Here's a summary of what I've been up to the last few days. There’s not anything to show for drawing class this week because the drawings all look mostly the same, we just practice different techniques each week. This week we covered perspective: 1-point and 2-point and also atmospheric perspective.
In ink and watercolor class we applied watercolor for the first time! We set up our still-life, made our pencil-plan, inked in our contours, applied three rounds of ink-wash, then the watercolor wash on top!
I have several things to say about the unfinished piece shown here.
First, I got confused on my initial ink contour lines, so my amethyst and the white ceramic item didn’t turn out right at all. The amethyst actually wouldn’t be so bad if I’d inked the facets before applying ink and color, but I didn’t know that they counted as contours, so that’s why the facets look so unnatural. The white ceramic item was just very hard to capture and is also way out of scale. I came home and worked on several rounds of quick sketches with that item with Benjamin’s oversight so I could learn to see it and sketch its contours more easily.
In addition to continuing to work on drawing skills like scale and form, I want to work this week on improving my shading. There’s not enough highlights in this image. It’s very flat.The cool thing about these colors is that I mixed them all myself from just primaries! So while I wish they were better... I’m amazed and pleased that I made my own hues for the first time and that they’re not too far off.
Mostly, I just want to get a better handle on tone. That’s my biggest hurdle at the moment. I feel like the drawing and the color-mixing is attainable with practice based on the skill level I have to get me started. But the tone has me vexed and I don’t feel like I even have a good baseline to grow from. Benjamin said he’d help me work on that this week, which I am looking forward to.
The most fun part of it to me was that I got to bring mementos from home for my still-life scene. All of these objects are actually quite small! I enjoyed the challenge of using small items while filling a large page. The treasures featured in this image are: a large apple snail-shell, 2 pecans from the tree I planted with my grandfather when I was a kid, a white ceramic insulator from my grandfather’s shop, some rusty bolts from my great-grandmother’s brother’s blacksmith shop, an amethyst Benjamin gave to me for my birthday, and a wooden frog that my dad carved and painted for me when I was a kid.
