The Svalbard Series

So, I've been painting a lot of botanicals lately for a meadow project I'm working on and they all involve many layers of glazing. Whilst they are drying, I've taken to doing sketches based on the aurora borealis - this has kind of now become a thing and it's had a lot of attention on Twitter so I'm now hashtagging them as the #svalbardseries - they are silhouettes based on actual Google Street View images from Svalbard, but with imaginary backgrounds. Here are some examples, thus far - two based around the town Longyearbyen and one more rural based near to a mining town. Important to note that St Cuthbert's Mill kindly gave me a block of Saunder's Waterford paper to review, gratis, and I've been suing it for these paintings and others to really test it out. It is in 140lb cold-press (CP/NOT) in their 'high-white' colour, which is a very pure, bright white.

Miner's Daughter, Ana, Meets Jörð's Daughter, Aurora

Watercolour on paper. Copyright (C) 2016, The Spindoctor. CC BY-SA-4.0.

Saunders Waterford 140lb "high white" cold-press paper.

Artist-grade paints by Winsor & Newton in Indigo, Prussian Blue, Aureolin, Phthalo Green YS and BS, Ultramarine Purple and Ivory Black.

This was originally going to be 'Gaia's daughter', but I figure Jörð is more appropriate. The miner is stood to the left of their house, his daughter is held in his arms.

Winter Night At Longyearbyen

Watercolour and gouache on paper. Copyright (C) 2016, The Spindoctor. CC BY-SA-4.0.

Saunders Waterford 140lb "high white" cold-press paper.

Artist-grade paints by Winsor & Newton in French Ultramarine, Aurora Yellow (discontinued, 1997), Dioxazine Violet, Phthalo Green YS and Ivory Black. Spattered with Designer's Gouache (Winsor & Newton) in Zinc White.

Reflecting the aurora in the snow on the ground worked out really nicely in the end. I did the spattering effect with one of those spattering brushes that looks like a bottle-brush and you turn the handle - makes for a lovely fine spray!

Winter Morning At Longyearbyen

Watercolour on paper. Copyright (C) 2016, The Spindoctor. CC BY-SA-4.0.

Saunders Waterford 140lb "high white" cold-press paper.

Artist-grade paints by Winsor & Newton in Hansa Yellow, Emerald (discontinued, 2002), Prussian Blue, Indigo, Ultramarine Violet and Ivory Black.

Don't be confused by the name at the bottom - that was me noting down what to paint next (i.e. the painting above this one!) but I was going to paint Norway - this was prior to deciding to stick to Svalbard.

Three Jar Inspiration

UPDATE 15th June 2016: I've made some worksheets for this technique and put them on my Downloads page to help start people off.

We all struggle with a lack of inspiration for painting regularly - personally I started using painting a small botanical each evening and posting them on Twitter under #bedtimebotanical a good motivation (please feel free to join me in that!), but there's another method I also use - I call it "three jar inspiration". If you use it, please tweet it or tag it on YouTube (etc) with #3jarspaint so we can share with one another our outcomes. I came up with this for myself as a means to force myself to use a wider range of mediums and to stretch my range of what I paint/draw - it has worked really well for that!

You need:
* Three jars of any kind.
* Paper (typing paper or scraps, 3 colours is ideal).

Label the jars, if you like - the should be labelled "What" "Style" and "How" - the "How" jar is actually optional. If you only paint in one medium e.g. watercolour and you don't want to use any other media, you can stick to just two jars.

In the "What" jar, put pieces of paper on which you have written a whole load of subjects for painting - these can be really specific like "The Sea", "A Banana", "Two Sheep", "A Beetle", or can be more figurative like "Playtime", "Laughter", "Deep Love", "Gaia's Might". You can use anything you like! If you like to use images for reference, you could swap this jar for a shoebox full of postcards or printed out images, for example. If you don't use reference photos - or perhaps want to start to get away from them - you can stick to using words on slips of paper and then only look up a reference photo when you really need it.

In the "Style" jar, put pieces of paper on which you have written a wide variety of styles, such as "Loose", "Abstract", "Impressionist", "Tudor", "Cubist", "Decalcomania" - they don't have to be specifically painting styles - you could use -  "Steampunk", "Vibrant", "Twisted", "Nightmare", "Stormy", "Dreamlike", "Utopia" - use your imagination! Or for a REAL challenge, put in some names of painters you admire! I've put in names of YouTubers I love as it helps me to try out their distinctive styles!

In the optional "How" jar, put pieces of paper on which you have written the different media you have to hand - put each one in a few times, obviously. "Charcoal", "Papercraft", "Cardmaking", "Mixed Media", "Art Journal", "Oil Pastel", "Alcohol Ink", "Stamping", "Pyrography", "Oil", "Gouache", "Alkyd", "Crayon", "Chalk", "Chalk Pastel", "Acrylic"...

How it works!
All you do is firstly decide when you want to paint/draw etc - for me, it's 2200h, so whatever time it is, find another time maybe 12-24h before which will be the time you use the jars. For me, that's 0600h. I get up and first thing, I grab a piece of paper from each jar - that tells me what I am producing at 2200h so I have all day to think up what or how I'm going to do this - you could be doing "Wasp, Steampunk, Papercraft" one day and "Seascape, Loose, Watercolour" the next - or if you use names of artists you could end up trying to mimic Leonid Afremov's oil painting style using decoupage to create a banana - in this way it REALLY stretches you as an artist!

Even if you only use two jars (or one jar and one shoebox), you are still challenged with doing watercolours (or whatever) of "sunset over Mount St Helens in Picasso style" or "tip of a ball-point pen in an art deco style" - that's a great challenge! Happy painting!

Supplies I Need To Use

I managed to start using my poor abandoned gouache this past week, so I've been thinking about what other supplies I have that I just plain need to use! The fact is - I cannot refuse a bargain - so I have plenty of things I got because they were a good deal but I've not really used much. Last night, I saw that Lindsay The Frugal Crafter had posted a much-requested video (seriously, every tutorial she does, someone asks for this!) tutorial using chalk pastels - incidentally, I cannot get used to Americans pronouncing "pastels" - in the UK, we say "pæstl", but in the USA they say "pæ'stɛl" (IPA). I replied to Lindsay's video to say "Y'know I really need to get some chalk pastels - and start using my oil ones..." - then when I started writing this post, I remembered, I have some Derwent Pastel Pencils, that I got for 50p each in my local art shop's "Clearance" section to make space for new stock - they normally sell for £1.80 each, so that was pretty good - I've not used them yet! I also have some Derwent Tinted Pastel Pencils I bought in a few specific colours to add to my stash thereof and, since buying those, I've not used them. So, that means I can probably try Lindsay's tutorial, albeit in random colours! I also have a set of oil pastels - Derwent Academy Oil Pastels - which are student-grade but they feel nice to use, I just wish I knew more techniques and found them a bit easier to use in terms of making what I'm looking for.

I've neglected my acrylics a LOT since I started painting watercolour every day as a challenge to myself. I have a mixture of different types, all from Daler and Rowney - CRYLA Artists' Acrylics, System 3 Acrylics and Graduate Student Acrylics - I don't have any of their budget line - the Simply Acrylic Paint. I've got some Simply Golden Taklon Brushes, which I think are fantastic value - they're really good quality for the price and are great for acrylics - you can kind of get away with using them for thick gouache application but not really anything else. I did get a set of Simply Oil Paints, because I wanted to learn some basic techniques and ways to use the paints without worrying too much about pigment load or quality etc - just something to practice and play with. Back to acrylics, Daler and Rowney oddly sell 4 grades - I'm used to "Artist, Student, Basic" combinations, like their watercolours - Artist's Water Colours, Aquafine Student Watercolours [sold as Georgian Watercolours in the USA], Simply Watercolours - but in their acrylic range, both the Graduate and the System 3 ranges are marketed as being student paints - the latter are better quality, however. I believe System 3 is for "amateur artists and experienced students" or some similar wording, but price-wise, Graduate just aren't as good value in terms of pigment load.

Finally, my dear neglected embossing powders - I very, very highly rate the range of Wendy Vecchi embossing powders by Ranger - the colours are fantastic and the quality is really high (I've reviewed all of them on Amazon). Wendy herself has posted some great mixes she's produced from her embossing powders - something that I've done a fair bit of myself and shared with her a technique for faux enamelling that uses her powders - something I'll be making a video tutorial on soon.

So, that's a whole load of stuff I want to make more use of! This is before I even get as far as inks...!

Dog Project - Part 5 - Finishing en grisaille and starting colour

Yesterday, I worked en grisaille to paint a tonal map underlayer that I would paint over in gouache. Today - my last day of annual leave for some months - I had a big sleep-in and then went shopping for a new bit of filming equipment (review coming later today!) and some biscuits and then came back home to work on the Dog Project some more. On my way home, I got a text from B (whom I'd shown the charcoal sketch) - he loved the charcoal and didn't want me to paint it, bless him, so I sent him the unfinished tonal map and carried on ;o)

First of all, I completed the tonal map en grisaille, including adding in the pure white bits (the colours I'm using for this are listed in yesterday's post). 

The area outside of the window is not a tonal map - it's just a sketch to guide me. I'd already picked out the colours of Winsor and Newton Designers' Gouache that I wanted to use - I have them all dried into a palette but I decided today to use them direct from the tubes as I wanted to be sure they were really clean - this is how glamorously I store my gouache tubes:

("Danish" biscuits tin - these, full of quite nice biscuits, are £1.00 in most "pound shop" chains in the UK - I am a big fan of pound shops...!)

I blobbed-out some gouache onto the lid of my big studio watercolour palette as that's a nice flat surface.

From top left, in rows: Raw Umber, Primary Yellow, Primary Red, Primary Blue, Permanent Green Middle, Permanent Yellow Deep, Ivory Black, Zinc White - the full details of which one can be found on my gouache colourchart post.

I began with some browns to paint the windowframe and the drawers - a mix of Raw Umber with varying amounts of Permanent Yellow Deep did just the trick! I then tackled the window by painting in a sunset with a kind of impressionist-style gradient (it's far away!) of Primary Blue to Primary Red via a beautiful wine-like purple that they made when mixed. I then brewed up a range of greens, first painting in the midtone green (Permanent Green Middle, as is), then a light green (adding Primary Yellow) and a mucky dark olive green (adding Ivory Black). The walls in the photo this was based on were a kind of neutral liver-y brown, but I wanted to warm it up so I mixed Primary Blue and Primary Red to make a deep wine-purple, then added Zinc White to make a tint and then added Raw Umber a little at a time to get this creamy, muted purple:

Pretty isn't it? I also made a slightly olive-y green to paint the blanket that covers Dog - Permanent Green Deep mixed with small amounts of Permanent Yellow Deep and Raw Umber. I painted that in a bit too thick so the tonal map didn't quite show through. Finally, I made a loose wash of Raw Umber mixed with Permanent Yellow Deep to paint the blankets in the foreground - white are oatmeal-grey in reality, but as Dog is a pretty light colour, he'd be lost if I'd stuck to that! I've now left that to dry overnight and will probably add more layers to those blankets before I start to work on Dog himself.

[Yes, those ARE sheep on Dog's blanky - Dog had all the coolest stuff - including pirate jimjams. RIP Dog :( ]

Dog Project - Part 4 - Painting En Grisaille

So, yesterday, I kind of started again, working from a new picture of Dog and in a new medium - gouache. There are many different ways of working in gouache and I'm going to use two for this painting - the first is an underpainting, the second is the midtone method. The underpainting in this case is en grisaille, that is to say, entirely done in shades of grey and focusing only on levels. The underpainting is then overpainted in coloured gouache and this helps get the light and shadow just right.

Now, when working in watercolour, one normally mixes one's own black by neutralising a colour with its complement - a yellow with a purple, a red with a green, a blue with an orange (ultramarine and either of the siennas make nice blacks) - or, if doing a three-colour painting, you just mix your red, blue and yellow and get a black that will "sit" well with all of your colours and won't look too...well...black. If one doesn't want to do that or needs something much more black, one still doesn't reach for a tube of black paint - one would use Payne's Grey. This is a mix of colours and varies by manufacturer as follows:

Payne's Grey Compositions
Winsor and Newton, Cotman Water Colours (465): PBk7, PB29, PB15.
Winsor and Newton, Professional Water Colours (465) : PBk6, PV19, PB15.
Daler and Rowney, Artist's Water Colours (065): PBk7, PB29.

PBk6 - Shungite - this is a natural carbon mineral that contains Buckminsterfullerine - I know this cuz I have a bracelet made out of it, it's kind of "posh coal" as I think of it! It's a beautiful mineral to wear and I guess Winsor and Newton use it because of the unique properties the fullerines must give to the paint?
PBk7 - Lamp Black - powdered carbon.
PB15 - Phthalocyanine Blue - yup, good old phthalo blue.
PB29 - Ultramarine Blue.
PV19 - Quinacridone Violet. 

See the problem yet? The problem is that if one does an underpainting that contains ultramarine, quinacridone violet and phthalo blue, they will seep into the upper coloured layer and give you mud, ruining the painting. Thus, when painting an en grisaille underlayer, one has to use a proper black!

I just found this picture of me wearing my shungite (PBk6) bracelet. The large pendant is obsidian (volcanic glass) and the rest is all jet (coal). I took this photo to show my dear friend J what I will be wearing after he gets married next month, as a joke, given we have a pseudo-jealousy thing going on for the sake of banter.

The lovely thing about gouache is that you have a WHITE PAINT! No more having to remember to leave white space, you get a nice white paint instead. I have a semi-opaque 748 Zinc White , which contains only PW5 - Lithopone (a mix of barium sulfate and zinc sulfide) - cool fact - if you take any 5mL tube of watercolour and add to it 0.75mL of this Zinc White gouache, you can make yourself a custom gouache of that same shade. Cool huh? Dunno where I heard that, but it works. I can then take this white and mix it with my black - 331 Ivory Black - which contains only PBk9 - Bone Black (a kind of charcoal made from charring animal bones - it used to be made from ivory back in the good old days when people did unbelievable and unspeakable things and no one cared) - this makes a very clean black and of course, one can mix the black and white to get a series of nice neutral grey levels and it is with these that we paint en grisaille as an underpainting, safe in the knowledge that it won't give us mud!

It took me about 1h to paint the en grisaille rendering of the original image. I used my Sable No. 4 Round brush - the whole thing done with one brush - and I just really relaxed and gently painting in the shadows. I've not yet added any pure white - but I need to - I've used the paper as white, which is not correct, so I need to rectify that before I add colour. The original stopped just above the drawers with an empty fruit bowl and a phone, so I used artistic license and added a window, with a view of the park near to B's home, which I am going to add some special details to that mean something only to B and myself.

When put side-by-side you can get more of an appreciation for it - I've deliberately not done a perfect copy - what's the point? A painting is a painting, not a photograph, right? My next steps are going to be to start colouring it with gouache - I'm going to start with the view from the window which I will be using a midtone method for, effectively, as I'm only lightly sketched the trees in the distance thus far. I will then start work on the room and finish with Dog, as I've decided he would be lit slightly from behind given when the window is and it'll be a beautiful sunset outside, so that light will be warm and pink. Tune in next time to see my progress!

Dog Project Watercolour - Part 3 - Rebooting

Well, I'm going to confess, I had some issues and I've had to make some big changes - but first of all, what I did following last time. I should add a few words of explanation actually because a few people on Twitter have asked me. Dog belonged to B, who is a very dear friend of mine and who is extremely kind to me. B rescued Dog about 6-7 years ago and loved Dog very much - and to cut a long story short, Dog, at a ripe old age of like 14, had to be put to sleep in early January 2016. I made B a canvas transfer of the same photo of Dog that this painting was originally based on, back in Jan/Feb for his birthday - a simple transfer of a CMYK laser print using Mod Podge (Matte) on a box canvas, which I then decorated in a mix of acrylic paints (375 Sap Green, 367 Oxide Of Chromium Green and 634 Naples Yellow, mixed to make an opaque sage green) and some of Tim Holtz's products to distress it somewhat - I sprayed on Distress Spray Stain in "Picket Fence" through one of Tim's layering stencils. I noticed at the time that Dog had interesting angles and shadows and would make a good watercolour, hence Project Dog was born to produce a watercolour to give to B as a gift.

Following on from the last instalment, I made a wash using Winsor and Newton Professional Watercolours in 178 Cobalt Blue and 448 Opera Rose so that I got a nice sky with a warm purple sunset descending into pink along the horizon. I also applied a wash in 503 Permanent Sap Green for the grass, adding shading by mixing 178 Cobalt Blue into the green along the grass underneath Dog.

You can't really see it in the photo as it's just a snapshot, not a proper photo for the blog, but the purple-blue sky came out really well and had a nice soft edge. I did this using a 1" black goat mop to apply water to the paper and then a 1" white goal oval wash to apply the paint.

It looked really nice...and then it all went wrong! When removing masking fluid (which had been on for like 24h - the instructions and other users online seem to say you have about 3 days to remove it in before it sets fully), it removed the top layer of the Bockingford 425gsm rough watercolour paper right in the middle of Dog's back... This meant that when I then applied 319 Indian Yellow, it 'clogged' in the 'pealed' paper and left a huge area of really dark yellow...so I had to abandon ship, which makes me sad as the washes are some of the softest and most beautiful I've ever done.

There was also a second issue - Dog's face in this photo is at a funny angle and thus hard to paint, so I went back to B and asked for some photos of him - the original photo was one that another friend, R, took at a party we had back in December. I managed to get 3 photos of Dog that I thought might work and I thought a lot about how to imagine them in watercolour. 

Then...yesterday morning I was lying in bed watching YouTube and I found some lovely gouache technique videos and, as I'd just the other day been saying how much I should actually use my gouaches, I decided to reboot and, as well as changing photos, to change medium too!

So, this is the new photo of Dog I'm working from - I've drawn all over it, but you get the idea. First I printed it out onto white A4 printer paper using my laser printer, at the side at which I'd like to paint it.

Next, I prepared to make a charcoal transfer. First thing I did was cover the back of the picture with charcoal, I use Daler and Rowney Simply Charcoal in Medium, which I got in a Simply Artists Sketching Set, which is about 6 quid and really good value - I think I got mine for about £3 in the January sales this year - I always buy "kits" etc if they mean a cheap way to get a couple of decent pencils and charcoals. This particular set has 2 sanguine sticks, 2 charcoal sticks, an eraser, a pencil sharpener a sandpaper block, 2 paper stumps, 4 sketching pencils (HB, 2B, 4B, 6B - and they're really nice to use too) - that's pretty good value I'd say, especially if like me, you seldom use charcoal or sanguine or even pencils so just need some basic supplies...however, I digress! Back to the project! I covered the back with charcoal - the weird stripe on it is just where there's painters tape on the surface underneath. 

I then "polished" it using kitchen paper to remove all of the dust. I then applied another coating of charcoal and then polished it again - this leaves a pretty good "transfer backing" as I call it - it's stable and doesn't stain every surface unless you press hard and, if you've done it right, doesn't leave any dust.

I took the transfer-backed picture and laid it into the middle of a sheet of The Langton Prestige 14" × 10" 100% Cotton cold-press watercolour paper, which is sold by Daler and Rowney. It's a nice paper in terms of texture and so on, but these blocks do buckle if you paint quite wet, but gouache doesn't uses washes, so that's ok, right?

I added some registration marks and taped the paper into place with blue painters tape (which is cheaper in hardware shops than in art shops!) and then traced over all the main lines in the photo using an HB pencil from the set I mentioned above.

The image transferred properly and pretty cleanly and kept nice pale lines - it's important to use a medium charcoal and not a soft one otherwise the lines can be very dark and you don't want lines showing in the finished painting. I touched a few bits up with a 6B pencil (soft and pale) just to make sure I had every line in place.

I then taped around the area I wanted to work in so that I would get a nice border when finished with straight edges - there's a lot of paper either side of the picture - this image covers about 1/3rd of the width. I removed that black thumbprint using a putty rubber, which works well with charcoal, of course. So, now I have an image to paint, what am I going to do...? Tune in next time for the next instalment of Dog Project and find out!