Color Doodles

Making a Gouache Pocket Box

2010-07-17T00:01:00.001-05:00

I have a pochade box that I can use for the gouache as tube paint.

But gouache can also be dried and re-wet like a pan watercolor. The paint will not be as thick or as opaque.
I wanted a small box that I can try using for “pan gouache”.

I had an extra Koi Pocket Box of 24 watercolors. I took the insert out.

Using bake-able polymer clay, I rolled out and flatten some clay. I pressed Altoid mints into the clay for the paint wells. (I read this somewhere on the web. It keeps the cavities in the clay open and dissolves easily to come out. Plus the kitchen smells minty fresh!)

After baking, I coated the clay with Golden’s GAC100 (basically fluid acrylic paint without pigment) to seal.

I cut down a small plastic cup for a water tray.

I bought a set of mini brushes for $9 and kept the Koi water brush & sponge.

Here are the paint colors I put into this box.

Back row:

Cadmium Yellow

Ultramarine

Light Purple

Permanent Green Deep

Cadmium Orange

Front row:

Lemon Yellow

Cobalt blue

Permanent Rose

Lamp Black

Permanent White

I can’t wait to try this pocket box this weekend.

Trying opaque watercolor (Gouache)

2010-06-10T22:04:00.000-05:00

On a recent trip, I brought a watercolor & gouache kit with me. Gouache is an opaque watercolor. With regular transparent watercolor if you want light colors you have to plan ahead and reserve them. Since gouache is opaque, I could add the light colors at any time including near the end of the painting. Since I am used to working dark to light in oil pastels, I like that I can do the same with the gouache. And as with watercolors, it dilutes and cleans with water.

I had a small sample set of Windsor-Newton gouache I was given recently. I used it with my Koi watercolor set to give me a larger variety of color in the gouache.

This painting was done in early evening after a day of rain. The sky was still filled with heavy rain clouds. But since I was in a happier mood than the clouds, I took some artistic license and painted as if it were a sunny day.

This was painted while sitting on a bench on a dock and listening to the birds and chipmunks.

Very peaceful...

Phone app upgraded

2010-05-31T10:51:00.000-05:00

Magic Doodle Premium, Android app on Droid phone.

On the left is the cup I did yesterday with a lot of difficulty. After downloading an upgrade to the app, I tried drawing again. On the right is the cup I did today. The upper rim of the cup which gave me so much trouble yesterday, was easier today. Whatever was done in the new upgrade, made it so much easier to see where I was putting down lines.
The developer of this app also rearranged the color palettes to put them in order so the colors are easier to find.

Thank you Etienne, this app gets better and better!

Peonies in the Park

2010-05-30T21:20:00.000-05:00

Peonies in the Park -029, 4x6", watercolor

Yesterday, my friend Anjali & I painted at a local park with a large bed of red peonies.

Those flowers were beautiful!

I'd like to go back there again before they fade.

Phone sketching is ROUGH!!!!

2010-05-30T13:44:00.000-05:00

This morning we went out to breakfast. While waiting for our food, I tried sketching my coffee cup.

Wow! It was so hard to control where lines started and stopped and even where they went.

The top of this cup took 4 attempts to get those 3 colors to sit where they are.

This next one was just playing with stick figures.

e-fingerpainting on my phone

2010-05-19T23:23:00.007-05:00

Trying to draw on my phone with my finger.

This poor tree is my second attempt at e-fingerpainting.

e-fingerpainting on the phone

2010-05-15T15:00:00.002-05:00

I stopped during my errands this morning and tried a plein air in a new medium, my phone.
This morning I tried out the Android app Magic Doodle Pro on my Verizon Droid phone.

From my limited experimenting with this app, the pros and cons of this are:
PROS:
I’ve always got the app with me so I can paint anytime.
This is the height of stealth plein air. No one could tell I was painting. Looked like I was playing on my phone.
This app could zoom in & out. Had varying brushes and brush sizes.
App has way to email pictures so I can get the finished painting off the phone.

CONS:
The soft brush was too fuzzy. The hard-edged brush is better but will take some figuring out how to use it better. This painting was done with both brushes. You can see the difference.
It will take practice to set the brush down in the right place as my finger is always in the way!
The color palette is not set out in any logical order. While outside, it can be difficult to see what the colors on the palette are. And not being in a chromatic order doesn’t help.

This app has possiblilities but is going to take quite a bit of practice to achieve anything worthwhile.
It would be good for quick, thumbnail value sketches.

Overall, worth the $2 spent on the app and I’ll be playing with it more.
I’m also going to send these comments to the developer. He seems to be very responsive to suggestions.

Second sketch - garden

2008-07-29T23:02:00.000-05:00

I went out into the yard on Sunday to do this sketch of my favorite part of the garden. That is a cement statue of what looks like a well-loved teddybear. And that square in the center of the gazing ball is me sitting on a lounge chair sketching.For this one I tried to do a somewhat loose pen sketch first. I liked this. It gave me a better idea of where to put the color. In the background I did some wet into wet without a sketch and I don’t like that part too much. Overall, I’m pleased with this sketch. It took me about an hour.

New Watercolor Sketchbox

2008-07-29T22:57:00.000-05:00

I've been looking for a small, convenient way to do some plein air sketching.
I figure if it is small & easy to use, I might actually use it rather than having it just sit on the floor of the car! This past weekend was the first time I tried this Koi box by Sakura that holds a postcard-size pad in the lid. I had an errand to run and on the way home, I stopped for 25 minutes at the local park and painted this view of the pond and garden.

This was easy to set up and put away (although I still managed to get paint all over my hands!) And I was able to hold everything including the paper towel in one hand.

I have to figure out whether to use a pen first and the paint color in? Or paint with first and then define with a pen?

In the above painting I only used paint and no pen.

It's been a while

2008-07-28T22:08:00.000-05:00

I've been painting a lot and you can see that on my painting blog
http://artblog.oilpastelstudio.com/

But I have only recently started sketching again.

I am still looking for that elusive "perfect" sketch medium.

What to draw with?

2006-07-02T00:59:00.000-05:00

I'm still trying to discover what the "perfect" sketching medium is for me.
I keep a sketchbook and some oil pastels in the car if I want to do lunchtime sketching.

But to throw in my bag....
Even pared down to what I think is a bare minimum number of oil pastel sticks, it is still too bulky to throw in a medium-sized purse. So today I experimented with using just a pen and a pen with watercolor pencils.
That wasn't bad, I'll try it some more.

06/14/2006

2006-06-14T22:06:00.000-05:00

Here are some sketches done with pen and oil pastels.

Taste of Sketching
7/1/06 10:53pm
07/01/2006

Went to the Taste of Chicago and tried to do some sketching. I felt so self-conscious. These sketches were all done in 10-15 minutes each. My models kept moving on me.

Creating a Sketchbook

2006-06-13T00:23:00.000-05:00

06/12/2006

This week I tried quick sketching with my oil pastels and a pen.
These are about 8x8" and each about 20 minutes. These are from this week's WDE on WetCanvas.com

It's funny I started quick sketches using oil pastels (OPs) and didn't like the lack of detail in something done so quickly. So I tried watercolor but must not have figured out how to use them properly because all I seemed to be doing was mixing colors and wiping the small palette in the travel kit. Not enjoyable and I used too much water so not strong enough colors. Okay, so I moved on to watercolor (WC) pencils. didn't have to do much mixing because I had a large number of pencils. And because I used very little water, the colors were nice and saturated. But it still lacked detail. At that point I read a book about sketching with WC pencils by Charles Evans. He alway goes into his WC pencil sketches and punches them up with pen. That finally gave me the combination of detail and saturated color I wanted but the sketchbook paper wouldn't stop warping from the water used!
So I decided to try the pen with a much lighter, looser approach with oil pastels. And surprise, surprise! My favorite painting medium just became my favorite sketching medium.
I'm finding this whole circling back to where I started as rather funny!

I liked my experiment with brush-tipped pen and Oil Pastel so much that today at lunchtime I went out and did a 10-minute plein air sketch.

I used VanGogh OPs which are harder sticks. It was only 70F today but the car was in the sun so the OPs sitting in there got warmer than that. But still they were fine to use. Did not seem to soften at all.

Okay so here is the sketch. Kind of loose is what I was striving for.