EASY WATERCOLOUR PORTRAITS - TUTORIAL TRYOUTS

This week I really enjoyed working through the Easy Watercolour Portraits tutorial suggested by Kristin Dudish at Tutorial Tryouts every Tuesday.  It was fun from beginning to end, and I was very happy with the results.

  
As it happens, my watercolour portraits also fit right into Jenn's theme for Artist's Play Room for 'Heads and Shoulders', and I have added an extra image at the end specially for APR - a different type of 'Heads and Shoulders' image. 

It took me all morning to find a photograph to use for the tutorial because I spent almost the whole morning looking through the photo boxes for a picture matching the type Elise recommended, and only a moment to choose one when I saw it.  Still, it made an enjoyable and nostalgic morning.

This is a school photo of my daughter, Carol, when she was 8 years old (46 years ago), and apart from the fact that it is a lovely image, the balance of light and shadow is just right for the technique.

Elise gave instructions for using PicMonkey, but it proved very simple in Photoshop.  I scanned the photo into Photoshop and used the Posterise filter, with a reduction on the darker/lighter scale, to make a posterised copy, as in the middle photo.

I then used the Trace Edges filter, as in the third picture on the line-up of three above. I printed the posterised and traced images, but decided that although I liked the effect of Trace Edges, I would trace the outline from the posterised version with tracing paper, as instructed in the tutorial.

As you can see, I simplified the right side a little to make the image clearer, and produced my outline tracing in pencil.  I used a simpler method than the tutorial suggested for transferring my tracing onto watercolour paper.

I turned the page of tracing over and re-drew exactly on the traced lines, as we did when we were children.  Then I flipped the paper back over to the front side and drew over the lines again onto the watercolour paper for the preparatory image.  Doing it this way meant that I was able to repeat the process and use the same tracing for all four of the paintings.

When I looked at the pencil lines on the watercolour paper, I felt they were rather dark, and I erased the traced lines until they were just barely visible.  At least that's what I did on all the others, but forgot to do this for the gold one, as you can see if you look closely.  I think it is worth erasing until there is just a faint outline to guide you.

The gold painting is quite nice, but it's just not the colour I associate with Carol - blue and turquoise seem to be her colours.

One of the things that is really annoying about getting older is the fact that I get a shaky hand, and I think you can see the effect of that on this dark blue version.  I did the whole tutorial in one day, so I was also getting rather tired.   The line around the chin on this one is rather too dark, but I'm pleased with the result.  It's amazing how such a simple approach and speedy painting can produce such a realistic image.

One of the reasons I use Inktense watercolour pencils so much these days is that it helps me to avoid the shaky-hand syndrome.  I wanted to try another painting, and decided I would see how it came out with Pitt artist pen and Inktense pencils.

I'm really pleased with the result, gentle and tender, just right to portray a gentle and tender person.

This has been my favourite tutorial so far, and I'm sure I shall use the technique again.

ARTIST'S PLAY ROOM

Finally an extra 'Head and Shoulders' image for Artist's Play Room.  This is a small sketch in my sketchbook for a painting I am doing - it's been put on one side for quite a while because I was having difficulty with part of it.  Hopefully I will get down to finishing it one day.

I heard a programme on the radio about THE LONG MARCH, an event near the end of WW2.  It affected me so much that I sat down straight away and drew this coloured pencil sketch, with the intention of working it up into a painting.

If you like the idea of making a watercolour portrait, I really do recommend this tutorial.  It meant a lot to me because I was painting the portraits of Carol.  At the moment she is not very well at all, as I wrote about her in my post The Bravest Person I Know a few weeks ago.

Thank you Karen for suggesting the tutorial, and to Elise for her generosity in sharing the technique.

MINI ACCORDION BOOK - PAPER SATURDAYS

I made two little accordion fold booklets to post to Manon's Paper Saturdays, both painted randomly with watercolour front and back so that each side can be used for drawing or stamping.

FRONTS                                          BACKS

They are only small - 6 inches high by 16.5 inches - cut from a single sheet of paper.  I found these were the hardest things I've ever tried to photograph for a blog post, but I did my best! 

This is what they look like from above when they are folded out.

I wanted to make them just a little different from the usual by angling the top edge of each 'page' on a slant.

Very simple to make, but I like this kind of booklet, and it's easily slipped into a pocket or bag along with a pen when going out, just in case there's something to sketch.

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The next picture is a card I made and sent to my friend Karen a few weeks ago.  I hope she does't mind me showing it here, but I was really happy with the result.

The cow was a cut-out, and I decorated it with collaged hat, scarf and ribbon bow, and painted her 'toenails' red.  The yellow dots were added with a pen, and the cow collaged on to my own painted and textured background.

Last week I made a mess of trying to link up to Manon's Paper Saturday, and found I had posted the link as a new post on my own blog, which I had to delete quickly.  I hope I can manage to do it successfully this week.

EMERALD - OR AT LEAST AS CLOSE AS I CAN GET

Emerald the Evil, the Green-Eyed Monster, 

just lying in wait for the chance 

to plant the seeds of envy 

in someone's unsuspecting heart.

I'm sure this is not what the Collage Obsession theme of 'Emerald' for this week, was supposed to produce.

My mind went through emerald jewellery, lovely dresses for red-haired ladies, fields of green in the Emerald Isle.  I even thought of something connected with the Emerald City but that's not having such a good press here in the UK at the moment.

I firmly decided to create some emerald jewellery designs, and even drew a hanging hook for the first earring ..... but when I put my pen on the paper, this is what happened.  I don't know where he came from, but I never do know where creatures like this come from.  I shudder to think what's inside my mind when I see this kind of thing developing on the page.

So, emerald may be seen mostly as a colour of beauty, green is also the colour of envy which, when it goes too far and becomes jealousy, can be one of the worst vices.

So let's put all the blame on Emerald the Evil.

I drew his outline with Pitt Artist's pen, and coloured him with Inktense pencil, and sparkly gel pens for his eyes and claws.  I wanted to get an unpleasant feel to his skin, so I put the fairly thin paper of my sketchbook directly on to my battered desk (i.e., ex-dining-table), so that the grain and other bits of battering affected the pencil work.  He's not really emerald in colour, but this is as near as I could get to it, whatever medium I tried.

As an example of pencil work it looks horrible, but that's what I wanted, and his skin makes my flesh creep.

I scanned the finished drawing into Photoshop and added the wiggly, snake-like border with a distortion filter called 'waves'.

So that's enough about him.

Now I'm looking forward to seeing all the really beautiful creations of other artists

over at Collage Obsession.  Why don't you take a look too.

P.S. - IF YOU HAPPEN TO BE COMMENTING

YOU ARE ALLOWED TO SAY

IT'S 'ORRIBLE.

I THINK IT IS!

I LOVE BLARLET

This is one of those 'coincidence' posts.  I had made some monochrome prints for Kristin Dudish's Tutorial Try Outs on Tuesdays, and had decided to complete some of them with red. 

Then I checked out this week's theme for Artist's Play Room and found we were to follow Tracey Fletcher's lead a few weeks ago of Blorange (a combination of blue and orange) and invent a name for two colours we like to use.  

I love working in black and red so I chose BLARLET.  It should really, of course, make the word Bled, or perhaps Bred, but neither of those is very interesting and have other connotations.  So I stepped sideways a little and combined BLACK and SCARLET to use for my prints, and this will also be my entry for Artist's Play Room this week.

You know those students who take a serious interest in everything a teacher is saying - and then go and do something different.  Here I am, guilty of just that.

The excellent tutorial was about gelatine printing.  I enjoyed the tutorial, but realised straight away that I really don't have the room or the facilities or even the time to try this type of printing.

Now taking a course or following a tutorial is really about learning something new and stretching oneself.  The gelatine seems to give a soft base, so I decided to find something I already had that would be softer than the usual printing plate, and came up with a kiddies pack of A5 foam sheets.  I taped a sheet to card with masking tape and set to.

I chose black because my first attempts with acrylic paint dried too quickly (and I was too lazy to mix it with flow improver as a retarder).  The only printing ink I had left was a tube of black, so that's when I decided to go with Blarlet, using a new foam sheet, and just make monochrome images.

For an inking-up sheet I used a paper palette with special shiny sheets made for using acrylic paint.  This saved some cleaning up at the end because I could just fold up the used sheet and put it in my waste bin.

I made about 30 prints, some OK, some reasonable and some failures, and the ones I show in this post are just a few that I was fairly happy with.  I like the way the masking tape forms a border around the prints, and in some cases I left it as a border.

This is the Blarlet version:

The printing was done yesterday, and today I had hoped to add the red with paint or pencils, but time being what it is, in the end I decided to cheat and add the colour on Photoshop.  I can always add the colour by hand another day.

I kept trying different materials for the masking pieces, and some proved less successful than others.  I can see that one advantage of the gelatine print seems to be that it is so soft that things like twigs sink into the gelatine and make a good image, whereas they didn't sink into the foam as successfully.  Even these stencils I made from thin card didn't show all the detail when I printed.

The images above show the first and second pulls - and I often like the second pull better than the first.  Here's the Blarlet version:

Again, I left the masking tape border - or at least most of it.  This has been over-cropped.  I like the contrast of the golden slipper with the black and red.

Some of the images were printed on thick white cartridge paper and others on cream.  I tried colouring the faces red but it didn't work, and I like the monochrome for the 'conversation piece'.  The ribbon print was not too successful, and I think I have posted it upside down, but I've included it because given more time it should be possible to make a better print.

The ribbon really stands out in red against the black background.

At this stage I experimented a little more, and placed a screwed-up-and-opened-out piece of cling film around another foam sheet, which I taped to card as well as I could.

The image isn't marvellous, but I can see that it has possibilities.  The print above has a look of a mysterious wood, so I'm quite pleased with it.

This was my last print.  It's  certainly different, and has a lot of movement.  The face mask was added just to see if it was possible to mix masking with the cling film, and it is.  More there to experiment with some time.

I wanted to experiment more with the cling film approach, but energy levels had dropped and I was tired - didn't even clear up much which I always try to do.

So, I'm sorry I didn't actually use gelatine, Kristin, but watching the tutorial did make me use a couple of printing methods I hadn't tried before, but that I will include in my printing 'armoury'.  And I've got plenty of prints that can be used in collages, etc.  So altogether I'm very glad I took the plunge.

Check out Tutorial Try Outs on Tuesdays here, and have a look at the Artist's Play Room in a few days for some great images.

HAPPY ORANGES FOR A.P.R. - AND A BIT OF DOGGEREL TOO!

These three cheeky orange pals, with their orange leaf 'hair', are my first offering for the Artist's Play Room this week, on the theme of  'Fruit'.

In fact this is my 'Two for the price of One' week, because there is a painting with a different approach to the theme at the end of the post.

I drew the oranges with a Pitt Artist's pen and painted them with my trusty Inktense pencils.  I took them into Photoshop to experiment with different backgrounds, but everything I tried took away the graphic quality I like against the white background.

So I decided that they are three LEVITATING ORANGES.

How did I come up with the idea for this design?  Well looking at all the freshly bought fruit on our kitchen side table, my eyes were drawn to the oranges.  And they reminded me of childhood, when we used to do silly things with food (which was all right as long as we ate it afterwards).  I took photos to show you my starting point -

I cut out two wedge shapes, a largish one at the back and a smaller one on the front.  Then I took piles of photographs of them in different positions, and the ones in the collage were about the best.  You should be able to see where the smile and the teeth come from for my drawings.

This reminded me of another daft thing we did.  We would eat the orange from the wedge-shaped skin, and trim it to a size that would fit our mouths.  We then used a knife (no namby-pamby nonsense for us about kitchen safety in the olden days!) to slice a horizontal line almost through the pith, and vertical lines to shape 'teeth'.  Then we would stuff the 'false teeth' into our mouths and just act daft.

I did make a set of orange peel teeth yesterday and took a photo of myself wearing them, but it was ghastly and my beloved said I looked revolting, so I decided to save you the horror of seeing the photo.

So here are the Levitating Oranges again, together with their doodling doggerel:

WHEN FRIENDSHIP TURNS TO LOVE

Meet Hal, Hattie, Hugh, three sweet orange friends,

They've vowed to be buddies till life itself ends.

Now Hattie is loved by both Hugh and by Hal,

And each of them wants her for his special gal.

Hal gives her vacations, and chocolates to eat.

Hugh gives her rings, and 'Jim Choos' for her feet.

(Hattie hasn't got feet, but she does like nice shoes

And Hugh feels his gifts will help her to choose.)

Now Hattie's no dope, she piles on the soft soap,

And vows to each chap she will one day elope.

She tells Hugh, and then Hal, that she's ready to marry,

Then leaves and shacks up with a

lemon called Larry!

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That's enough silliness.  Here's my second offering for the APR 'Fruit' theme.

This was painted a while ago, but it seemed appropriate for the challenge.  It was painted using a 'wash-off' technique, with waterproof black ink and gouache.

Hope you enjoyed both the pictures and the post - I enjoyed every minute of doing them.

WHO'S THAT HIDING IN MY ARTWORK?

The theme for Collage Obsession this week is 'Faces'.  Life is busy just now, and I am cheating a little by using a piece I made a few weeks ago, just for the fun of it, so I hope you will forgive me.

Painted paper 'doily' collage, 

magazine image background 8"x8"

Jez

I started out by wanting to make a 'cut-out doily' as we did when we were children, but with a completely random shape rather than a circular  repeat pattern.

I kept folding the paper in completely different directions to cut out small shapes, which produced this result.  Then I didn't know what to do with it, so I stuck it over the magazine photograph.  Only then did I think of painting it - definitely not planning ahead.

Yes, that's Johnny Depp's eye peeping through a space that seemed to have been designed for him to look through.

Before seeing the Collage Obsession theme for the week I had decided to link this simple piece of paper cutting with with Manon's papercrafting challenge Paper Saturdays, so I shall be linking up Manon too.

Do check out both blogs for some interesting and incredible artworks. 

PROUD AS A PEACOCK - APR CHALLENGE

This is my take on the theme 'Peacock' for this week's APR challenge at Artist's Play Room.  A reluctant start because I couldn't think of a way to make the subject my own.  So I followed my usual practice, when I went to bed, of telling my brain to put the subject in the back of my mind to think about while I slept and come up with an idea in the morning.

If you've never tried this technique, I do recommend it - it works for me.  As soon as I woke I realised that I could take the idea of a peacock's feather in an Art Nouveau-ish direction, Art Nouveau with my own twist.

So many people love to own one or more peacock feathers, and I'm no exception.  I have a few large, medium and small, living in a plastic folder with all my other feathers, so that everything gets rather battered.  This one is 7" long, and I love the way the perfection of the feather has been disorganised.

I thought you might be interested in the stages I worked through to achieve the final result.

I imagined the design as a piece of gold and enamel jewellery, a brooch or a pendant, and quickly sketched a rough drawing of the main part of the feather to work through my vision.

I needed an oval shape to surround it, and as luck would have it there was a plastic dish from a mushroom paté on my desk, just the right size.  My first attempt at placing it over the drawing was not quite right right and the oval needed to be lowered for my next stage of the drawing.  

You can just about see in the sketch the parts I have crossed out as unwanted and to be ignored.

Using the same sketch, I erased the oval as well as I could and positioned it more accurately by drawing the outline on tracing paper.  I then used a Pitt Artist's pen to draw on the sketch the lines that would give me a better idea of what I actually wanted for the final design.

I then erased all the pencil marks so that I could see the drawing more clearly and experimented with colours from my kiddie's set of lovely sparkly gel pens.  It has definitely gone wilder than Art Nouveau, and it's gone past being something that could make a  piece of jewellery, but I'm ready for the final stage.  

I re-drew the design in a different sketchbook with better quality paper.

My initial sketch showed that I had too many curving strands, and the design needed more space and air within it.  The strands are not exactly as in my sketch, but placed where and how they felt right.  

OK, I made a few mistakes about the design here and there, and because I had a 'shaky hand day' my drawing and colouring were not perfect.  But I'm about enjoyment these days, not about perfection.

The lovely sparkle of the gel pens is not very clear on the photo above, so here's a pic where Dev held the drawing at an angle to catch the sun as I took the photo and you can see it a little more clearly.

Am I as 'proud as a peacock' about this?  No, of course not!  Just pleased that I made myself respond to the challenge and I do like what emerged.

COLLAGE OBSESSION - YOUNG LOVE IN PARIS

REMEMBER, REMEMBER

The theme for this week's Collage Obsession is 'Cities'.  I worked through a few ideas about city skylines, and Liverpool's distinctive skyline in particular, but wasn't inspired enough to start.

Then I realised that I was looking at the theme from the wrong angle.

A city is more than just buildings.

A city is about its heart and soul - the people who live there, and the workers and visitors.

Without the throbbing heart of its people a city is just an empty shell.

Photo by Zoë Photography 

Artwork and poem by Jez

All images and poem Copyright

So this is my take on the 'Cities' theme.  My daughter Zoë took the photo on a business trip to New York.  I always love all her photographs, but have never visited NY, and as a surprise she gave me an unusual and original Christmas present.

The gift was an A4 sketchbook with one of her photographs on every alternate page, opposite to a blank page, so that I could create a drawing or painting inspired by the photograph.

The photograph of the vintage café tables reminded me of a Henri Cartier-Bresson photograph of two lovers at a café table.  If you don't know his work, check him out on Google - he lived from 1908 to 2004.

So although the inspiration was New York, this simple collage of three images was inspired by Paris.

I wrote the poem some time ago, when I first saw the photograph.  I used Derwent colour pencils (i.e., ordinary coloured pencils) for the drawing because I wanted gentle colours and a soft focus feel to the image.  I hope you enjoy it.


Hop over to the Collage Obsession site to see more interpretations of the theme.

TUTORIAL TRYOUTS - PVA GLUE RESIST

I had great fun with this week's tutorial for Kristin's Tutorial Tryouts - Every Tuesday and found another resist technique that I am sure I shall use again.  Added to that, I really went loose and free and experimented. This is a longish post, but plenty of pictures and a doodle doggerel at the end.

No worries about what 'you nice people out there' might think of my work, and I enjoyed myself, as I hope you will be able to see from the results.  The challenge was to try this tutorial from Unruly Paper Arts using PVA glue as a resist.

The first ones were just to get my hand in, on scrap pieces of paper that were floating about on my far from tidy desk.  This first scrap below measured 3" x 4".

The paper was already painted with blue and yellow - probably a waste piece from something larger and I thought it would be interesting to see how the coloured background turned out.  I spread the glue with my finger 'drawing' the shapes freehand.  It didn't look too good but improved with a few scribbles with a gel pen and a mount of shiny maroon card.

When I showed Dev he said it was not up to my usual standard, but that with experiments 'different rules apply'.  So I wrote that on the image in Photoshop.

The second scrap of paper produced a completely unexpected result.  It was just a small piece of black paper (about 4" x 4") on the still untidy desk.  I thought it would be interesting see the effect on black paper, and painted a 'cloud' and the bird freehand with a paint brush.  The only thing I could think of for painting over the PVA was white gouache, and surprise surprise, the gouache stuck to the PVA parts.  It was streaky over the rest of the paper, but I stopped there so that I didn't mess up the part I liked.  I added the tops of the trees from a stamp, and found a few words that seemed to fit well.

For the blue and green version above I painted the glue on with a brush through a home-made stencil that moved - somehow the bend at the foot of the tree makes it look as if it's about to walk off the page in disgust.  Watercolour added for the grass and the sky.  

Another surprise result.  Perhaps I'm doing something wrong, but I like the effect.  Instead of seeing the white paper through the glue diamond shapes of the stencil, the watercolour paint turned the glue darker.  In my collage 'bits' box I found the butterfly to add to the piece.

I made this butterfly many years ago but never found any use for it, so at last it's found a home.  It's made it completely with free machine stitching in various colours, on a base of water-soluble fabric.

Even in this close-up of the butterfly it is difficult to see that I used a lot of gold thread which makes it sparkle in the sun.

For this 'Relax Enjoy' version I painted the glue through a simple quilting stencil of a flower onto watercolour paper, long and fairly narrow, which gave me enough for the version below as well.
I painted over with yellow watercolour, and mounted both cards on what is really a purple mount to contrast with the yellow.

It looked a bit lacking in any oomph, so with a purple coloured pencil I surrounded the flowers and added detail in the flower centre, and added shading randomly with an orange pencil.  The coffee cup and words jumped out of the pile of collage bits and said 'Use me'.

This is the other half of the same piece of watercolour and the same stencil.  The collage pieces at the corners were from a Christmas card, and I added the matching purple and orange emphasis with the same coloured pencils.

Let's not get too serious.  Next, here's the kind of collage I love doing, a simple element of collage with appropriate wording.  

I cut out the boy and thought of the text a couple of months ago, but he didn't find a home until this week.  The PVA resist 'stars' you can faintly see in the background were applied in a different way.  I painted the glue onto part a large stamp from Homebase intended for home decoration.  It worked quite well and the glue easily washed off the stamp (immediately, of course, not the next day).

Like the blue diamonds version, the glue spots on this numbers card were painted through a stencil.  I  painted over with yellow watercolour and then wiped paint residue from the spots with damp kitchen towel as carefully as I could, so they were as white as possible.

A bit stuck for something to add, the idea of numbers stuck on the spots came to me, and then I found the image of the dice I had torn out from somewhere or other, can't remember where.

It makes me think of gambling, not what I had in mind when I started.  I'm not a gambler of any kind, but I wonder if there are enough numbers on there to provide someone with the winning entry for the lottery!  If so, good luck.

Now my favourite kind of doodling, but a special tutorial doodle with a short doodle doggerel.

BOOTSIE

Here's Bootsie

Off to see his Tootsie

Singing as he goes

And light as a feather on his toes

He's all in a whirl

Because he's going to see his girl

During the week I had the desire to try to combine the PVA resist with Carla Sonheim's gesso technique from last week's Tutorial Challenge here, and Bootsie is the result.

I painted the background with yellow watercolour and then randomly drew 'sunray' lines from the centre to the edges with my finger, so that they varied in density and width.

When the glue was dry I painted over with dark green watercolour, and again wiped away as much unwanted green paint as possible from the sunrays.

When that dried I added the oval and circle shaped with white gesso and a paintbrush and left that to dry.  Oh the need for patience is very trying on an impatient artist!

Then the fun bit.  I painted the bird shape with blue Inktense pencil.  That dries fairly quickly, so I could add the whirly lines with darker blue Inktense and paint over them for more intensity.  Collage beak added, ink outlining and Bootsie's boots to finish the job.

As you can see, I really enjoyed this tutorial, and I'd recommend you to try it.