Snow Day and Materials Testing

The sun came out today! Even though it is still cold outside, the Groundhog Day Storm is over.

I made sure to soak up the rays. The warmth felt good!

Plates of orange-buttermilk scones welcomed my family when they finished shoveling out. Lots of coffee and tea, too.

I am finding my graphite watersoluble pencils, in combination with a travel sized waterbrush, to be indispensable items for my sketch kit. As I work with them more and more, I am really drawn to the range of values I can achieve, in spite of the water. Also, it gives a painterly look to my value studies. Here is one I tried today:

On the right is a hawk that I see frequently at Fontenelle Nature Center. I omitted his cage from the sketch. He is injured, and I think he cannot be released into the wild. But he is stunningly beautiful. (So is his next door neighbor, the Barred Owl). This is a quick value study I did from a photo I took last week.

On the left is a previous composition sketch of cattails in a snowbank.

The new raptor exhibit out there is looking great. I can't wait for it to open.

More Studio Tests

More materials testing! I've decided to devote all of January to testing materials, since I have developed some new interests.

I have always loved tonal drawings. Leonardo's sfumato is something that I hope, one day, to be able to achieve in my own drawings. With this in mind, I picked up a block of olive green Derwent XL graphite to see what it could do. I liked it so much with the pear subject that I think I will go back and get the rest of the colors!

It is hard to show in a reduced size picture what this looks like in person. It's very moody, very smoky. I like it a lot!

Here is another set of testing. Quite a boring page, but I'm including it because it shows some of the playing around with materials that I do before I settle on a way of working. On the left, I drew a block of green, and sprayed it with water. It didn't budge, so I then dropped water on in large droplets. Nah. Didn't work. Then, I tried a color block with drops of  isopropyl alcohol- something I use frequently in my watercolor and acrylic paintings. Still no movement, so that was abandoned. Then, I dipped a brush in water and dragged it over the block and attempted to paint with it. It was hard to get anything to show up- quite unlike my watersoluble graphite pencils. I abandoned this idea, too.

The next test was drawing a small landscape, just like I did with the pear. This was better. The detail was lost in the photo, though, so I'm not including it here.

I think I liked the graphite block best for the still life of the pear. But I really, really liked it for that!!! I am going to try a few more experiments with different papers. I think I also preferred the sketch paper I used for the pear to the drawing paper used for the landscape.

I'll be posting more testing throughout the month of January. Thank you for reading, and stay warm!