If At First You Don't Succeed...

 Today's post is 95% about art and 5% cute dachshund pics at the end for anyone who is feeling unenthusiastic about art.  For you folks, just scroll on down there!

For the rest of the readers, I'll just say it was a busy creative week here in between the dog walks, the swims at the gym, the Friends of the Library volunteer gig, the Zoom meetings, the baseball on TV (Go Mariners!  Go Twins!), and the weekly Crazy Rummy game that I never win.

First, we had three  Zoom sketch practice sessions instead of the usual two.  Yay.  Each reference photo that was chosen was one that I initially disliked, yet each one turned into a pretty decent artistic effort.  On Monday, we picked this scene of rocks and trees:

I thought the colors were bland, but Tina pointed out that one could always exaggerate them, and that she could see pinks and blues/purples in the rocks.  Then I couldn't decide whether pen or watercolor would work best, and muttered about that for a while until I remembered that I had a set of water-soluble ink pens in various colors which meant that I could draw with those and then wash watercolor over it to create a cool effect.

So that's what I did:

Much prettier than the photo, if you ask me.

At our next session, we chose this fish, which I found challenging because of the light spots. 

 It's hard to get good light areas in watercolor without using what's called a "masking fluid" to protect them from the paint.  I don't like using it because it takes a long time to dry.    But then I remembered that I'd recently bought a tube of white gouache, an opaque water-based paint, which I used quite successfully:

Our final practice session proved even more challenging.  This was the photo -- nothing easy here!  Tricky sky with that bright sunshine, tricky shadows, and a complex tree to boot.  Yay.

After considerable deliberation, I came up with a five-step process for depicting the sky which involved a gradated wash, some lifting out with a paper towel, some wet-in-wet technique, a little dry brush, and a bit of glazing.  Whew.  Then I did the water rather quickly with just mostly dry brush, and the beach with mostly wet-in-wet, and when all that was dry, I painted in the tree and the shadows.  Goodness, that was a lot of work, but hey, it turned out nicely, if I do say so myself:

Okay, now it's time for my new challenge:  oil painting.

Yes, I didn't have enough to do, what with the ink and the watercolor and the colored pencils and the acrylic paints, so I added oil paint to the mix.  I haven't done any for probably ten years or so, and had to go buy all new materials.  That's what retirement income is for, right?

My first idea for an oil painting bombed.   Possibly I aimed a little high -- the reference photo I tried to use was a fresco by Raphael, called the Liberation of St. Peter:

My clever idea was to turn this into Aziraphale the angel rescuing Crowley from a prison, just an imaginary scene, perhaps a reverse of that one in the actual Good Omens series where Crowley rescues Aziraphale from the Bastille.  First, I reversed the image (because I liked it better that way), and took out the guards and most of the bars, and then tried sticking the characters' heads on via Photoshop:

You can see that I tried several different Crowley faces.  Then I redrew it on paper in the actual size I wanted (11" x 14")"

Then I used transfer paper to put the image onto a painting panel (a gray-toned gessoed hardboard), and tried rendering a grisaille -- an underpainting in values of gray, which is traditional prep for an oil painting, and which can be done with acrylic paint.  It looked rather awful -- the heads were so small that I couldn't paint good details at all:

In a work, yuck.  So then I tried redrawing the picture to cut down the background in order to get larger faces: 

Which were still too small for good details even with my teensy tiniest brush, to I bagged that idea, transferred the drawing onto colored pencil paper, and sometime will get around to trying to finish it with colored pencils.  I can get incredibly fine points on those, and should be able to do the detailing I would like.

By now, some of you (I won't name names) will be wondering how long this post is going to be -- well, don't worry, we're nearly to the end (and to the cute dachshund pics).  

I have not given up on oil painting by any means.  But my next effort will be a simple portrait from a simple photo ref of Aziraphale, rather than a complicated attempt to futz about with a master artist's work.  To that end, I found a simple photo that I liked, a nice big close-up which nearly fills an 8" x 10" canvas panel, and yesterday I painted a grisaille value study of it, in acrylic paint, thusly:

Sometime this coming week, I hope to get the actual oil paints out and try some glazing of color over this...could be bad, could be great, could be something in between.  Tune in next week to find out!

AND NOW, without further ado, what you've lasted this long for -- ADORABLE PICS OF PIPPIN!

Isn't he the cutest thing EVER???

That's almost all -- I nearly forgot about the Bentley!  You know those two Funko Pop figures I bought of Crowley and Aziraphale?  Well, I found them a car -- Crowley drives a 1926 Bentley, and I found a model of one from that era -- the only such one available, as far as I could tell.  It's a little small for them, but that's only because their heads are so danged big!

Isn't that sweet?  

And yes, I am still twelve years old.  Why do you ask?

Have a fun week out there, everyone, and remember:  Don't Be Ordinary!