Portraits/Faces Continued
Before I post more new faces, I decided to take a little walk down memory lane and include some old ones. These are a mixture of paintings and drawings. They all make me feel good.
The two above were my very first gouache people. I stopped doing these and turned to landscapes. I’ve never been able to reacquire the technique I used in these.
The next two were pen and ink. This is where I part company with the purists who say a projector is “cheating”. I transferred the basic outline to get the proportions reasonably correct, then turned off the projector and developed the drawing with pens. The projector helped get the drawing started, but it had nothing to do with the inkwork that went into these.
The next one was a gouache painting.
Roughly twelve years ago. No projector here, but I did use a grid to get the head and features in the right place. This one took a while because I was completely out of my element, with the portrait and with the paint.
So there is pretty much my background in portrait work. Of course, there are a ton of rejects that the world doesn’t get to see, They are all a part of the development.
Next time, I’ll share some of my latest efforts with graphite pencil. No projectors. No grids. Just me and a pencil.
Pencil Faces
This is fun. This one is a little out of square, but it’s just a sketchbook piece.
Next I’ll try to insert the faces into some kind of environment. The portrait drawing is fun and challenging. but I’d like to tell some stories with the drawings.
New Faces
In 1990, I entered three graphite pencil drawings in the Texas State Fair. The result was two blue ribbons and a yellow. I was told my a former college art instructor that I should be painting, that it was faster and I could make more money. I went back and forth for a few years, but finally settled on painting. Until the last couple of weeks, I hadn’t done a serious pencil drawing in a long time. I found a series of books focused on pencil portraits, and feel rejuvenated. To be sure, they are more useful to me as reference work than instructional. I got more instruction in a couple of YouTube videos, but the images themselves serve my purpose. Hopefully, they aren’t AI work. At any rate, I’m spending a lot of hours with pencils in my hand and feeling some progress. Here’s the last couple of days work. After drawing the bearded man, I handed Nell the book and let her select the next subject, the girl with the wind-blown hair. Years ago, I used a projector for this type of work. Today, it’s just my hand and eye.
Still a lot of catching up and a lot to learn, but a whole lot of fun.
Stay tuned.
And Back To Pencils…and Faces
If you have followed me for any length of time, you obviously are a very patient person, but you also know that as the years have passed, I’ve grown to be even more all over the place with my posts. They’re always about art, of course, but you never know what you are going to see next. I have probably lost a few folks because of that, but I believe that variety truly is the spice of life. Or maybe I just get bored easily, although I’ve never thought of my life as boring. Take a spin through my posts and you’ll see that my interests are somewhat eclectic.
All of that is to say that while yes, I was drawing barns in ink, I have taken a renewed interest in pencil portraits. I am waiting for Amazon to deliver a couple of books I’ve stumbled onto in the hope that they will teach me something new. I’ve done four faces in the past week. The one below is the only one I’m happy with, and it’s got some issues, but for now, I’ll take it. It’s taken from a photo clip from the Vikings Valhalla TV series. The others were creations from my own mind. Maybe that says something about the value of working from references. At any rate, I’m hoping the new books will help me with my own invented characters.
The value of this, aside from the obvious one of adding something to my toolbox, is that I am toying with a new project and improving the look of my characters is important to me. And who knows, it might even suggest a drawing style for the illustrations.
Cheers.
Finally!
All we did was leave town for a while (about a month) and things happened. The biggest,. and costliest, was our AC died while we were gone. We had to have it replaced long distance. Fortunately, we have an RV Tech we trust and he had the job done by the time we got home. The thing that affected this blog was some kind of wifi change and I’ve spent the last week trying to get back online on my ancient laptop. Finally, today, I touched the right keys and found myself online again.
I believe the topic just before we left was pen and ink sketching. Our time spent in Ohio was quiet and I got a lot of drawing and sketching done. My main subject when we go to Ohio is old barns. They are around every bend and over every hill, especially in the Mt. Vernon area. So, herewith are a couple that I had a lot of fun with…
I took a number of photos of this old barn on Delaware Rood and hope to produce some nice drawings from them.
A simple neighborhood street scene. Just a nice image to play with
Some of these have been exercises in sketching foliage as much as sketching structures.
It’s been fun.
Sketchbook Chaos
I don’t want to give the impression that my sketchbooks are all neat pages of nice drawings. I’ve tried that. Doesn’t work for me. I started this current sketchbook exercise with the idea that since we were getting ready to travel north, I would keep a sketchbook for barns and old houses, one for landscapes, another for people, and so forth. It didn’t take long to understand that I was going to find myself carrying a half dozen sketchbooks around. And invariably grabbing the wrong one to go on a day trip. And because I do a lot of doodling and just thinking on paper, I was sure to end up with the wrong stuff in the wrong sketchbook. And a lot of unused pages.
Some of you are aware that Nell and have lived in an RV for several years. A 36 foot Fifth Wheel trailer. It has four slideouts, so there’s plenty of room for the two of us, but storage space gets a little dicey at times. A couple of years ago, I went through all my existing sketchbooks and culled the decent artwork from them. Most of them were spiral books, so I just tore out pages and put them all in zip lock type bags sorted by subject/theme. Then I gave most of the empty books to a grandson.
With this new interest in sketchbooks, I have acquired several hardbound books in a couple of sizes. Again, I toyed with the idea of separate books for different subjects, but I put that idea aside. I am dedicating one book to barns, houses and other structures, and maybe landscapes. A second book is for the kind of stuff you see here:
Random stuff. A sort of visual stream-of-consciousness. Finish a page, or at least reach a stopping point, and flip to a fresh page and move on to another random thought. The three faces above don’t take up a lot of space, but the idea is that I may come back and do more of the same kind of thing on that page. It’s not intended to all be pretty, finished, “presentation” art. Just me and visual things that occur to me.
But one book will be focused primarily on barns and other structures, maybe more finished sketches of things. Like this:
The sketch above is an old garage almost taken over by foliage. Last year, I painted a barn at a farm near where we’re going again this summer and this old garage was just across a driveway where I was sitting. I’m actually enjoying noodling all that foliage in ink.
We will be getting on the road tomorrow for our annual pilgrimage to Ohio, Nell’s home state. I write these blog posts on a laptop and it’s not going with us so there will be no posts for the next few weeks. Hopefully by then I’ll have a lot of sketches and drawings to share.
Thanks for sticking with me.
More Sketches
Journal pages are a fun way to mix images and text. I used to be pretty good at this, but I’m having to learn all over again. This page is still a work in progress, but I’ll come back to it eventually.
There’s a lot of experimenting that happens in a sketchbook. I’ve had watercolor pencils for years, but never used them. I thought it was time to see how they work. It’s amazing how just a few marks can turn into full washes.
And then there’s this sort of thing. Liz Steel does a lot of this, although hers are much more elaborate and detailed. She seems to mostly do restaurant and cafe scenes, table settings and food in a bold and colorful way.
Lettering is a major part of this kind of page. Liz uses an architectural style of lettering. I spent many years as a draftsman and, as most of us did, I developed my own lettering style, which was similar to this. When I started my graphic novel, I toyed with the idea of hand lettering all the text. Sadly, when the time came, I discovered that, after years of not doing it, my lettering had become uneven and shaky. I’ll attempt some of it in my sketchbooks, but I suspect it will never be the same.
Meanwhile, I’m spending my time doing things that don’t require much storage space but still allow me to maintain some degree of hand-eye coordination and creativity, like the following page:
These little ink and wash sketches measure roughly 3 1/2″ x 4″ and they’re a lot of fun to do.
We leave for Ohio in a few days and I suspect I’ll gather a lot of material on the trip, some of it new and some of if revisited.
Thanks for looking.
Sketchbook Stuff
One of the beauties of working only in a sketchbook is that I can be all over the place in a day and simplify as much as I want. These offerings employ pen and ink, pencil, watercolor and gouache.
Most of these were done in Daler-Rowney hardback sketchbooks {4″x6″ and 8 1/2″x11″} found on the shelf at Walmart. The ink work is primarily Microns and for the watercolor I’m using the little Essentials watercolor kit (also found at Walmart) that I bought last year in Ohio (on the left).
The blue is just about used up but I have three of them, so I’m good. I do a lot of work sitting in an easy chair so this works well for me. It’s also handy on the rare plein air outing. The gouache is my standard DaVinci gouache which I’m using from the little metal watercolor palette (shown on the right).
Ink and watercolor… still one of my favorite ways to work.
And faces are a favorite for pen and ink. In this case, ink and pencil.
Neighborhood scenes are something I want to do more of.
Lots of simple house sketches…
And more simplification of barn studies.
As I said, working in a sketchbook I’m all over the place. Obviously, I’m working primarily from reference photos (all my own) and after thirty-plus years of driving to Ohio plus a lot of side trips, there is a lot of material to work from. I spend a lot of time studying etchings by Whistler, sketches by Rembrandt and in a more modern note, urban sketches by Marc Taro Holmes, Liz Steel, Moira Huntly and others. And, as always, I continue to attempt ( and fail) to emulate Erik Tiemens’ watercolor and gouache work.
I continue to explore what I like to do.
Barn Sketches
My love of these old structures always comes back. I know metal barns are probably cheaper to build, but there’s just something about old warped wood and rusty metal that attracts artists. I’m no different.
I’ve accumulated a few sketchbooks over time,but never really made the best use of them. I’m trying to change that. I’m not really much of a plein air artist, but I love to collect reference photographs when we travel and especially images of old barns and houses. These are being translated into sketches and for a time I’ll be working almost exclusively in sketchbooks.
I’m finding that the beauty of working in a sketchbook is that I don’t treat the sketch or drawing as quite as precious as a stand alone piece done on more expensive paper or board. When I do a stand alone drawing or painting, I’m less likely to go back to it, less likely to add to it, whereas a sketch sometimes begs for more. Not necessarily to carry it to a more completed drawing state, but just simply to enhance it a bit. The barn sketch above is an example. It was originally just an ink sketch. Flipping through the pages, when I came to this one, it just needed something. Granted, it was not a bad drawing, but I wanted a bit more for it. Adding the gray tones on the barn and tree made the light a bit more dramatic, but I still wanted more. So I added the dark background. Rather than simply using black, I added some color to it and now I think the drawing is complete. I would never have done those alterations to a stand alone drawing.
I’m also finding that I can binge-draw to my heart’s content, doing these little doodles that are just simply a lot of fun. They also keep me thinking in terms of values and light source.
I’ll close with a drawing of an old house. This place is in Ohio, on the way to Nell’s hometown of Mount Vernon. The Victorian style is typical of many houses in that area, so it’s not unusual, but In the 30-plus years we have been making that drive, this old place has been in the process of renovation. I have never seen it when it was complete. I felt it was time to record it for posterity.
I’m having fun with my sketchbooks.
Pivoting
I’m finding that I can sketch Native Americans and horses in pencil, but I need a lot more practice to do them in paint. I still haven’t done many barns or other structures in acrylics, but I’ve dealt with them with brushes before. So… I’m pivoting onto more familiar ground. I haven’t worked on a good barn image in about a year.
I have this fear that I’m going to lose my touch. If you’ve followed me over the last ten or so years, you know I have moved from one genre to another and from one medium to another. The graphic novel took four years out of my other pursuits and I miss doing some of this work. So, until my eyes give out or I start to lose my hand/eye coordination, or until I start eating the paint, I feel the need to get back on familiar ground. Doing this painting felt good, but I can tell I need to recapture a few things.
We collected a lot of barn images and other landscape reference photos, so there’s more to come. I’ve got a lot of paint in stock, both acrylic and gouache, so I’m climbing back in the saddle.
Ralph Parker, Artist 
