Tools Of The Trade

I am progressing slowly with watercolours, thanks to F., the best girlfriend of them all, I now possess a Rembrandt aquarelle travel set, which is quite a step up from the small selfmade set filled with children's watercolours I used before. With a bit of whittling I was able to fit a number 0 chinese brush, a 00 brush and a number 6 and 12 flat brush inside. The colour quality of the Rembrandt is amazing as well, here for example is my most recent work, which took me about two hours in the train from Lausanne to Basel.

40 minutes portraits

I haven't been posting much lately - it is amazing how much time an interesting new job and an excellent girlfriend will take.

Since my morning commute involves a 40 minutes train-ride between Lausanne and Neuchâtel, I have been busy sketching more victims subjects in watercolour pencils. Above on the left you can see a guy from an ad in the newspaper 20 minutes (a swiss comedian, I think?) and on the right L., who was, for some weird reason, impressed with my sketching and asked me for a scan.

By the way, if you want to see how this kind of sketches are supposed to look like, take a gander over at Gurney Jouney, especially this or this .

Coming soon: Fishes

Drawing and painting

Two recent works I did in my drawing course:

The first is a quick sketch: the assignment was an old clown with one leg, holding an axe. I drew this without any references in about one hour, and am quite happy about it, even though I got some of the anatomy in the shoulder of my one-legged clown wrong. I do like his expression though, which is the exact level of grumpiness I was going for...

The second took me probably about 8-10 hours. The assignment was to paint a woman with child. My first try with Colorex watercolour ink, which I hate, hate, hate. It looks like watercolour, but behaves differently enough that I was fighting with it the whole time. You can tell that I started with the left leg of the woman, it is just awful.

I restricted my palette to Marine blue, turtle gray, natural sienna and Sanguine - my first time painting with a restricted palette, and I liked it very much. Last time I am using Colorex for the foreseeable future, though.

Wizarding propaganda

Some time ago I painted a propaganda poster for the House Elf Liberation Front (HELF). Reading J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books, I have always thought that house elves were a demographic ripe for revolutionary thought - all they needed was a charismatic leader, and the woe onto wizarding kind!

Now I have made another propaganda poster - the time is a few years after the (successful) house elf revolution. Witches and wizards chafe under the draconian rule of the house elves, and counter-revolutionary sentiments run high. Long-held pure-blood prejudices are thrown overboard as open warfare breaks out in Diagon Alley once more...

The drawing is 4B pencil on A4 printer paper, with colours and writing added in photoshop.

Forced to draw cute

Sigh. I was accused of only producing dark and gloomy work in my drawing-course. Of course I protested that this wasn't true, but couldn't point to any recent non-gloomy work quickly enough. Therefore I was condemned to paint something 'cute'; more specifically, in the words of my teacher: "A princess. Riding on a dolphin. And the dolphin is smiling."

Hence the above. I also tried out water-soluble crayons for the first time, and am not too impressed. I think I prefer straight-up watercolour.
I am not at all happy with the sky - I am beginning to think that clouds may be my nemesis. Whatever I draw next (hopefully I am done with 'cute'...) will have to have some clouds in it, because clearly I need the practice.


Water-soluble pencils on 300 gsm A3 aquarelle-paper.

More adventures in watercolour

For three days now I've been painting watercolour sketches of myself with my new waterbrushes. I use a small hand-mirror, and give myself about 30 min after lunch. Here are the two most recent results:

A good way to get more comfortable with a new medium, I hope. I really like how you can't dither endlessly using watercolour - you make your stroke, and it's there. Erasing is nearly impossible, so you have to get it right the first time, or at least make the most of your mistakes. Or not, as is the case with the nose on the right portrait. Urg.

Waterbrushes

My new girlfriend (and more on this most excellent subject on a later date) gave me some waterbrushes recently. These are brushes with a small reservoir behind them, which feeds a regular trickle of water or ink into the brush. They are excellent for sketching on the road, since you don't have to fool around with pigment and open containers and whatnot. I filled one with water, another with burnt sienna, and together with my pentel brush they allow me to make two-tone sketches.

Last weekend we had a Vo-Vietnam training-camp in Bern, and during lunch-break I used half an hour or so to sketch my friend Phong. It even looks a bit like him, if you squint a little.

Alien & Liane

Last year my big sister gave me a set of charcoals for my birthday. It took nearly a year, but I finally managed to draw something major with them - the assignment was 'Morphologies'. From a list of different body types I chose the extraterrestrial and the pregnant woman, since I hadn't drawn either so far.

It was really fun to draw with charcoal, and even if I did kind of mess up the poor girl's face, which looked much better in the sketch, I am quite happy with the result.

Morphologies: Before the fight

Another assignment in my drawing class: draw different morphologies. I chose to combine two: a long gaunt man and a fat, strong one.

Alternatively, I had a vision of an epic battle: the last chance of an impoverished teacher and his sole student. Every bit of money they can spare goes into the student's food, hence the  teachers gauntness. Is it a wonder he prays loudly to the gods before the fight, which may be their last chance to earn some much-needed money?

 I am quite happy with how the teacher turned out. Less happy with the sumo wrestler; I think I drew his hands and head a bit too big, they should be smaller on his (supposedly) massive frame. The background is a bit uninspired, I drew it as an afterthought, and it shows. I wish I would have given it a bit more thought before I started the drawing, I definitely will for the next one!

Emotions: Joy, or: Modern Faerie

In my series of emotions (previously: surprise, rage, sadness and fear), I proudly present : Modern Faerie.

Life in the city is hard for faeries, and some fail to... adapt. Seeking solace in drugs, those poor creatures normally don't make it for long, and clapping your hands won't work here.

This is a drawing I've wanted to do for ages, but never felt up to. But when joy came up as a motive in my drawing course, I knew the time had come. Inked with a Pentel pocket brush on A4 paper, I am quite happy with how it turned out. Credit for the idea with the newspaper-wings goes to my teacher Julien.

In case you are curious about the process, here is a scan of the pencil drawing  I subsequently inked. Unfortunately I don't have any of the many preliminary sketches I did before, but I think I did at least eight before settling on this perspective and composition.

I was thinking of doing the same image in charcoal and chalk, but I think I will work on something different instead.

More brush pen

Blame Stephanie, who encouraged me when I posted my first sketch...

More imagery from Vietnam, the photo I based it on can be found here.

Brush pen

Tried out a brush pen yesterday, below you can see a quick 2 minute sketch of a guy in a rice field. Very interesting way to draw, since you can't correct anything.

crappy iphone picture of hasty sketch

Edit: Rotated picture, added link to original



- tales from the road

Nasobem

Ah, the Nasobem. Scant records exist of this elusive species, which is rumoured to persist in the Mekong-delta in Vietnam. Unfortunately I did not manage to see it when I was in Vietnam, although I did hear a curious snuffling noise in the underbrush once. Might have been a Nazgul, though. I did find this depiction on a piece of parchment in an old pagoda near Cần Thơ:

An octopus doing in the brackish waters of the Mekong?
You just can't trust those ancient sources.

 

Three sketches

I didn't have much time to draw during my stay in the US - too much to do, too much to see, and about a thousand photos to be shot - but here are three pages out of my sketchbook:

Smile

After a photo - I can't capture fleeting expressions from live subjects yet.

Layover

A girl sleeping a the airport. Her head looks a little bit small, but I swear that is how she looked like. Except for the hand, which could be a little bit bigger.

Roman

He was Dutch, really. Hanging around the common room of the youth hostel, concentrating on his laptop screen, as Romans are wont to do.

All three were done relatively quickly - about half an hour each.

Guggenheim

The thing with the Guggenheim is that it has a very small permanent exhibition - thus your visit stands and falls with how much you like the temporary one.

Unfortunately, the current exhibition, Haunted, is not really my thing. Much too modern, it goes mostly right over my head. Furthermore, two other galleries in the annex were closed for the installation of new exhibitions. That being said, the Tannhäuser Gallery is small, but good. Two pieces I particularly liked:

Van Gogh's Paysage enneigé

source

and Picasso's Fernande à la mantille noire

source

In my humble opinion Picasso should have forgotten about cubism, and surrealism, and stuck with painting amazing stuff like the above ;) Although you can see, or so the Guggenheim maintains, that he already starts to move from expressionistic and romantic painting to abstraction, and I guess I could be convinced of that. Still, Fernande is much more accessible to me than his later work. Don't make my poor brain work too much!

Which, come to think of it, may be the crux of my problems with modern art (if you can call the 1950's modern) - I want to appreciate and enjoy art, not work for it. Sheer laziness, I am afraid.

MoMA

The Guggenheim is closed on Thursdays, so I went to the Museum of Modern Art.







The painting I like most so far is Matisse's Musketeer. Not exactly modern art, I know. But I have to admit I don't get most of it. Some of it is aesthetically pleasing, some makes me chuckle (Ceci n'est pas une pipe), but most goes over my head. Even Picasso: I can somehow see that much thought and art went into his work - something that I can't say for many other artists: I can't tell Pollock's stuff apart from a paint spill - but I still don't get it.







Yet there is some hope for me: I didn't get Gaugin either a couple of years ago, or Matisses later stuff, but now I do. Yay me!






- tales from the road

Location:W 54th St,New York,United States

New favourite painting

I think I spent half an hour before this painting in the Met. Sublime.

Claude Monet, Ice Floes, Metropolitan Museum, New York

Emotions - surprise

Next to last in the emotions-series (previously: fear, sadness and rage).

Do not forget your Tyrannosaur-EX^TM deterrent when venturing into the primeval jungle!

I am quite happy with how the riding-lizard turned out - I want one! I probably could have spent some more thime on the foilage, though. Also, the claw of the poor Tyrannosaurus is and looks lika an afterthought. But! I drew the trepid explorer without a reference, and her anatomy works, more or less. Horray for me!

Lastly I thought it would be interesting to show the preliminary sketch I made, where I figured out where everything would go. Normally I need to make more than one of these, but this picture sprang more or less fully formed into my mind, like a hungry tyrannosaurus, or a bad metaphor.

Grarr.

Both drawings pencil on A4 paper.

Edit: Ahem. I actually was drawing surprise, not fear as previously stated. Fear I've already done. Corrected in title and text.

Eastern Dragon

Busy finishing my paper. Have a dragon while I work.

orientalischer Drache, aus Add. zu den Unaussprechlichen Kulten

Re: Your report of the 12 th of May, Anno Domini 1247

Your Excellency,

despite delving in the deepest archives, our librarians could unearth scant information about the creature you describe. The only clear descriptionn was found in Bloch's unholy De Vermis Mysteriis, and two of our brethren went mad before we knew only to use illiterate copyists which cannot be tempted to perouse the foul volume. We also had a few copies of the addendum to the Unaussprechlichen Kulten, one page of which I enclose in this message - it bears the only clear depiction we could find.

May our Lord be with you,
I remain you most obediant servant,
B.
-------------

Pencil (B, 4B) in my sketchbook, some patterning and cleaning up of the scan in photoshop.

HELF

Little did Hermione know what an avalanche she set off by starting SPEW. Oh, the hose elfs at Hogwarts pretended to be horrified, but they did listen. Soon they started their own campaign, and it wasn't long until a more sinister offshoot of SPEW appeared: HELF, the House Elf Liberation Front. And they didn't contend themselves with propaganda either...
The wizarding world never knew what hit them.

Support Comrade Dobby!

Finally made a real version of my pencil sketch from over a year ago. Acrylic on paper, A3.
And I know his forearm is too short, but that is how house elfs are built. Seriously.