For Christmas I was inspired to paint a snowman. We decided to take our neighbors Snowman Soup (hot chocolate) for Christmas. My mom found a cute poem online for Snowman Soup and the idea was to put the poem on a recipe card. We had this planned for a while but never talked about the card. The other day I felt like I was going crazy and need to do something and started drawing. The process went very fast so all I have are finished product pics!
Since I was just practicing and relieving stress, I just drew the outline of the snowman and his hat.
Next I added a grayish blue very lightly around the base and sides of the snowman, then my imagination went a little wild. I wanted their to be trees and his hat to have a red bow. Then I thought wouldn't it be cool to add a leaf to one of his branch hands and a bird on the other. I drew the bird, but I free painted the trees. I started very lightly, and added more layers to the ones I wanted to seem closer. The spontaneity of the exercise made this very relaxing and enjoyable. I wasn't expecting a painting! I planned as I went and the purpose was to experiment and improve, what I ended up with was a Christmas card! There are definitely things to improve, I see all the flaws, but I didn't need to toss it out and start over, it was cute enough to use and perfect to grow from.
Since I decided he was a keeper and he went perfectly with our Snowman Soup idea, my mother and I took the original down to the FedEx Office Store. They have a variety of papers to choose from. We chose a heavy weight semi-gloss paper. They scanned the paining in and we luckily ended up with a very customer service oriented employee who worked with the machine until she got the image and background coloring as close to the original as possible. Here are the results!
She reduced the image by about 50%, which gave us four to a sheet and were the perfect size for what we needed. This is not the first time I have done an original for a card. Office Supply stores are great to work with for printing. In the past I have usually tried two to a sheet for a folded Christmas card. You pay for the paper, I believe the one we chose was $1.24, and we decided to do 6 sheets, so we ended up with 24 cards for less than $8.00! It's never too early to start working on cards! Valentine's is around the corner and it's always someone's birthday somewhere! :)
Monday, December 7, 2015
This Amazing Video is a Must See!
Recently my mother started to "play" with ink and water. The results have been amazing to me and I will be posting her work, which is fabulous, along with my attempt which I will label WIP :)
The first video I am nowhere near attempting, yet, but it is fascinating to watch, if you go no further with this post, DO NOT LEAVE BEFORE WATCHING Mary Doodles paint a wolf in ink!
Mary Doodles has great how-to tutorials which introduce the basics and techniques that can be used for any style of painting. Her style, which I call edgy cartoonish, is amazing but not the direction I take for my artwork.
The second video I am posting is introducing Derwent Inktense Pencils. They are becoming my new favorite thing!
In Lindsay's post she calls them watercolor pencils but they are actually ink, not watercolor pigment. Ink in a pencil form, who knew? The upside to Inktense is that the colors dry much more vibrantly than watercolor and once the pigment is wet and then dries, it doesn't move again. This means you can layer the colors with beautiful effects! The downside is once it dries it doesn't move again and they are quite pricey! One way around price is to get them from Michaels with their 50% coupon. For the 24pk the price is $83.00, so you definitely want to use the coupon.
My mother has been studying the works of one of her favorite pen and ink artists, Claudia Nice. She did the below leaf assortment from a study of Claudia's work in her "Creating Textures in Pen&Ink with Watercolor."
I know, right? I am hoping whatever I am missing from the gene pool I can pick up through osmosis! She started with the sketch, about half the size of the original, and then layered the colors. She used ink pens for much of the veining and texture as well as the gravel beneath the leaves.
I took a simpler approach for my first Inktense experience. I wanted to do Thanksgiving cards for a few people and was messing around with a pumpkin sketch and decided to use the Inktense pencils. They are done on postcards that have a line and groove texture. Here's how they turned out:
I was going for a whimsical look, so I extended the stem by writing out Happy Thanksgiving, keeping both words connected and ending it with the curled vine look going down to the stem of the pumpkin.
I then on dry paper added the yellow base to the pumpkin, then with a wet brush I blended the yellow over the entire pumpkin.
I used a blow dryer to speed up the process and added some burnt umber"ish" colors and orange.
I kept layering until I had the depth of color I wanted.
I went a little too deep in shading the crevices of the pumpkin. I used a burgundy. I did several of these and went lighter on the others.
This is the finished the pumpkin, as I said earlier, I kept layering the colors until I had the look I wanted. As you can see the base yellow still shines through.
I then traced over the vine and words with a green Inktense pencil and when that was done, I took a wet liner brush and went over the words. This allowed the Inktense to set and provided some shading.
I then did some shading underneath the pumpkin. I wanted to incorporate the blue so the orange would pop because that is the effect you get when complimentary colors are placed together. I also included some orange and green. Shadows often have a tint of the colors of the subject they are shadowing!
This is not the same pumpkin I did above but one of the many I did. When I finished them I decided to add a water color background. I did this by spritzing the entire piece and then dropping and blending the color. That was possible because the Inktense stays dry, unlike watercolor that has dried, which would be ruined if rewet. I went right over the wording but I went around the pumpkin. This was one of my favorites. I felt that the blue-gray background allowed all the colors to pop, although it does now look like a pumpkin on a flying carpet! :)
