Watercolor Demo

I wanted to make a blue painting so I figured why not record it as a live demo as well?

YouTube link.


8x10" on an Arches HP watercolor board. About 1.5 hours.

Acquisitions!

I only had one textbook to buy this semester, so I invested some of my money in things I'd been wanting to try for a while.

The brown box is a Mt. Vision flesh tones set of 25 pastels. They're the biggest pastels I've ever seen, I didn't expect to get this amount for the price, so I'm really pleased with them even though I haven't even tried them yet.
I got the Panpastel sets mostly for painting cats and to try my hand at landscapes, and the Pastelmat seems to be highly praised everywhere, so I'm excited to experience it.

I bought the Da Vinci Venetian red tube a while back but never really used it because the tinting power was too strong to lighten with the big tube of student grade white I had. I used this as an excuse to branch out and get a selection of Gamblin paints as well as a big white tube and try out artist grade oils. I  used to enjoy oil painting when I was first learning art, but I haven't tried it in several years. The Gamblin paints came with a set of 4 small paints as a bonus, so it'll be interesting to try out some extra colors. I didn't actually realize it until I set them out and looked at them, but I believe I have a pretty nice palette selection here.

I intend to write a few reviews for these products after I've played with them. I've invested enough cash into them that I have no excuse not to use them (I have a tendency to buy stuff and tuck it away for months) and hopefully they'll pay for themselves in short order.

Me as Everything (pt.1)

Spiral



Lion


The Machine Spirit

A while back, I figured I'd try something different from regular self-portraits and start incorporating other elements into them. So the result is these weird amalgamations of me and various other things. They're kind of creepy.

The Machine Spirit & Lion are both 9x12" ink and watercolor paintings on Arches cold-pressed watercolor paper. The nautilus one is an 8x10" on an Arches hot-pressed board. Can't remember what all colors I used, usually it's a mix of Maimeri and Winsor & Newton. Mostly burnt sienna, cobalt blue, sepia, and thio violet.

I can't say enough good things about the Arches boards, they're the same great paper but mounted on an archival board that doesn't warp when wet, so it's more convenient than plain paper albeit more expensive per sheet.

Another one for 2012

This one was a request from a buddy's sister. The actual color of the drawing is more like the sepia one but I put it in grayscale when I scanned it also, since it looks nice that way too.

8x10", strathmore 400 drawing paper. Same HB and 3B pencil as well as a B pencil for VARIETY.

Hey, I finally figured out how to draw blonde people! Now there's a milestone.

2012 productivity!

Super detailed realism takes too long. I wanted to finish out the family series of some of my relatives, so I adopted an old-school style of pencil drawing akin to what you'd see artists in the 40s and 50s and I'm pretty happy with it. I still gravitate more towards the detailed rather than the sketchy style, I guess it's just personal habit.

Here's a couple. They only took 2-3 hours apiece and are 8x10" on Strathmore 400 drawing paper. Done almost entirely with an HB leadholder pencil and a 3B regular pencil for the dark parts.

These two kids are siblings. There is one more in the family I need to draw, then the set will be finished.

Eric

This was a project I did as a surprise for one of my buddies while he was off at basic training this summer for the National Guard. I hadn't finished a detailed graphite drawing in over a year and I wanted to see if I still had what it took.



Yep.

11x14", Stonehenge paper, graphite. I have no idea how long I worked on this, other than it was longer than strictly necessary. There is some sheen present in the photo.


Here he is replicating the pose in my cap.
(You can see one of my old self-portraits in the mirror!)

Squirrel Demonstration

Did this one a while back, figured it would be good to post it here.

I stuck my camera on a microphone stand and recorded myself painting a squirrel in watercolor and condensed it down from about 3 or 4 hours to 11 minutes, which is still a good bit. About half a dozen colors were used: Payne's grey, sepia, Vandyke brown, yellow ochre, burnt sienna, and cobalt blue. Probably a few others.

This is 8x10" on Arches HP watercolor board.


Watch the video on YouTube