally in the right direction?

However, I now realized the problem in painting with gesso after the initial stages: it’s flatter than the paint, so shows as matte spots on the snow. Oops. I covered that with titanium white for an even shine.

Back to the clouds: I mixed a really dark payne's grey to give more dramatic contrast. In retrospect, I can say that right about here is where I really went terribly wrong:

I soon realized that these edges are way too dark, and way too smooth: cumulus cartoons. I was modelling the edges too uniformly, as if these were smooth globs instead of loose water vapor. I kept hacking away at it, but couldn't make it right. Yet in each of my frustrated stages I can see an inkling, a little zone that did work, among an overall effect that did not. I'm really glad I took all the process photos, because thus I can extract those little bits for future reference. (The photos also helped show me that some progress actually was happening.)

It's a frustrating and scary thing about painting that there is no "save as" or "undo" command. With acrylics, especially, the ability to cover over previous layers is both a blessing and a curse: easy to fix, easy to obliterate something good, and (unlike watercolor) no built-in requirement to stop at a certain point instead of reworking it to death. In writing, you can change a draft, but as long as you saved a previous version, you can restore it exactly just by putting words back in that order: an exact correspondence of signified and signifier. In digital art, you can at least save and restore the stages or elements. Here, there is no fully going back to what was there before. Sometimes what you had before was better, sometimes it wasn't, but you won't really be able to tell until it's too late to go back...

A couple hours later, I finally concluded that this sky was too much for this picture, too dark, pulling too much attention to the background. That’s a problem with the planet too, but at least it looks convincing. There’s no reason for all these dark dramatic edges; these clouds should be light on the edge, and they’re snow clouds, not rain clouds. If this was just a sky painting, I could maybe live with it, but the figures need to be the focus of the image. Bah.

Some words of Michael Whelan kept coming back to me: "The trick is not to get your first illustration job, but to get your second job after you've blown your first..."

Casting despondently about, I turned to an Andrew Wyeth art book in the hope that he could show me how to paint clouds. Actually, it turns out he mostly paints flat overcast skies; not a distinct cloud to be seen. But I did find this trenchant Wyeth quote about his painting process: “I can’t control it. If I control it, it’s no good.”

That’s Andrew freaking Wyeth, the painter who has done some of the most meticulous, exquisitely detailed paintings of our era. A painter who often works in egg tempera, an extremely painstaking and finicky medium that does not accommodate a fast or loose approach. “I can’t control it.” Okay, then...

This is true in dance, in martial arts, in many other arts: in order to flow effectively, you have to relinquish control. But in order not to end up with an uncoordinated mess at least some of the time, your non-controlling must come from a place of deep knowing. There's the rub.

Pondering this, I took a dinner break, and went to National Geo for more photo references, which showed me how my cloud edges were much too crisp, simple, and defined, and how clouds are often dark ones against light ones or vice versa, less often a complete dark-to-light shading on one form.

Triggered by the ‘don’t control it’ concept and my extreme frustration, I returned to the painting and had a breakthrough (or a breakdown? or something). First I wanted to tone down the Dark Cloud Edges with some white glazes, but zinc white alone wasn’t covering at all. So I mixed a big pool of both titanium and zinc whites (splitting the difference of opacity) plus lots of Open gel to keep it blendable for a while. But instead of carefully glazing this in my usual manner, I slapped some paint on with a filbert brush, then rubbed it around with a rag. That seemed promising: softer, more atmospheric, no discrete brushstrokes getting in the way. I threw caution to the winds, attacked it, blobbed, blotted, smeared, wiped on, rubbed out, literally finger painted... god, it felt great! I made diagonal finger strokes for the effect of blowing snow, hazed out the edges, then brought some of the darks back by rubbing paint off, but let them stay streaked by white... A mess? Maybe. But I experimented, went out on a limb, out of desperation. I might have just created a bigger mess, I couldn't tell, but at least I tried something different. That... was really interesting.

Mind you, there were aspects of the version before that I liked better than what I had now. But sometimes you have to let go a piece of good material that doesn't fit the rest of the piece. As writers say, Kill your darlings...

I worked more on the snowy hills, creating contours and softening transitions; I finally subdued the heavy phthalo outlines with subtler grey-blue ones. The snow-trail behind the figures was coming along, rendered in various tints of blue.

Till recent years, I had never used filbert brushes (flat with a rounded tip), so I haven't really incorporated them into my repertoire. But on this piece I’m liking the filbert for rendering clouds and snow; it covers broadly, but gives more organic marks, whereas the round leaves distinct brushstrokes, often ridged, and the flat makes chunkier edges.

Given the backlighting, I realized that the foreground snow slope (where the red man is about to walk) would be in shadow. I lightly rubbed on some phthalo there, but decided that just muddled the snow effect. I ended up putting titanium white back over it (though I let hints of the blue show through to create a little dimension). I did an awful lot of back-and-forthing on this piece.

I put a tidge more shadow on the yellow man, though I still hadn't painted him in detail. At the last minute, past my work-night bedtime, I realized I hadn’t done anything about the planet's ring... I sketched it in with white just to show T. where it would be, but I knew the shape wasn’t right yet. After the next photo was taken, I added the bent antenna and broken wires to the communication device (which helped it stop looking like a TV remote). I now felt I could bear to show this to T., with the caveat that it's not done. (For instance, I still hadn't specified the shape of the spaceship at all.)


8/19 In the light of day, the clouds looked better than they had last night. Not quite there, but... not as far off as it had seemed. Overall, I feel it is an arresting image. If I saw it across a room, I’d go look at it. The question was, what would T. think of it?

8/16 Second painting session: definite progress! But man, acrylics remain the very devil. Thanks to my job and recent years' exploration, I know so much more about them than I ever did before, their properties, their pigments, and yet I sometimes still feel completely at sea in rendering with them. Definitely a love-hate relationship at this point.

This time I kept inadvertantly smudging the white surface: opened a container that spattered dark green, then got red paint on my hand and tracked it onto the snow... next time I do a mostly white image, maybe I should mask out the whole background area! Argh!

I wanted to start with the central figure, because if I couldn't make that work, the picture wouldn't work, and I might as well find out at the outset. I did another layer of naphthol red to solidify coverage, then started rendering him with alizarin and then a dark mix of alizarin, phthalo, and a touch of cadmium yellow (mixed black is generally more interesting and lively than black from a tube). Then I used glazes of alizarin to bridge between darks and lights. I made a small adjustment to his right hand position. I started to introduce the concept of backlighting from the planet (which I hadn't considered in the initial phase), but naphthol red light was too weak for highlights; I needed the intense punch of cadmium orange...a regrettably expensive color.

I felt good about the red figure, the overall sense of effort and determination. I had a lot more problems with the other body. Tried various yellows: cadmium, diarylide, indian yellow, a bit of burnt sienna for shadows... dunno, I’m not feeling it yet, either the color or the contours; it looks pallid and unsubstantial.

Pencil is definitely not the best thing for underdrawing; it shows through far too much, especially on the yellow areas...but I’m not sure what to use instead. On the left is my red smudge, which I'll have to sand out later; white paint won't eradicate it.

We'd discussed putting various details on the uniforms: reflective patches, piping, pockets, insignia, etc. But once I had painted the man in red, it seemed like that would just clutter up the vivid, graphic figure, so I left it off. Besides, since no costumes exist yet, I didn't want to specify the look in a way that might later contradict the footage too much.

I added some stark figure shadows with a thin layer of phthalo, which gave it more graphic punch. But I may need to set up some mannequins to figure out the shadows’ exact shape.

I added back a little blue outlining in the snow, but mostly I continued to glaze with white (using gesso, which covers better than titanium white paint) over the snow and clouds. I decided to make the hill lines sharper towards the lake, where the clouds open, then fuzzing out where the snow is blowing more, obscuring edges. Now I wished I hadn’t done those big phthalo lines, when the field needs to be mostly stark and plain: phthalo is somewhat ineradicable. And being more comfortable with lines than paint, I had once again made the error of outline mentality: putting the strong color on the edge of the ridges, when it should be in the depths behind the ridges, with the edge being the brightest part. It took a lot of layers of white to reverse that error.


I used a template to trace a more exact circle for the yellow planet, but was pleased to find I had free-handed it almost perfectly! I fiddled around with various yellow/white/brown blends for the planet's surface; I at last found a use for the grainer brush, a weird novelty brush that creates thin parallel stripes. The planet still looks messy, but at least I have an inkling. I think I’ll try Open (slow drying) acrylics for that, so I can get softer gaseous blending. I discarded my earlier thoughts of a pure white background; this just looked too cool to pass up.



Next step: make the snow/cloud background start to work. And buy some cadmium orange and cadmium yellow deep.

This is the piece I did for my mom. The metallic ink and the fine silver sparkles in the paper don't scan that well, but you can sorta see it. I mounted it on a matte silver board that tied in well.

So... Barak.

A couple weeks ago I came home from a fantastic day demoing art at Trade Show to learn that Barak Ravensfuri had died. I was just... stunned. I still am. He was so... large. That's my overwhelming impression. Large physically, large psychically, unmistakable, unignorable. A huge presence, a huge impact wherever he was. Someone who grew and matured tremendously from a rocky beginning. Big and loud and fierce and blustery, but an honorable and caring person under the noise, with a magnificent capacity for laughter and celebration. Occasionally a huge pain, but always a huge heart. It is a quieter and a poorer world without him.


I've always loved this picture. Such a peaceful moment amid a reign's usual demands. When this was taken, or a little before or after, I was probably hunkered on the ground just to the right of the throne, filling in names on scrolls. I was on retinue for the reign, and I think it was that same day when Barak, having observed my comings and goings for a bit, complained that I kept cringing when I was around him. I responded (only partly tongue in cheek), "Well, that's because I'm never sure if you're going to hit me!" (He had a way of glowering at one...) Indignant, he protested, "I would never hit you!" I said, "Can I have that in writing?" Whereupon he tore off a piece of Lao's notebook paper and wrote the following:

Which, as you can imagine, I have treasured ever since. If I ever took up fighting, I planned to laminate it to my helmet...

And here's his "Legends of An Tir" stained glass window design for Twelfth Night.
[click image to enlarge]

In his right hand he holds his eponymous "barak buck" coin, which indicates his tremendous fundraising efforts.

And that makes six... six people I know who have died in the last two months. Enough, world. Stop.

"Emergence" (Prismacolor Lightfast & regular colored pencils on Aquabee vellum bristol)
For some reason the color in the lower half is a little frosted in the scan, but this gives the general idea.

( About it )