Challenge Sketch, Hat #2 Primary Colors

Here is my primary color challenge of the hat (Sketch #2) and a photo of the reference. I did this in soft pastels on Art Spectrum pastel card. I used red, blue and yellow. The blue looks very dark in the photo of the sketch. It was a bright blue, not dark navy. I used a little white to brighten the color. A challenge to get the browns and creamy color. I spent about an hour all together, forgot it was just a sketch and just kept going. Heh, heh. The hat is rounder in real life than my sketch.






I guess my sketch is what I expected to see. These hunts are helping me to get over that and to 'see' better. It is similar to the roses and rocks for me. That is probably one of the reasons that paintings that leave areas to the imagination are appreciated. The viewer can fill in the blanks to suit their own feelings and imaginations. I love to look at very realistic paintings, as well, but they don't touch the emotions as much for me.

I usually lean toward using primary colors in painting. Especially in oils and acrylics. I have never purchased things like turquoise, peach, etc. I have always liked to mix my own colors. My palette is usually: titanium white, cadmium yellow, yellow ochre, cadmium red, indian red (this doesn't go as pink when white is added and mixed with black makes a great background color when you want it to look black, but have color. Especially in still life paintings.), alizarin crimson, burnt sienna, burnt umber, a blue (depending on still life or landscape), sap green and sometimes ivory black. In studio I add yellow green and thalo green sometimes. For plein air, I usually leave off the indian red, alizarin, and black. But as you see from this exercise, you don't really need many colors to mix your own.

Pastels can be used almost the same way. It is great to have all the colors and not have to blend and cross hatch as much, faster of course. :) But with a limited palette or small number of pastels, one can put black under a brighter color to get a darker version. Recently the manufacturers have been developing more dark colors. Unison and Terry Ludwig have great selections of darks. Pastels have more brilliance if they are not blended too much. The prisms/edges of the pigment reflect the light better. When blended the edges are smoothed and do not reflect as much light. That is a good excuse to buy many pastels ... if you need an excuse. When you add white to pastels it looks a little chalky, so nice to have many light colors as well.

Most pastelists just love to look at all the colors, I think. You can never have too many pastels. I'm including a couple of photos of some of my pastels as a sample. :)

Tiny flag sketch

The Hunt is on as I mentioned and has a few interesting challenges. I worked on painting one item from the list using primary colors only. You can use white to lighten the colors, but only use red, yellow and blue. I started a hat in pastels, but we went to golf. I will try to finish it and add it in later. I have about 20 minutes in it so far. Interesting getting a nice tannish color for the hat. :)

We went to the Real Estate office to take some mail that had been left for the owners of the house. I took few moments, while Gene went in, to sketch the U.S. flag and the New Mexico flag. They were across the street with a gun of some sort. I don't even know what the building is. It is in regular #2 pencil in a Strathmore sketchbook of recycled paper, 3.5 x 5 inches, 60 lb. paper. Nice little book. I sketched a bridge in one of the previous hunts. It fits in my purse. No excuse now.

Scavenger Hunt 9 Sept 7 - 15

Hunt number 9 is up and running. See you there.

Triple Whammy

I looked at wetcanvas.com, Scavenger Hunt #8, this morning to see the final sketches and comment if anyone had anything new up. Just as I started the browser, I thought about all these sketches from life, no photos, no memory shots. An then wham! My simplicity - Scrabble board was .. from a photo, from my memory and I even stated it was so. Wow, guess that certainly disqualifies that sketch. Ha. Will have to do an extra one for the next hunt. Ah, me. It was such a good idea.......

No sketching or painting, well, yes, I did play in the pastels a little as you see. I had a piece of Wallis paper near the easel, I had been showing Gen how pastels work when they were here. She is painting in acrylics and taking lessons. I was talking to Gene and thinking about an idea I have of painting old fashioned floppy roses, so was just doodling with the pastels I had out from working on the Orange Door. Not a bad sketch, but from memory you can see that the roses were starting to all look the same. It is the same as painting rocks for me. Without a model, I tend to make them all the same. Quirky, huh?

There is also a golf photo which is a lovely spot here at the Silver City course from today.

Scrabble sketch

It was a long day, sort of. We went to play golf in Deming, New Mexico, with friends, Gen and Charlie. It is a fifty mile drive, so that was two hours gone from the day. We started about 10:00 a.m. and then went to a late lunch at a steak house. Beautiful day .. no rain! The photo of the little cloud is to show a non cloudy day here, for a change.

The sketch is the last for Scavenger Hunt #8. A new one will start tomorrow. I finished 19 of 26 and three challenges, so pretty good for me. It was a 9 day hunt. A learning experience for sure. One of the challenges was to sketch "Simplicity". Nitsa made a face from the letters and one lady sketched a rose. Many different ideas. I have been thinking about it for the week. This afternoon when we got back, I went out on the patio to do a crossword and have a coffee. It just came to me, Scrabble. We don't even have a Scrabble game here, so I had to look it up on-line to refresh my memory on the value of the letters and look at the board. Then after several starts I settled in on this sketch and hurried to get it up tonight before the end of the hunt. I did it in the little Cannon sketchbook with a Uniball pen. About twenty minutes. The pen is not good for sketching as it bleeds and is hard to control. I will put it somewhere other than with my sketching equipment. Maybe in the desk here and leave it behind when we go.

This house is evidently owned by an artist. There are several watercolors and pen and ink drawings on the walls with the owners name. I feel it is the woman, but that is just a guess. There are some wall hangings from South and Central America. It feels like home here, very comfortable. They are moving back in when we leave so it won't be available next year. Guess we will look near Cloudcroft or go to Canada or.....

I didn't finish the Orange Door, maybe tomorrow. That house has such weird little additions that the roof doesn't look right, even when you look at it in person. Joanna and Gene both questioned my perspective. Sigh, as Joanna says.

Orange Door, Rocking Horse, sketch

I had a productive day today. I did a pastel painting of an orange door. There is a house across the street from Gene's mom's house that is light blue and has a bright orange door in the back. It is not exactly like my painting, but it gave me the idea and the basic shapes. The painting will be in an oval frame, so I shaped it in PhotoDeluxe as I didn't want to lay the mat on it until I am ready to frame. So it doesn't quite fit the digital mat, but you get the idea. It is on Art Spectrum pastel paper 9 x 12 inches, so will be 8 x 10 when finished. I did an under painting of dark orange where the blue is and dark blue where the orange is. Used alcohol to spread it into the tooth of the paper. I used a mixture of soft pastels. I took the photo before I added the last highlights with Sennelier pastels and have Gene, the critic, check my angles. I will post the finished product when it is matted. It took about 2 hours to do it.

I also got number 17 - milk carton and number 18 - crackers done for the scavenger hunt on wetcanvas. Amazing that I have that many done. Woohoo. The sketch is in my no name sketchbook, which is a copy of the Canson but the paper is not as nice. It is good enough for quick sketches though. I used a Prismacolor pencil. The ellipsis are better than the photo. The camera did that weird shaping. Really. The Prismacolor pencil doesn't erase well, so it is good to sketch with so you are not tempted to change things.

Today, Gene prepared a wooden rocking horse that I will paint. He sanded it and cleaned it up. The Family Crisis Center in Bastrop has a Festival of Trees as a fund raiser the Saturday before Thanksgiving. They auction off Christmas trees and other Christmas items that are donated and decorated by businesses and volunteers in the community. The Bastrop Fine Arts Guild does a tree every year and I am the committee chair for that. Gene bought this unfinished rocking horse last year for a fairly hefty sum, so I am painting it this year to donate back for the auction. Hopefully he won't buy it back again. :) It is a fun event with all the proceeds for charity. The Crisis Center serves four counties in the Bastrop area. We have volunteered there since 1997.

Sketches 16 and 17

I sketched some this evening. These are for the Scavenger Hunt on wetcanvas.com. Dessert tonight was a Klondike Heath Bar, so sketched that for number 16 - ice cream. Only about 10 minutes, it was melting! Then number 17 - key was in the pocket, by feel, so no shadows or letters. That was an extra challenge for the hunt. Interesting.

The paper is white (photograph at night, no flash) and includes the Pigma Micron pen.

Gloomy day, sketches

It has been cloudy for two days. Drizzle. Gloomy.

Yesterday we did paperwork and watched golf. We had brunch at 'Geronimo's", a New Mexican restaurant. They have menudo, which Gene loves. They do put the dry corn in it in New Mexico, so it is more like posole and I would like it more, I think. It has cow's stomach and had tripe, before the mad cow disease scare took that away. It has red chile and spices. I would prefer it later in the day, but it is commonly served in the morning for a hangover cure, I suppose. We did go out to eat last night at the Red Barn, family restaurant. No exciting photo ops for the day.

Today started off with clouds and drizzle. It did clear up so that you can see the closest hills. I watched golf and sketched for the scavenger hunt. Concentration on sketching is hard to manage with Tiger playing. #12 - the bed, was done in the Canson sketchbook with the Pigma Brush pen, sepia. It is like a small paint brush, so no detail. Interesting to use. #13 - bookcase, was done the same. #14 - light bulb was done in the smaller Canson with a Zig Millenium, black. Out of proportion but interesting to draw. #15 - transparent, was the hardest. I was distracted and messed up the pillows on the couch. I wanted something behind the package for the bulb so it would show through. Oh well, it made me think.

(Added later: I was distracted from my writing as well, evidently. The next to the last sentence is wonky. The transparent package is from the light bulb. I wanted the pillows in the background so you would see them through the transparent plastic.)