Illustration Friday: "Adrift" in a Sea of White (Winter 2010)

 Pen & Ink and watercolor on journal page 

After a week in the Bahamas I came home to a much cooler color palette.  Snowbound, there has been little else to do but paint...

Bahamas Landscape Workshop

This week the world is white and starved of color, but last week I feasted on a palette of azure, alizarin and lemon pigments with Susan Abbott, a fabulous colorist who led a landscape workshop in the Bahamas. Landscape is something that has always frustrated me so I was eager to learn.

Susan began the workshop by talking about painting and its relation to light, shadow and design.  Our first exercise was to do a series of sketches, mapping out the light and shadow within a format.

The first step in these studies was to identify the extremes in values -- the darkest (5) and the lightest (1). The next step was to add the values in between the extremes.  I worked in pen, which forced me to be decisive.

With these studies as a warm-up we then went on to do some preliminary sketches for our afternoon painting.  I chose this lovely blue house right by the sea. I sat on the steps of a canary yellow church and sketched while  someone practiced the organ -- renditiions of "Great is Thy Faithfulness" and "Do you think I'm Sexy?"

After a morning of sketching the class ate at the "Harbour's Edge."  I tried to sneak in a quick sketch of the terrace where we had the fish of the day -- grouper!  It turned out to be the "fish of the day" every day, every place we went. 

In the afternoon I tried to turn the sketch into a painting, but wasn't happy with the clash of pthalo and ultramarine blues. I worked on it that evening, taking all the lampshades off the lamps in my room to give me proper light.

I showed the painting to Susan at breakfast. The painting looked even worse in the morning light, and I saw it on her face.  Happily Susan gave us a demonstration on triads -- using the same primary colors throughout a painting to create the secondary and tertiary colors.  Triads help to give the painting unity.

Eureka!  It was the structure I needed to be spontaneous and expressive in my next painting of a yellow house.  Here I started with a sharpie marker and drew the shapes that appealed to me most.  Then I used cad yellow, cad red and ultramarine as my triad and Voila!  I was very happy with this painting in the end. 

The next day Susan gave us an exercise of using elemental color and shapes that weren't necessarily representational. This was a way for us to think about the relationships between colors and forms within a painting -- warm and cool color; dark and light; small and large; primary and secondary.  This is what I came up with for the exercise.  I really enjoyed this exercise and treated it as a puzzle.

Armed with this new knowledge the group packed our painting gear into golf carts and headed for Tahiti Beach to paint.  Susan gave us a spectacular watercolor demonstration of a dramatically painted sky, telling us that "landscape is either about the sky or about the water."  Her's was definitely about the sky!

We then set about completing our own paintings.  At that point I don't know what happened to me, but I really lost my nerve.  After progressing through these wonderful color exercises and demonstrations I should have risen to the challenge and painted Tahiti beach alla prima using broken color.  Instead I wimped out and decided to do an underpainting in cyan and then use acryic glaze to build up the color.  I've done that before with studio landscapes.  Unfortunately what I ended up with here was this pathetic painting that didn't capture the moment, had no discovery in it and, well basically sucked.

I call it "Gauguin Vomited".  Still I was happy being in the sunshine, scribbling away, and as Suma, one of the workshop participants said, "the biggest decision we have to make today is what flavor of ice cream to order at the Sugar Shack."  Below are a few of the results from eating, sketching and drinking at Elbow Cay:

 

In the end the workshop was too short.  Some of us toyed with extending our stay, especially since we heard it was going to snow in DC, but in the end we packed our duds and prepared to catch the Marsh Harbour Ferry to the airport...

It turned out it wasn't the snow that got us stuck in the Bahamas, it was record flooding in Miami.  It was torture but we stayed in the Bahamas one more day... boo hoo!

Muscial Constellations

Don't ask ... I have no idea.  I just went where the paint and pastels took me :)

IF Theme: "Patterns"

I started keeping a small sketchbook with me to work through color theory and ideas.   This was an exercise to use color and pattern to express the seasons.

IF THEME - "RESOLVE"

(digital painting)
This week's theme was good practice for developing another another character in the "Pinky" story. This is Shelly, Pinky's big sister.

Illustration Friday - "Clandestine"

(click on image to see full size)

Again, this is a bit of a stretch for the IF theme, but I think it kinda works. It's the title page for my Dummy Book (title is self-evident). I did the rough scketch and painting on the tiny dummy book I made and then refined it in Painter.

Illustration Friday Theme - "Voice"

ROOOOO RIS IT????!

Even though this was an earlier post I think it kinda works for the "voice" theme at Illustration Friday :)

Pretend/Rambunctious

Digital Painting with Corel Painter IX

I originally meant to post this on Illustration Friday under the "pretend" theme, but I didn't finish it in time. It's from my story "Pinky and the Blue Speckled Butterfly." It seems to work (more or less) for this Illustration Friday theme too.

Illustration Friday: "The Blues"

...and the sea rolled ashore

and consumed her.

Illustration Friday: "Wedding" (The Lady & Lord Xoc)

Acrylic & Incised Modeling Paste on Illustration Board
(click to enlarge)

This is inspired from a Maya relief at Chichen Itza of the Lord & Lady Xoc, from the 9th century I think. When a Lord & Lady married they made a sacrifice to the gods of their own blood. There are some more graphic depictions of self-blood letting but I chose to focus on this more "genteel" image, so to speak.

Illustration Friday - "Missing"

digial painting

this is an intuitive response to this week's IF theme of "Missing"

Pinky & the Blue-Freckled Butterfly

"Pinky & the Blue-Freckled Butterfly"
acrylic on canvas
6.75" x 9.25

This is cropped from a full spread I'm developing for my children's book titled "Pinky & the Blue Freckled Butterfly." I like this style of illustration, but I'm not sure if I can sustain it for the whole book. An alternative style might be watercolor. The whimsy of watercolor might better match the whimsy of the story. I am going to try one more spead in this style to see how it works. If it doesn't, I'll go to watercolor -- with some trepidation, since it is much more difficult than acrylic.

Illustration Friday - Moon

"Ixmucane"
acrylic on canvas board
(cropped)

Playing with Paint(er) - foray into digital art

I just bought Painter IX.5 and have started playing around with different digital media. It's great fun and you don't have to clean up afterwords ;).... Once unexpected result is that it re-inforced the viseral impulse to work with real/traditional media. I'd be interested in hearing other artists experience with digital media.

Rebecca Thornburgh's Creative Process

Here is another wonderfully generous author/illustrator who shares her creative process
Click on either illustration to go to see her full process.

CALL FOR FIRST TIME CHILDREN'S AUTHORS ILLUSTRATORS

Alice Pope, he author of the annual "Children's Writer's & Illustrator's Market," has created a great blog . She is looking for first time (published) authors/illustrators to be profiled in her upcoming edition. Check out "call for first time authors" entry as well as her entire blog, which has some great resources as well.

Cheers

the photoshop experiment: Jesse's Song

the photoshop experiment: Jesse's Song
Cory Godbey is a wonderful and generous illustrator who shares step-by-step processess for using traditional media and photoshop for creating really lovely work. Must see for all us "traditional" (i.e. old) artists who are wondering about the possibilities for art in the digital age!

The Outlaw: Varjak Paw

I just read the sequel to "Varjak Paw" (see review below). It was as interesting and fun as the first one. This second book was even darker than the first, all about gang warfare, leadership and the underbelly of the city -- literally. The illustrations are very cool, very edgy, done by Dave McKean. Below are the illustrations from the first book:

The illustrations from the second book are darker and funkier than the first book. Definitely worth looking at to see the possibilities for creating illustrated books for older readers.

Children's Books Reviews

I listen to recorded children's books while I paint. Not only do I accomplish two things at once, but it keeps me engaged in thinking both visually and textually. This week I listened to three lovely short novels for children ages 9 and up. The first two are Newberry Medel winners and the third is just sheer fun.
Missing May
Cynthia Rylant's voice of Summer, the 11 year-old West Virginian protagonist, is so authentic. She is an adopted girl morning the loss of her adoptive mother. This is a "quest" story where most of the "journey" is an internal transformation of both herself and her adoptive father. The characters are fragile, funny and resilient. The recorded version is read by Frances McDormand, who absolutely brings the story to life! Also, a number of people have created some very thoughful "lesson plans" for this book.
Bridge to Tarabithia A lovely book about friendship and imagination between a young boy and girl in rural Virginia in the 70s. The story brought me to tears. Paterson really touches on the emotional life of the child.
Varjak Paw This book is just sheer fun! It is a kind of "Kung Fu - Karate Kid" for cats. Narrator George Guidall's interpretation is marvelous. I can't wait until the next recorded version comes out!! I do want to check out the written version however, since it is also illustrated in the style of a graphic novel ;)

David Wiesner's Creative Process

David Wiesner, author/illustrator of Tuesday, the innovative Picture Book, shares his creative process here. Very cool, step by step demonstration of how he goes from inspiration to dummy book to full spread and publicaiton. Definitely worth a look