Myrna Wacknov has a delightful new blog which is very instructive for all artists, no matter the medium. She happens to be an expert watermedia painter and is extraordinary in portrait work and figures. She issued a "November Challenge" which called for a contour drawing cut up with a grid of odd derivation then to paint it. I took the challenge and expect to have my painting completed toward month end (No point in rushing things . . . since I have plenty to do!)
So here is the drawing with the grid outlined in blue line (watercolor pencil that will disappear as it is painted). After hours of development of the drawing, the grid and getting it onto a piece of hot pressed watercolor paper, I stopped dead. I couldn't, for the life of me, figure how to go about painting it. I was stuck!
As you may know, there is much much more freedom to make errors with opaque media, such as oil or acrylic or gouache. Watercolor doesn't provide such liberty. One needs to plan a lot in order to complete complex paintings such as this one. The best device I have found to work out of such a planning puzzle is to do value trials . . .sketches. And do more than one! I will complete nearly 20 before I make my choice of which plan to follow . . . .it's called exhausting one's alternatives and picking the best one for composition, mood and content. (Yes, it is much more than just a picture that looks like a photo!! Much, much more!)
So, here is all I could get done this morning before heading out of town for the day. I think there are 8 or 9 different ideas here. I used Tombo pens in three different values on a big sheet of tracing paper. I made a single quick sketch on paper, then traced it enough times until the big sheet was full. Then it is just a matter of concentrating on how and where the lights, darks and mediums will be placed to achieve different emphasis.
Click on the photos to get a closer look.
3 comments:
What does "a grid of odd derivation" mean?
A grid implies (to me) equally sized, or nearly so, squares or rectangles accross an area.
A friend took a landscape ( a series of tree shapes) turned it upside down and used the outlines of the trees as the 'grid'. Of a different source or derivation, I found some advertisements in a magazine which used the golden mean and otherwise divided the space into odd shaped geometric shapes to form an oddly derived 'grid.' Does that help, Silvina?
Thank you. So it's kind of an anomaly or something someone recently made up. I mean, not common knowledge, right? Or do most educated artists know this?
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