When Planets Collide (or look like they might....)

 I got to see the Saturn-Jupiter conjunction!  Whee!!!!

The skies had been dismally overcast every night for weeks, with no letup in the forecast last week.  So even though I spent part of December 21 basking in the backyard in sixty degree sunshine...

...I still had little hope of seeing anything, with cloudy skies predicted.  Imagine my surprise when, on going outside at 5:30pm for some reason (I never go out then...what was I doing?  I HAVE NO IDEA), the skies were mostly clear!

So I looked over the tree line to the SW, and saw two bright starlike objects which appeared to be practically on top of each other.  PLANETS CONJUNCTING!  I grabbed my binocs and the lights turned into Jupiter and Saturn.  I have no way to take night photos, but it looked a lot like this one I found on the always-helpful Internet:

So that was a thing.

Yay!  I saw planets!  

Okay, so that was an exciting way to end the first day of Winter, when it was sunny and warm and did I mention sixty degrees.  A few days later things changed:

Eep.  From sixty to thirty!  We got about an inch of the white stuff, but neither rain nor sleet nor snow shall stay Pippin from his appointed Squirrel Watch:

After making absolutely certain no fluffy tree rats were trying to invade their snowy domain, the Hounds retired to a comfy, cozy nap on the sofa.

That was it for Nature's bounty last week.  Whew.

On to the art!

Our sketch zoom group did these cypress bonsai trees, which I drew the old-fashioned way with pen and colored pencil:

On a non-group sketch day, I decided to practice more with the digital painting app, Adobe Fresco.  I watched a tutorial in which an artist painted some mountains and trees, and got only about ten minutes into it before deciding that would be fun to try.  So I invented my own scene like that, perhaps channeling a bit of Bob Ross and his happy little trees, and drew it on the iPad in about an hour and a half:

That was a fun exercise.  And I had so much fun drawing and painting digitally that when the Zoom sketch group met again the next day, I decided to use it for our practice piece.  

We chose this rather complex Japanese scene, with loads of challenges.  I tackled it the same way I would had I been using my non-digital tools -- I used a pen tool first to do a quick sketch to get all the elements in the right places, and to add a few details.  Then I chose a couple of different brush tools similar to watercolor round brushes to paint over my sketch (though I left quite a few ink lines showing), and then a tool that mimics colored pencil fairly well, followed by the blending tool.  

It was all done very fast, as we have a one-hour time limit.  I wanted it to look like a sketch rather than a finished piece, and I'm quite happy with how it turned out.

That's all from here in the hinterlands.  See you in the new year!

Old and New

I made art both the old-fashioned way and the new-fashioned way this past week.  First, for one of our Zoom sketch practice sessions, I used pen and colored pencils to draw these seed pods:

The photo we worked from had a dark background, which I didn't have time to put in (we meet for one hour):

I decided to add the background later, though, because I had spilled some colored pencil solvent on the piece and stained it.  Covered it up successfully using dark sepia colored pencil:

The next session's photo was of this rather creepy tree:

I came up with this colored pencil and watercolor sketch during the hour-long meeting:

I liked it, but I wondered if I could get something closer to the original by re-drawing it later using my new-fashioned toy, the iPad, with the Adobe Fresco app.  This is all digital painting:

I think it is closer to the photo, though not quite as creepy looking as my watercolor version.

Finally, I used the Adobe Fresco program to draw a wacky thing from a dream I had, about seeing a Giant Platypus Bird (because hey, why not?).

I have no idea how that entered my brain while dreaming, but there it was, soaring through the skies, and my friend Connie was in the dream too, explaining the field marks in case I couldn't tell what kind of bird it was....uh-huh..  WEIRD.   But fun to draw.

Okay, in non-art news, I got a delightful present from my friend Michelle:

Some people read it as, "I am an angel, you are a lemon..."  The design could have been a bit clearer, I suppose, though those of us who are over-the-top Good Omens fans recognize the quote instantly as "I am an angel, you are a demon.  We're hereditary enemies."  After which, the angel Aziraphale politely invites the demon Crowley into his bookshop to share a few bottles of wine, because they are also best friends.

Speaking of best buddies, I have been remiss in posting cute dachshund pics of late, so here are a few shots from Sunday morning of pals Pippin and Truman relaxing on the sofa, their favorite spot in the whole world.  

Enjoy!

A New Toy

Before I get to the new toy, here are the drawings done this past week in our group Zoom practice sessions.  First, a lovely blue gate in front of an adobe home, done with ink and watercolor.

Next, some bonsai, also ink with watercolor:

And here is a wonky door/steps -- the original photo was truly odd.

I tried livening it up with some wacky colors -- not entirely successfully, but oh well.  It was fun.  This one was done solely with colored pencils.

Okay, time for the new toy!  

I got an iPad Pro 11 tablet to play with, along with a drawing/painting app called Adobe Fresco.  I had never used any kind of digital art software, though at least some of the options were familiar from Adobe Photoshop, which I've used to adjust photos.  Still, there were a LOT of menu choices, and I had no idea what I was doing.

The brush tool menu offers three different main categories and dozens of brush styles within those, plus you can change each brush via dozens of adjustments. For example, when I selected the "canvas" brush, I had adjustment options that I understood -- size, opacity, flow strength, etc., -- but was also faced with mysterious things.  "Blend" modes offered such choices as "linear burn", "color dodge", "difference", "exclusion", and "subtract"-- there were TWENTY-NINE options for this one adjustment alone!

GAH.  I was lost.

When a brush is selected, and then a color, one uses a stylus to draw on the tablet, and the magic of computers allows the stylus to mimic a real brush.  So I just started playing around with various brushes, and quickly became utterly frustrated.  I came up with truly crappy stuff like this:

What I'd been using were brushes called "live", because they imitate watercolor or oil paint--the colors mix/blend with each other in a very similar way to wet-in-wet painting.  I found them hard to control.  I wanted to do stuff that was more like the colored pencils I've been working with.  

So finally I gave the regular brushes a try instead -- they don't mix (though I believe you can make adjustments to do so), and I was much happier with the control I had over them.  And then I discovered the "smudge" brush tool.  Ah!  It was a revelation.  This tool allowed me to blend the colors exactly the way I wanted to -- lots of ways to adjust it to get precisely the effect I wanted.  

The feel of using the smudge tool was very similar to using the solvent on colored pencils.  Once I figured out how to mimic the colored pencil blending experience, I was so much happier--and off and running!

After a few days of practice, the next time the Zoom sketch group met, I used the iPad and Adobe Fresco to draw this bizarre beetle, in about one hour:

The hardest part was trying to match the colors -- not exact, though not too far off.  

Feeling more confident now, naturally I decided to tackle some Good Omens!

I practiced on this photo of Crowley, which was not high quality.  I imported the photo into Fresco, and drew over it, and then tried to improve the details, just for practice.

My redo wasn't perfect, but it taught me a lot about using the tools.

And it gave me a chance to create parts of the image rather than just copying over them.  For example, here is the eye in the photo:

Not much detail there.   I pretty much painted it out and redid it from scratch:

Next, I got the idea to "correct" some of my colored pencil drawings.  This one, for instance, had textures that were too rough in areas despite the solvent blending, especially in the faces. 

This didn't bother me, actually -- it gives the picture that hand-drawn look that I prefer.  But when I printed it out (for calendars, for example), it looked too blotchy.  So I used Fresco to smooth everything out so I would have a photo I could print from:

Next, tackled an early portrait I did of Crowley before I learned how to blend colored pencils.  It definitely had way too much rough texture:

And it needed a background.  He's talking to his plants in this scene, so I used Fresco to smooth out the portrait, and then drew in some plants:

I'm having lots of fun with my new toy, that's for sure.

The Hounds, however, are not thrilled.  I have clearly been spending far too much time paying attention to that strange device instead of them, and this is how they feel about that:

Well, I'm sure things will settle back into a more normal routine soon.  I hope so, anyway, because my arms are sore!

That's all from here.  Have a great week out there!
 

What Was I Thinking?

 Last week I bought my first ever iPad, with one of those nifty pens that let you draw on the screen, with the idea of trying out some digital art software such as Procreate or Adobe Fresco.  

Well, so far I haven't been successful at drawing anything on the tablet that looks like what it is.  My admiration for digital artists just increased by about a gazillion percent.  How do they make things look so good?

I'm pretty sure the answer is something like, "They spent YEARS mastering the tools and taking classes and practicing first."  Duh.  

So, I did practically nothing last week except watch Procreate tutorials, feel completely intimidated, and play online Scrabble.

If I never do anything else with it, I must say that the iPad is great for playing online Scrabble.

Thus, the only thing I have for show-and-tell today are two drawings done during the weekly Zoom practice sessions.

This lantern was done with ink and watercolor:

This Japanese lantern was done in pen and colored pencil:

That's all from the hinterlands.  Have a great week, and stay safe out there!