Revisiting Old Sketches

About a year ago my husband bought me some watercolor pencils as a gift. It set me off on a large portrait spree and I used them to draw/paint 6 pieces from live subjects. I did close studies of the people I was drawing and I loved using the pencils because I haven't used pencils since I was a teenager and always thought of it as an inferior medium because it was so simple to use. But being older and wiser I realized that easier is not so bad. I like it when things are easy sometimes, it's like a bonus in life.

It is a very rare occasion for me to sketch and one day I had a brand new watercolor pad sitting in front of me, 15x20 inches and I though, what the hell, why not try to do a quick self portrait study but not worry too much about being realistic. I ended up with an expressionistic portrait of myself that I rather liked. It took me about an hour maybe a little longer to sketch it and I put it aside and never looked at it again.

A week ago I opened that pad planning to use it for the my next piece and saw the old sketch. I didn't want to waste the paper and didn't want to detach it from the pad either. It's a block pad and helps keep the paper from warping when getting it wet so I decided to finish the painting. I started off with just a blueish face. After brushing water over the pencil I added a pattern to the background imitating wall paper using a fabric pattern I have from some curtains I made a while back.

In the spirit of coming back to old things I decided to revisit gold/silver/whatever... leafing. I used this medium a lot during college. I loved the reflective texture and the meticulous process of applying the adhesive, laying the leaf and brushing off the excesses in intricate patterns. I thought this would be a visually impressive but an intellectually simple way of adding something to the piece.

While applying the silver leaf I had much time to contemplate the piece. I think perhaps this is one reason I love the tentative, time consuming mediums. While doing something that is repetitive I have plenty of time to think of things and come up with ideas that may improve either my art, or life in general. In this instance I remembered that all my portraits had unrealistic colors. I always started my portraits with a color scheme in mind and for each color in the scheme I would assign a value, so that instead of using a grey scale for shadows and highlights, or just a value scale in a similar color range I would invent my own value scale using different colors.

In this painting the scale from darkest to lightest is as follows: blue, red, yellow and white.

For the past few months I considered this practice and recognized that in many paintings this sort of approach would be defined as the underpainting. After adding various hews to create depth and represent any reflected colors an artist might add a layer of skin tones. I've been basically dreaming of the day that I could accomplish this level of complexity. This painting having taken me very little time thus far was a good candidate for experimentation. And so I took a peach colored pencil and simply went over every part of the skin and added a thick layer of what was the closest color I had in my collection of pencils to my own skin tone. I was very pleased with the results.

The Artistic Process

About three months ago I had a freelance job for a lady who lives in New York. She is a costume designer and was working on costumes for Disney Land in Tokyo, Japan. She provided me with very detailed, photoshop generated mock ups of the costumes she designed and I was to paint them on paper. She later explained to me that I was simply filling in a small portion of her artistic process. First she would design the costumes and plan their colors. Then I would use her computer mock ups and swatches to create the colors on paper. It turns out that the costume makers would use my drawings for color matching rather than the computer generated mock ups because the computer screen shines light through the image and it makes it very hard to interpret the colors in the real world. So my work basically made her imagination's ideal easier to interpret for the costume makers. Then the costumes were going to be made using white material. Then adjustments and remakes would be made. And then, finally, the actual materials would be used to make the actual costumes.

Sometimes one of my paintings for her would take about 20 or more hours to finish. It wasn't because I was slow, but because it was painstakingly time consuming to mix the right shades of colors, check with her via text and photos weather or not the colors were correct and often times repainting the same vestige 4 or more times until I would get the color right. She had something like 60 of those kinds of images, if I remember correctly. I did not get to paint all of them, but I painted quite a few, I think about 16 and it was very time consuming. The incredible thing was that I was not even providing her with a finished product of her brain child. I was only one cog in a big wheel of an artistic process that led to the eventual completion of the project. After working for her and getting insight into her very intricate and time consuming process I came to a realization that there really was no cutting corners when you wanted to get a thing done right.

I've always been under the impression that I should learn to make my paintings quicker. I like to have intricate details, but I should somehow accelerate the making of the details by figuring out some way where they're suggested rather than carefully depicted. Now I know that if I like to have intricate details I should come to terms that those details will take some time to create and it's okay that it will take many hours, because that's how long a thing takes to make if I want it done the way I envision it in my brain. I think my latest piece really shows growth in my willingness to do what I endeavor to accomplish. I've certainly done other paintings in my life that took as long and were quite intricate, but I think this has a larger diversity in depth and pattern and I hope that my next pieces continue to improve.

This current work has taken me at least 30 hours to paint if not longer. A very basic run down of my process is that I choose images to reference when I decide to paint something. Then I combine various elements and use those images when necessary to look at. I use many rulers, compasses and right angles. I switch from tiny to larger brushes and back to tiny ones depending on the size of the surface area I am painting. Sometimes I look at a book of my favorite artist to help me with technique or to simply inspire myself when I'm making decisions on what direction to go to accomplish the best result.

Back to Art

I've taken a few days since my return to visit some friends and spend some time with my husband and his lovely little daughter. Today I'm mentally preparing to go back into painting starting tomorrow. To get myself motivated I'd like to share this drawing I worked on during my stay in Russia. After I worked for a costume designer in New York, I ended up meeting her on my way to Russia. I spent the night in her home and she was very kind and welcoming.

She gave me a gift of some paintbrush markers from Japan. I've never used them before so I went to town with them in my free time when hanging out at my grandma's. This is a scene from the fairy tale "the Terrible Revenge" by Gogol. In this scene a guest at a wedding at the start of the story suddenly turns into a shapeshifter anti-chirst and everyone witnesses his sudden transformation and the guests become terrified. Using the markers really helped me get away from my usual precision and be more quick and gestural in my strokes.

I've wanted to illustrate this entire story for many years now, but I've still some other work to finish before I can truly invest myself into this series. I have to finish all the Matryoshkas of my friends I've promised them I'd make.

More from Russian Ethnological Museum: Russian Section

As promised yesterday, here are more costume photos. Today's collection is from the Russian people's traditional clothes.