Tag: sketchbook

  • Satisfied Sigh

    Satisfied Sigh

    I’m finally happy with a version of this pose. I think I’ve figured out that she is slightly tilted away on the left side (her right hand) and her hands are not the same distance from the viewer. I used a very limited palette of unbleached titanium, raw umber and French ultramarine for this one,…

  • Dusting The Oil Pastels Off

    Dusting The Oil Pastels Off

    I have a box of oil pastels that I never use. One reason for that is the fact they don’t dry, and up until recently I didn’t have fixative specific to oil pastels. That my excuse, and I’m sticking to it. Most of my oil pastels are the fairly ubiquitous inexpensive ones, with a small…

  • Reflecting

    Reflecting

    Two versions of the same reference. For some reason I did the first one in my A4 sketchbook, even though there’s a hand, so it meets the criteria for my A3 sketchbook. The background was already there, from using up paint at some point, and it worked quite well. The second painting is in the…

  • Sponge and Painty

    Sponge and Painty

    I started today’s practice with a colour mixing exercise, but I was not in the mood for swatching in grids, so I shelved the sketchbook and used the paint for some figure painting. This was painted using sponge brushes, which don’t give you much space for perfectionism, and are just lots of fun to use.…

  • Charcoal Pastel Gesso

    Charcoal Pastel Gesso

    Starting with some warm-up play in a sketchbook on a page that had some acrylic paint from a previous session as a ground, I played with this high-contrast reference and some charcoal powder. Having smudged in some basic shadow areas, I wanted a darker dark, so I mixed the charcoal powder with clear gesso, and…

  • Repeat Until Satisfied

    Repeat Until Satisfied

    I’m still obsessed with this hand and foot pose, and I’m really enjoying the process. Somewhere in between yesterday’s painting (r) and today’s is where I want to end up. I do like the black I mixed today, I’m going to play with that more tomorrow. Til the morn, Suzanne 587/600

  • Hand and Foot Combo

    Hand and Foot Combo

    The hand and foot combination that was bugging me before my trip was given a full A3 page, and some large untidy brushes, to try and make sense of it. I definitely got closer to the shapes and placements, so I’m happy with that. Til the morn, Suzanne 586/600

  • Photos and Street Sketch

    Photos and Street Sketch

    A wee collage of photos from my day. We left the house at 5:40am and four different trains took us all the way to Thurso, with a couple of hours in Inverness to visit Leakey’s. I’m absolutely knackered, and the only art I have managed to do was a very quick sketch of some lovely…

  • Comparison Sketchbook Spread

    Comparison Sketchbook Spread

    Yesterday (L) compared with today (R). Yesterday I used vermillion, cad yellow, and cobalt blue for my palette, and today I switched the cobalt for ultramarine, so it’s a nice spread for comparing the difference a single colour can make. I inadvertently tested out the difference between two similar brushes, but this was unintentional. I…

  • Introvert

    Introvert

    I painted quite a bit today, and by the time I was trying to wrap this one up, whatever is going on with my painting arm was rebelling. There are a few bits where I finished up with my non-dominant hand, so that was fun. I was trying out a brush I’ve had sitting around…

  • Back Off

    Back Off

    I sketched and painted back of the head views today, and then finished up with this one incorporating the back view and the hands theme. A real beezer of complexity, this one, which I made even more difficult for myself with my choice of brush. I used a Daler-Rowney XL Filbert brush, size 50. It’s…

  • Folding In On Self

    Folding In On Self

    Yesterday’s sketchbook painting with the black gesso ground inspired this one, but instead of using the black gesso I painted layers of red violet and fluorescent magenta, and then used those colours with titanium white to create the lighter values to bring out the figure. I started out limiting myself to using a 2″ wide…