Last year I decided to buy a new house… and possibly it was the worst decision of my life. I started to make some repairs and to build a new room for painting and my other hobbies. Almost seven months later I do not even imagine when it will be finished… As the raven used to say: nevermore.
All these past few months, I was doing several things not directly related to drawing and painting. I got back to play music regularly. I play my guitars every then and now but this summer I was playing piano again. I studied piano many years ago so I was refreshing some old songs and pieces that I already played. Music is a lot of fun.
Each drawing of my Loring Art Calendar 2012 is a tribute to one of my favorite artists. As I said it is a way of thanking them for uploading their artworks to the Internet. While they are sharing their work for free, we are enjoying and learning.
The June sketch is inspired by a drawing by Leslie White. It was not easy to select a Leslie’s painting, all of them are fantastic and very inspiring. I chose a watercolor of the Empire State Building on a mixture of gesso. The painting looks awesome and the whole post is very interesting. Leslie, thank you for sharing all those wonderful experiences. I used a photo by Ben Bunch as reference.
Each drawing of my Loring Art Calendar 2012 is a tribute to one of my favorite artists. As I said it is a way of thanking them for uploading their artworks to the Internet. While they are sharing their work for free, we are enjoying and learning.
The May sketch is inspired on this drawing by Rob Carey. Rob used as reference for his drawing a painting by the German Expressionist painter August Macke. Three different versions of the same scene. I used a photo by Wolfgang Pittkowski as reference.
I bought a book on flower painting by Adelene Fletcher recently. This is my first try with flowers and watercolors. It is a cyclamen persicum. I did not draw my usual ink lines, I tried to follow the steps in the book. Not happy with the flowers. Leaves are slightly better.
The Menger sponge is a fractal curve that was first described by Karl Menger while exploring the concept of topological dimension. It is described by an iterative algorithm. It begins with a cube that it is sub-divided into 27 small cubes, like a Rubik’s Cube. The inner 7 cubes are removed, the cubes in the middle of each face and the cube in the very center. The result is M1. The process follows with each small cube ad infinitum.
The drawing corresponds to M3, the third iteration. If we consider small cubes for making the sponge, it should be needed 203 = 8000 cubes (20n where n is the number of iterations performed on the initial cube).
Each drawing of my Loring Art Calendar 2012 is a tribute to one of my favorite artists. As I said it is a way of thanking them for uploading their artworks to the Internet. While they are sharing their work for free, we are enjoying and learning.
The April sketch is inspired by a drawing by Debbie Adams. As many of you know, her drawing of Cape Hatteras is used in a Derwent package. I have already seen the package and it was one of my favorite drawings. Then, I discovered her wonderful blog and I learned who was the author. Internet is cool thing. Thank you, Deb, this one’s for you.
Recently I bought some tubes of watercolor. Really I do not need more watercolors, I am happy with my Winsor&Newton Cotman box, but a store had a 3-for-2 promotion in Rembrandt watercolors and I got a good deal. Also I wanted to check out an artists grade watercolors. They are really good pigments that offer beautiful basic colors and combinations. Although I have not used them extensively, the colors are much brighter than the Cotman equivalents. Nevertheless, Cotman is the student grade of Winsor&Newton, I should compare them to the artists grade.
Concerning the colors, I am happy with my current palette although I do not use some colors very often, like the viridian and the sap green, and I never use others, like the white. I was pretty sure on some colors like the Prussian blue and the Payne’s grey. They were not in my palette and I was very interested on them. For the rest of colors I used the Bruce MacEvoy website. If you are interested on watercolor it is a must read. Great detailed descriptions of colors, pigments and palettes.
Finally I was on these colors: raw sienna (234), azo yellow medium (269), rose quinacridone (366), Prussian blue (508) phthalo green (675) and Payne’s grey (708). Some days later I added some new colors to the palette: burnt sienna (411), burnt umber (409), ultramarine deep (506), blue phthalo rouge (583), permanent red deep (371) and permanent yellow lemon (254). The idea is to keep a warm and a cool tone of each basic color and several earth tones. Usually the greens are a combination of a blue and a yellow, sometimes the greens from pigments seem unnatural in the paintings.
