PAINTING BY NUMBERS WITH TUTORIAL TRYOUTS

For Kristin's Tutorial Tryouts this week she gave us the challenge of trying Vicki's approach to painting by numbers, which was quite an easy, relaxed tryout, and a bit of fun.  The pic above is my finished piece.

I decided to use a 'still life' photograph as the basis.  I recently took a thermal image photo of a vase of tulips and I selected a small section of it which I cut down even further to focus on one tulip only.

I fiddled with it a little in Photoshop until I found a version that looked promising for the colors and background.  The tutorial suggested tracing the print by hand with tracing paper from a paper copy, but because time is very short for me at the moment I wanted to find a way to do everything on the computer.

The 'tracing' above was produced by using the 'trace edges' filter on Photoshop.  I like the way sections of the background are like spray painting, but I felt it could be improved. 

Now the picture above looks more like a hand-traced version.  In fact I used an app on my i-pad called Art Rage, which has the facility to place a 'tracing paper' over a photograph so that a 'pencil' from the tools can be used to trace round the shapes.

This was so easy to do, and felt just like tracing on paper, and I was surprised and delighted with the result.  I was so enthusiastic about my tracing that I think perhaps I outlined too many small shapes which was not helpful when I was adding the colours in Photoshop.

At that point I abandoned the idea of using the same colours and instead tried a colour combination that is new for me and am fairly pleased with the result and with the ability to complete the tutorial using the computer.  I like the little touch of a few dashes of digital 'spray paint'.

Interesting and fun to do, and once again I learnt a little something new, so my thanks to Vicki and Kristin.

Sadly this is Kristin's last Tutorial Tryout - for now at least she says.  The Tryouts have been a real challenge to me, and I've learnt a lot, so I hope to see her back with them later in the year.

GEOMETRIC PAINTING for TUTORIAL TRYOUTS

Kristin's Tutorial Tryouts this week was Denthe's geometric approach to painting abstracts.  The red and black version above, using fine point pens, was my second effort.  I decided I liked the idea of a very restricted number of colours for this technique and I always love using just red and black on white.  This was my favourite of the three I attempted.

For my first attempt I wanted to see what the technique involved so I didn't stray too far from Denthe's layout and use of birds - though the birds and design are my own.  I made two mistakes here - firstly I used A4 paper in a sketchbook with absorbent paper.

Then, because things are rather difficult at the moment, I decided to save time by using coloured pens instead of paints.  Big mistake, not helped by the fact that some of the pens started to run out before I had finished, as you can see from the streaky mess.  I was quite pleased with the result of the design, but didn't feel it was 'my own', which is why I went on to the black and red version.

Using a bit of sense for the black and red one, I drew a 4" square.  Instead of geometric shapes I drew random curvy shapes and small circles..  Filling in the colours is a little like doing a jig-saw or a puzzle, making sure colours always butt on to a different colour.  The result makes me think of circus faces.

For the fishy shapes I used more colour, again within a 4" square.  I used kiddies sparkly gel pens, and you can see some of the sparkle in the top half - we actually had a couple of hours of sunshine yesterday that highlighted the sparkles.  I quite like this one, though you will probably notice the non-deliberate mistake in colouring.  Ten points for you if you do.

I do like drawing black outlines around my shapes, though I was always told in art classes that 'people and things do not have black lines around them in real life'.  So I thought I would see what happened on this little sketch if I outlined the fish more clearly.  It loses a lot of the abstract nature, but I like it.

This is an enjoyable technique that can be adapted to anyone's style.  It is interesting trying to get the right balance of drawings, geometric shapes, 'in-between spaces' and colour, and I enjoyed the tutorial.  

My thanks to Denthe for her generosity in sharing, and to Kristin for using the tutorial this week.

Do check out Denthe's tutorial, 

and the great paintings by other artists on Kristin's Tutorial Try-outs.

TACKLING ANOTHER TUTORIAL - A Lynne Hoppe Face

What I appreciate so much about Kristin's Tutorial Tryouts - Every Tuesday is the fact that Kristin points us in the direction of a style of art that is quite different from the safe haven of our regular style, which always gives me the reaction of 'I can't do that, I don't want to do that, and I think I'll sit this one out'.

And then I realise that the whole point of the exercise is to make us accept a challenge when it would be easier to hide under the blanket until it goes away.  That was definitely the case with Lynne Hoppe's tutorial on how to paint faces in her delicate, ethereal style, which is about as far from my own as I could get - I don't often do sweet and pretty as you may have seen from my previous posts.  Another reason was that I was scared to try this particular style.

Yes, I was frightened, and so I found a very good excuse, because I didn't have most of the materials Lynne uses.  But since Kristin said of the beautiful face she painted that she used just what she had in the studio, that excuse was knocked on the head.

So here's my effort, which was a real experiment for me in every way:

I used just pencil, acrylic paint and watercolours, and mostly not even the colours Lynne had used, so obviously I was never going to get that delicate dreamy look she achieves.  Sometimes I even mixed acrylic paint and watercolour together and found it worked.  One thing that surprised me was that I painted directly onto the old book page and expected the paper to cockle tremendously but it didn't.

She's a little heavy on the eyebrows, but perhaps that runs in the family.  Perhaps Frida Kahlo was one of her ancestors.  When I looked for an old book page I was attracted to this one because the title of the short story is 'My Father's Love Story' which seemed right for the kind of sweet young face I was going to paint.  Then at the end I followed Kristin's lead and found a few appropriate words to highlight.

I learnt a lot through following this tutorial, about painting in several delicate layers, achieving a more luminous skin tone, using alternative media, and - most importantly- about myself.  How did I feel about the tutorial and my effort when I had finished?

I FELT HAPPY.

(Dev read this and said I didn't just look 'happy', I looked 'high'!)   

Thank you Lynne and Kristin.

As always, I couldn't resist playing with the image a little in Photoshop, just changing the colours.

 I think that the original, top left, looks better than any of the colour changes.

Do have a go at the tutorial - it's fun.

MEET THE FAMILY - Tutorial Tryouts with Kristin

THE FAMILY

No, not MY family, these are not blood relatives.  Though in a sense they are my family because I created and named them, and in spite of everything I've become a little fond of them, even if they are all big drips.  Dev said they were quite good, but in a revolting sort of way!

This week's tutorial on Kristin's Tutorial Tryouts was about painting abstract portraits on a Youtube video.  Quite an experience, though I'm not sure the word 'abstract' applies, I'd say more 'weird' which suits me down to the ground.  I like weird.

 Acrylic paint on A3 watercolour paper

I followed the video for my first effort, and intended to keep as closely as possible to the style, but this fellow took on a life of his own.  This is Jasper.  He's the failure of the family, and he knows it (the rest of them are always telling him so).  That's why he doesn't look very happy.

                                                        Acrylic paint on A3 watercolour paper

I wondered how the technique would work with a profile view, and somehow it doesn't quite seem to work on a profile.  Anyway, I went my own way for the second attempt, and this is Everett.  Now Everett is a rather nasty piece of work, and I have to admit that he is mainly the one who has given Jasper an inferiority complex.  I don't trust him an inch (or even 25 millimetres).

                                                      Acrylic paint on A3 watercolour paper

Out on my own now, doing just whatever came.  This is Samilla.  She's the brains of the family, with a PhD in the Fluidity of Acrylic Paint Drips in Temperate Climates.  At the moment she's working in McDonalds but, like Mr Micawber, she's sure something will come up very soon.

I wondered about introducing a little more realism.  Well, as you can see, it just doesn't really work.  Nor does Archibald.  He doesn't have time to go out to work because his hair and beard are very high maintenance, so he's on the Government's new Universal Benefits.  Looking at that blue cape thing, I think he's at the barber's at the moment trying to ensure that he looks his mediocre best, and he's listening to his i-pod while the job is being done.  Never wastes a moment, that lad.

I think you can see that I enjoyed myself with this tutorial, even if it was a bit of a struggle.   And I learnt quite a bit, particularly how to get really good paint drips - something that I've never been very good at.  There is clearly plenty of mileage in this technique, and I intend to keep using it and incorporating it in things other than portraits.  Try it, I'm sure you'd have fun.

Nice one, Kristin, thanks.

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.

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.

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.