#214 A Week of Sketches

Another week of messing around in my daily journal. I don’t know from day to day what I’ll do artwise so it always is a surprise. It’s probably a reflection of how energetic or motivated I am each day. I wasn’t feeling too inspired on Tuesday so I just picked a rose out from a bunch of artificial flowers and sketched that. The left page was a little messy so I used an embossing thingie I picked up at a garage sale, spread a layer of watercolour over it and pressed it on the page. It disguised the mess before I did the lettering.

Going down memory lane now. I found an old photo in my collection and played with it. Portraits of someone you know are hard but it is fun trying to capture them.

I used Cadmium red, Cadmium yellow and a touch of Cobalt for the flesh colour. Unfortunately some colors bleed through this paper more than others. The red in particular seems to show more. This is what the following page looked like.

I don’t like painting on this much so I did a pen and gouache sketch on a small piece of kraft paper and glued it over the offending page.

Another photo I came across was a photo of a painting by Renoir I took when we visited an art gallery on a trip to Switzerland. It was an interesting exercise trying to depict form in an impressionist style with colour pencils.

Ah, gouache again.  I do love the opacity and bright colours, and the ease of painting with this medium. Perfect for a quick sketch of some fruit. Saturday morning is market day here so I chose some plums and pears for their beautiful colour and just because I wanted to paint them.

This week the Wetcanvas 2 hour challenge was hosted by misswiss who posted the reference photos. I chose a farm landscape scene, cropped the original image and did a thumbnail value sketch before painting this watercolour. I must remember to do this each time before attempting a landscape. It makes it much easier for me to simplify the composition and eliminate unnecessary detail.

To finish off the week after a busy day I did  fun little quick pen and gouache from another of misswiss’s photos.