Author Archives: Larry Marshall

Color, Color Everywhere

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I decided to learn to oil paint principally to get myself working in a medium that didn’t rely upon line for its information.  Why?  Because most sketchers are like me.  We go out, pen in hand, and draw stuff.  If we also use color (typically watercolor) we do so “after the fact.”  It’s common for people to say “I’ll add color later.”

This is fine and makes many of us happy but this approach causes us to draw without thinking of tone and any thoughts we have of three dimensions come in the form of perspective lines, object overlap, etc.  Again, that’s fine but these approaches don’t do much to teach us to see and produce value, and because of the ‘later’ aspects of our color approach we’re mentally reducing everything to two dimensions as we draw and, for many of us, the third dimension is, at best, handled by some general tone variation when we add color.

And so I thought the switch would force me to get into values and form more.  Unforeseen was my complete ineptitude with respect to using a brush to draw my oh so limited understanding of color mixing and a whole bunch of other stuff.

I bought this book, a book you come across everywhere you look when listening to oil painters.  It’s an oil painter’s bible.  Alla Prima’s reputation is well-deserved.  I have a fairly large library of art books (around 300 at least count) and this one has become one of my best.  Unlike the typical hobby books, this one is packed with into on everything oil paint, and as its subtitle says …and more.

One of the things contained within it is a suggestion for learning color mixing and to gain fluency with your own  colors.  I confess that I’m not a “swatch” guy.  I hate this stuff and, with watercolors I’ve always found it lacking because it’s so hard to know what you’re really mixing because of the watery nature of the medium.  Anyways, Richard Schmid argued that this exercise would make me smart and who wouldn’t want to be smart.

Here’s how it works.  Each panel represents one dominant color.  Each column represents a mixture of the dominant color with one of the other colors on the palette.  Then, with that mix, you do a 5-value chart of that color mix to fill up the column.  Each panel reflects 50 color mixes. I just used the Cobra Water Mixable Oils kit as my color palette and set to work.  It took FOREVER!!!

In doing this, however, I became fluent with the palette knife, learned a lot about the strengths of each color, got pretty good at mixing values and by the end I was able to do this a LOT faster than I could when I started.   Can’t say it was fun but Schmid was right, I got smarter.  I’m still dumb when it comes to oil painting but small steps are the way to success.

Here are all the panels I did to complete the Schmid exercise:

The Zorn Palette

All this mixing got me interested in Anders Zorn’s famous Zorn palette.  He painted almost everything with Vermillion, Yellow Ochre, and Ivory Black.  In reading about him I found that they found Cobalt Blue in his studio so maybe he used that on occasion as well.  I used this as an excuse to add it to my look at the Zorn palette.  Same dominant color + other colors approach applies here but as there were so few colors I was able to do everything on one panel in four blocks of value columns.   It’s amazing how many colors you can get from so few colors.

 

Significant Event <-> Trivial Result

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I’ve mentioned before that this blog is as much me documenting my sketching events as presenting great art work.  This is fortunate as I have very little great art work to present.  But here in Quebec we’ve lived through some of the most strict anti-COVID policies for two years.  We’re still partially limited in what we can/can’t do and still use vaccination passports and wear masks everywhere.  And, right or wrong, we’ve all become trained NOT to go anywhere.

But the last few days has brought relief from our bitter cold and so I’ve gone out walking, mostly in the snow and rain but as the temps have been right around freezing, I’ve enjoyed it.  Anyways, I walked through the farmer’s market that’s right down the street from where I live the other day.  The place is dead right now due to people not going out but also because there are no farmers there selling stuff so aside from a few permanent stores, there’s not much to be had there.

There is a place that sells coffee, though.  It’s located along a big hallway and there are some places to sit on the opposite side of the hallway.  There were two women sitting there when I showed up.  I decided to get a coffee and draw them.  I sat down, got my little 4×6 scribble book out, marked the top/bottom of her head and…they both got up to leave.  I quickly sketched a face from “memory” and that’s what you see in the middle of this sketch.

Then I was alone, nobody to sketch.  I was thinking of drawing one of the tables when a woman walked down the hallway.. so in the few seconds she was visible, I drew the back of her head.  Then another person walked by… another few seconds of scribbling.  Each of the people gave me 5-10 seconds to draw them so the results aren’t great.  But this was my first foray into a coffee place in two years and so this was downright exciting.  I had to post this miserable sketchbook page for posterity.

While I’m posting, here are some other quick sketches I’ve done.  There’s no rhyme or reason associated with them.  Done on the fly and on a whim.

Here I found an Indigo Prismacolor pencil, decided to sharpen it for some reason and this led me to draw a bit with it.

I’m quite excited about the prospects of getting out sketching again.  Hopefully spring is coming early this year.  I’ll be posting a massive oil paint project I’ve been doing soon.  Just need to turn everything into digital images and I’ll post them.

Look Ma, No Lines

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I’ve made a big deal about putting down my pens while I learn to create art without relying upon outline as the main element.  In spite of this, in one way or another, all of my oil paint experiments have started with some sort of drawn outline of the objects I was trying to paint.  These outlines, in fact, have been part of my experiments.  I’ve used pencil, colored pencil and painted lines.  I’ve used complete outlines and very loose location-only marks.  I suppose this remains an area of experimentation but I’ve been pretty happy using thinned oil paint and a small brush to do the drawing.  I’ve learned that I need to keep these lines light, however, as otherwise I struggle to cover them up.

A week or so ago I did the first experiment where I used no outline at all, relying only on placing spots of color of the appropriate hue, value and chroma to create the object, which in that case was a pepper.  This really pushes the thinking towards shape and form as you have to develop those shapes by including backgrounds as much as setting color in the objects themselves.  I liked that thought process.  It felt, somehow, empowering.

The result isn’t really a complete painting as all I wanted to do was see if I could make the pepper look, well.., like a pepper.  I vaguely blocked in another pepper in the background but I never really finished it.

I realized that I never shared it here, but since it’s sort of a landmark of sorts, I thought I should.  It’s only 8×6 on gesso’d MDF.  For what it is, I’m pretty happy with the result.

Drawing Straight Lines

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I have to begin with an apology to the person I’m addressing with this post.  A couple weeks ago I had an email dialogue with someone who told me she couldn’t draw a straight line.  I couldn’t explain how to learn to do it in a way that was clear to her and I told her I’d do a blog post on it.  This is that blog post, albeit at least two weeks late.

Truth is, you don’t have to be able to draw straight lines, but it helps to be able to get them somewhat straight.  Artists talk a lot about “hand-eye coordination” and “muscle memory,” neither of which have much to do with eyes or muscles, but we don’t do much to show people how to achieve it.  The reason is that, well, it’s boring and the internet has become all about showing people fun stuff.

In fact, we don’t do much at all to teach what we mean by “practice” and everyone believes it means that you should go out and draw stuff.  But a home run hitter doesn’t get good at the craft by playing baseball games, they get good at it by endlessly hitting balls off a tee, practicing one-arm swings along a particular path, and watching videos of themselves doing these exercises.  We need to be more like home run hitters.

Anyways, I went back into my piles of sketchbooks and found one set of exercises done back when I “couldn’t draw a straight line.”  Let’s discuss them.

2-point lines

The first thing you have to do is learn HOW to draw a straight line.  You don’t do it by drawing very slowly while watching the tip of your pencil.  This NEVER works.  Instead, you look at where you want to go while quickly drawing the line.  A good exercise for this is to 1) drop pairs of points all over a piece of paper. 2) put your pencil on one dot, look at another dot, and 3) pull  your pencil to the dot you’re looking at.   It will take a bit of getting used to but you’ll soon see that drawing straight lines isn’t so hard afterall.  In short, hand-eye coordination isn’t about drawing buildings, it’s about acquiring these sorts of skills such that it become automatic.

3-point curves

The same sort of exercise is done to draw curves, only now you’ve got to start the pencil on one dot and take in two other dots with your eye as you draw the curve.  Just don’t look at your pencil as you do this.

Super-imposed lines

This is another useful exercise.  Draw a series of line (use a straight edge) on a piece of paper.  Then, repeatedly draw lines on top of those lines.  I found this enforces the hand movement and improves your brain’s ability to do these movements, and it is your brain, not your hand, that is doing these movements.

I hope this helps at least as much as it embarrasses me to post all these crooked lines.  They say that looking back on your earlier work is a good thing.  I’m not so sure (grin).

Quick Sketching In The Cold

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I started posting my sketches to this blog as a way of maintaining a history of them.  It’s since morphed into a way of sharing with others but that original idea remains, although I long ago stopped posting everything I draw.

And this week has been a cold one.  The beginning of the week had us enjoying -32 to -38C temperatures.  The 58C difference between our inside and outside temps stretched our house heating system to its limits.  But on Wednesday is “warmed up” and we needed milk so I decided to walk to the store to get some.  It was -16C at the time but the walk is only 3-minutes in each direction and so I headed off.

And here’s the crazy part.  That morning I’d seen Alissa Duke’s post of some quickie sketches she’d done of the backs of cars and I couldn’t help but see every rear-end of a car as a target.  It was nuts but I drew several really quick, really frozen sketches.  By the time I got to the store I was frozen, though each sketch took less than 30s.

The funny thing is that you can actually see the shivering shakes in some of the lines.

But since pursuing the oil colors, purposely putting my pens down, it’s been a while since I’ve enjoyed pen sketching.  When I got home and warmed up I drew this guy from a reference photos used by a YouTuber to do a very detailed charcoal drawing.  Let’s just say mine was less detailed.  Then again, mine only took a few minutes (grin).

It was fun to lay down some ink again.  We’re back to really cold and a blizzard is swirling outside.  What kind of stupid people choose to live in a place like this?