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Love your watercolor work! Have you taken Mark Westermoe’s watercolor portrait class? It really helped my watercolor painting. What classes on here have you taken that have helped you?

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Playing around in procreate for the first time ever! I’m just playing around with colors and brushes and trying to get free. What are your favorite brushes? tips? tricks? tutorials?

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Thanks Bryan! I’m using the brown paper bag as a toned paper…but it’s not the tone that helps…it’s like the fact that it’s so cheap that I’m not worried about messing up as much. And when I’m not worried about messing up, I feel more free and create better work. I think just practice, practice, practice is the key to getting more confident with any material.

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Another ballpoint pen and prismacolor pencil on a brown paper bag. I’m not sure if brown paper bags are archival, but I really like drawing on them. For some reason I make better drawings with materials that have basically no value. Almost every time I try to make a drawing or painting on fancy paper or fancy materials, I mess it up. Does anyone else have that experience? How do you get over it?? I would like to figure out a way to hack my braid so I don’t have this problem. Regardless I do like using a toned paper. I watched Charle’s Hu’s lessons on costumed figure drawing on toned paper. I think I have a different drawing style/approach than him. It’s helping to watch different people draw to figure out an approach and style that works best for me.

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Ballpoint pen and prismacolor on a brown paper bag

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This is the best of my efforts today. These are some 5 minutes poses from Charles Hu’s costumed figure class. I’m getting faster and more confident with the ball point pen, even if today’s work is not as good as previous days, it feels good to work on speed and simplifying. I added some water color.

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This is a ball point pen “sloppy copy” of an Andres Zorn print. I love love love his line work in the shadows. I do these really fast master copies (I call sloppy copies) because it allows me to just use my eyes and my hand and let go of the part of me that critiques every line that I make (sometimes even before I make it). I love Andres Zorn’s work and am really curious about the limitations he creates for himself. I feel like creating limits for myself in order to push the bounds of creativity and picture making without having to many decisions to make. I just bought oil paints for Joseph Todorovitch’s portrait class…I could only afford a few colors, so Zorn palette is it.

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This is a portrait in watercolor and graphite on low quality sketchbook paper. Image reference is from the portrait with hands class…though I did not include hands in this portrait. I tried to work pretty fast (as fast as water color will allow). Already I see that should have put a shadow tone over the white part of her eye on the shadow (right) side and soften the edge of her chin against the backdrop of her dark hair. Her lips seem a little bit off and I’m not sure how using a complimentary blue/green in the shadows on her skin really works. Also I’m never sure how to do forehead lines or wrinkles with out it looking horribly unflattering. It’s always a fine line between accuracy and flattery. My process for this was 1)sketch with a 2B pencil. 2)A few layers of water color 3)Add darks with a 6B graphite pencil 4) then I went in with a florescent red prismacolor pencil on the lips, nose, lightly on the cheeks, and a tiny tiny bit in the nostril a la Rembrandt (he adds like a cad red in some weird places where there is reflected light off the skin or where light shines through an ear). Ok, so this is clearly not a Rembrandt, merely an amateur 30 min sketchbook scribble, but I really love the idea/technique. It reminds me that we’re all made of blood and muscle and light. And I will jump at any opportunity to use my florescent prismacolors in a picture of something natural like humans or plants or animals. Still trying to get better picture of my color work…may have to invest in some better lighting.

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It’s difficult to capture art with a camera. I feel like even, neutral colored lighting is key. I used to have a room in my old house with windows on three sides that had white curtains. I used it as a studio and a place to take pictures because the light was soft and there were never any shadows. I moved and all the lighting configurations I can muster cast weird shadows or I can’t get the color right. Like, even the tooth of paper casts weird shadows. I’m looking for a better lighting setup so I can paint in color at night and take good photos…but haven’t found it yet. I like this drawing a lot…her features are really well designed…the thumbnail photo drew me in, her face is so sweet and kind looking.

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This was definitely a color challenge for me…I used two different reference images, one with a weird yellow/green filter. This is mostly watercolor: I used a little bit of complimentary purple for the shadow areas and then went in with a gold prismacolor for some of the darker shadows. I didn’t want to use black or graphite and gold was what I had lying around and freshly sharpened. I think it works ok as I wanted to keep it soft. It’s pretty small, about 3″x3″. I don’t have very good lighting in my house, so had to wait until daytime to get a picture that captured the color correctly.

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This is a self portrait after a bad day. I used a freebie ballpoint pen and the red is a cheepo hardware store peel-away grease pencil. I’m trying to unlearn my perfectionism, so the sloppiness is intentional, and definitely a reflection of my mood. I’ve been working through the costumed figure drawing class and I like watching Charles Hu’s pen drawing. Though, I am more inspired here by Chris Legaspi’s ball point demo that I watched a while back. I like his shading style a lot. I’ve been trying to really hone my essential lines, like outlines and shadow shapes and then (especially here) go a bit crazy in the shading. It’s weird shading with a pen, it always looks a bit like bruises to me.

As for design, I had trouble with the chin and shadow area on the right side of the nose. I’m striving to get good enough so that I can be less sketchy with my lines…instead of finding the correct line through sketching, just knowing where I want to go and going there (I think that’s also a metaphor life). I’m clearly not there yet, but pen helps this learning process because you can’t erase nor hide anything from yourself. I melded my braid into a collar and I’m not sure why or if it works. Right now I’m just trying to get out of my own way and learn to trust my intuition.

 

[lizzomatic]

Hi Myriam,

I’ve also been experimenting with different mediums/pencils to get the best darkest darks in my drawings. I have a few suggestions other than what I see in this thread: 1)Have you tried using a smoother paper? With a textured or rough paper you often have to push harder with your pencil to get even dark tones. 2)Have you tried using prismacolor pencils or wax pencils? The black is much blacker than anything you can get with a graphite pencil. You can’t really do much erasing, but I love the rich blacks you can get and tonal range you can get when using them in combo with verithin pencils. Chris Legaspi has a good tutorial on how to use them (I think it’s in his materials series, but it’s been a bit since I watched it). 3)I recently discovered water soluable graphite and I’ve been able to get some really nice even dark tones, even on a rough paper, when I go over the darks with a water brush. I found some Schwan Stabilo water soluable pencils that I really like: I have a graphite one, but I like their black colored pencil better for getting really dark darks. A problem I keep running into is getting a surface sheen when using dark tones with graphite and I’m still playing around with combining colored pencils and graphite in the same piece…I don’t think they play well together.

I haven’t tried carbon pencils to my knowledge, but I will pick one up next time I’m art supply shopping. I’ve been playing around with different mediums, so thanks for the tip! And good luck with your art!

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