Painting Course – Day 1

I have started a painting course that is organizing my university. It is a very basic course in which we are going to learn and practice several painting and drawing techniques. As I am mostly self-taught, it was weird for me that a teacher gave me indications about the task I was performing. I guess I will learn faster. I hope to have fun, too.

We have started with oil painting. We had to select a photo or a painting for using it as model for our own painting. Do you know what did I choose? A forest with lots of trees!

Firstly the teacher explained how to use charcoal for sketching the main zones. Also he introduced the basics of color theory and helped to identify and create the colors that each one needed. As we are using a very reduced palette (cyan blue, magenta, cadmium yellow medium, yellow ochre, madder carmine, burnt sienna and white) the most challenging part is to get the appropriate colors. Then we applied the colors on the canvas by filling each zone with its darker tones, from top to bottom. We will add the details in the next lectures.

Some comments/criticism. The sky should be more purple, I had to add more magenta to the mix. It is not needed to paint or define the trunks of the trees at this stage, I had to paint just a green-brown blob. It is important to keep a similar thickness in all the color zones, edges included, the goal at this stage is to remove the white background of the canvas. Fortunately all can be fixed.

Post office building

La Palma is the most north-westerly of the Canary Islands, Spain. It is a small and beautiful island with wonderful mountain landscapes and black sand beaches because of its volcanic origin. The sketch shows the post office building of Santa Cruz de la Palma, the capital of the island and the second largest city after Los Llanos de Aridane. I must say I am not so happy with the final result of this drawing.

Liebster Blog Award

Vinyl Eraser has been nominated twice for the Liebster Blog Award! Thank you very much to Kellie See who runs one of the most creative blogs that I follow. Kellie is currently studying illustration and publishes her exercises and thoughts on the blog. Check out her latest post where she experiments on different mediums for drawing and painting. Very, very interesting blog. I love it.

And also thank you very much to Melody who nominated this blog for the award on the same day. Melody is studying for a Master’s Degree in Teaching Early Grades and runs the blog 30 Minute Art. The idea is simple: she has been able to find 30 minutes in her schedule for art that uses to draws, write poems, and even produces videos! She always puts a smile in my face with her posts.

Concerning the Liebster Blog Award. It is a chain award, so when you get it, you must pass the award on to more bloggers, in this case five bloggers. The Liebster Blog Award is given to bloggers who have less than 200 followers in order to generate some traffic for them. Liebster is a German word that can be translated as beloved or nice. The rules for accepting this award are as follows:

1. Show your thanks to the blogger who gave you the award by linking back to them.
2. Reveal your top picks for the award and let them know by leaving a comment on their blog.
3. Post the award on your blog.
4. Bask in the love from the most supportive people on the blogsphere – other bloggers.
5. And, best of all – have fun and spread the karma.

These are my nominations (it is really hard to choose only five blogs, I have tried to select blogs with less than 200 followers that have not received this award previously):

• A point of no return – arts, music and food for thought
• Creating from the heart – look at his watercolored berries… they almost smell
• High River Arts – the perfect site to find inspiration
• Les Personnages – fashion design… vê se pões a gargantilha…
• Wayside Artist – her deers and horses seems so real…

How not to draw trees (IV)

This is the final post about trees. At least for the moment. I think I have been able to integrate the general concepts from books, your advices and other tips found on-line and apply them in my sketches. I have to study and analyze your latest comments. (Nanina, thanks for the link to the Stapleton Kearns’ blog, his tree posts are very interesting.) I have discovered the very basics of tree drawing, now I need some time for internalized it.

Today the drawing shows several tree sketches. I have used other sketches with trees that I found on Flickr as models, by the way, great site to find inspiration. The idea is to experiment with different styles, or species, for creating a catalog for future reference.

Thanks to all of you who follow this series of posts for your encouraging comments.

How not to draw trees (III)

Today I have combined the ideas exposed in the previous posts. And I must say I am partially happy with the results. The different green tones help to define the volume of the trees. Even the trunks have that volume thanks to the shadows. Perhaps the problem comes from the tree shape. It is not so much realistic, it is more a cartoon-like approach to a tree than a sketch of a tree. It should not be hard to fix…

How not to draw trees (II)

Second experiment. The drawings I did yesterday really are not my style… if I have a style. I mean, the drawings are only watercolor, usually I use watercolors to give color to my pen and ink sketches. I did not use ink yesterday. I focused on color.

Today I want to isolate the shape so I do not use color. I use my graphite pencils (mainly HB and 2B) but I have tried to apply same rules, obviously, adapting them to graphite techniques. And here are the results.

The first tree is based on a video by the British writer and illustrator Shoo Rayner. The rest are variations on the same idea.

How not to draw trees (I)

As you know I’d like to improve the trees in my sketches. So I have decided to dedicate some efforts on this task. This is not a tutorial, how-to or whatever you want to call it. It is just a collection of notes with experiments about that topic. Maybe it could be useful for somebody else.

While I was reviewing my drawing and painting books and several websites looking for advices on how to paint trees, I found several curious statements or rules. Although they are so obvious, it is interesting to note them.

• The light falls on the top of the tree, so this area should be lighter and warmer.
• The branches grow out from the trunk, getting thinner until they become twigs.
• The tree’s trunks usually are not brown, it is better to use a variety of gray.
• The trees are three-dimensional structures, they are not flat, and some parts are closer to the observer than others.

For the sketches I used a combination of cadmium yellow pale hue and ultramarine blue for the several green tones and burnt umber and ultramarine blue for trunks and branches. I am using my W&N Cotman watercolors.

The first tree does not follow the first rule: the top of the tree is not lighter than the other areas. And the “holes” in the canopy show thick branches (second rule). The trunk of the second tree is almost brown and it should tend to gray (third rule). However, the lights and shadows are better in this case (although I do not like the ground). The third tree is almost flat (fourth rule): the texture and colors do not work so well here.