Wednesday Afternoon Art Jam!
Instead of coming over tomorrow night, Lisa called me about eleven this morning and asked if she could come over today and we do the art thing during the day. That rocked. She had an afternoon off work for personal reasons already taken care of, and so we had daylight for this week's Art Jam. It was even sunny. It got bright and gorgeous in the afternoon.
I started another monster colored pencils piece based on Masterful Color. This one is a keeper unless some personal quirk makes me hate it after something in the final layers. I decided to do the cover art step by step demonstration in Masterful Color by Arlene Steinberg. The piece that lured me and plenty of artist friends into buying this excellent book is in whole one of the step by step demonstrations. You have permission to literally copy her work for your own use, though it'd be copyright violation to sell it as anything other than "An exercise drawn from a step by step demonstration by Arlene Steinberg" I would think. I would at least want to be honest about that if selling one at an art fair.
But that's not what I did, because instead of using the line drawing provided in the book, I drew the marbles myself and couldn't resist rearranging them to my taste, changing sizes, simplifying it to only five and an extra shadow. I did use the colors recommended in the steps, but just placed them where I liked them better. This one most likely will never be for sale, I'm planning to mat and hang it when it's done.
I'm confident it will come out utterly cool, the complementary underpainting layer went well:
Robert's Marbles, Stage 1. I scanned at this point and stuck it in Scraps on my DeviantART account because I have a few students at dA and decided to share the stages. Someone favorited stage one. It blew me away.
Robert's Marbles, Stage 2. I got farther with it while she worked on designing a logo based on Celtic knotwork with white ravens in it. She went through dozens of iterations, mostly in pencil, they ranged from the best, most intricate knotwork drawing she's done in her life to simple and effective logo designs. This one has the first layers of the real colors added, mostly in the deepest shadows.
I took the color choices directly from the Marbles project in the book, but rearraged the size of them and where they went in the composition and the details of some of them, seriously hashing the photo reference to make this my own original work. I had intended to just "do the marble exercise" because I loved it... but I wound up making changes as soon as I decided to keep it. I wanted the foreground ones bigger and I wanted the colors rearranged to put my favorites in where I wanted them. All my changes are from the reference and imagination. But I did use her color recipes to execute them even when I changed the design.
Robert's Marbles, Stage 3. The local color is more established at this stage. Again, this represents a stage in the actual step by step demonstration in which the author, Arlene Steinberg, encourages students to literally copy in detail her cover art, I Thought I'd Lost Them. She included the original photo reference albeit small, and this has helped too, especially since I sketched from the reference instead of copying her line drawing even in part. I wound up getting some reflections wrong and with others, I changed them because I'd moved the marbles and they'd reflect differently against each other.
It's become an original piece and I will be very proud of it when it's done. It's more than a one-day project, but it's been a long time since I did some slow detailed colored pencil realism piece just for myself. When I decided to do it freehand and use Stonehenge paper instead of just putting it in a sketchbook, I should've known it'd be a keeper.
I will post later stages in later posts as I work on it. I'm so happy about it I don't even feel bad about not finishing it in today's session -- it deserves more than the six hours of work it's had so far, it needs to become one of those little pieces of finite perfection that make me happy.
I started another monster colored pencils piece based on Masterful Color. This one is a keeper unless some personal quirk makes me hate it after something in the final layers. I decided to do the cover art step by step demonstration in Masterful Color by Arlene Steinberg. The piece that lured me and plenty of artist friends into buying this excellent book is in whole one of the step by step demonstrations. You have permission to literally copy her work for your own use, though it'd be copyright violation to sell it as anything other than "An exercise drawn from a step by step demonstration by Arlene Steinberg" I would think. I would at least want to be honest about that if selling one at an art fair.
But that's not what I did, because instead of using the line drawing provided in the book, I drew the marbles myself and couldn't resist rearranging them to my taste, changing sizes, simplifying it to only five and an extra shadow. I did use the colors recommended in the steps, but just placed them where I liked them better. This one most likely will never be for sale, I'm planning to mat and hang it when it's done.
I'm confident it will come out utterly cool, the complementary underpainting layer went well:
Robert's Marbles, Stage 1. I scanned at this point and stuck it in Scraps on my DeviantART account because I have a few students at dA and decided to share the stages. Someone favorited stage one. It blew me away.
Robert's Marbles, Stage 2. I got farther with it while she worked on designing a logo based on Celtic knotwork with white ravens in it. She went through dozens of iterations, mostly in pencil, they ranged from the best, most intricate knotwork drawing she's done in her life to simple and effective logo designs. This one has the first layers of the real colors added, mostly in the deepest shadows.
I took the color choices directly from the Marbles project in the book, but rearraged the size of them and where they went in the composition and the details of some of them, seriously hashing the photo reference to make this my own original work. I had intended to just "do the marble exercise" because I loved it... but I wound up making changes as soon as I decided to keep it. I wanted the foreground ones bigger and I wanted the colors rearranged to put my favorites in where I wanted them. All my changes are from the reference and imagination. But I did use her color recipes to execute them even when I changed the design.
Robert's Marbles, Stage 3. The local color is more established at this stage. Again, this represents a stage in the actual step by step demonstration in which the author, Arlene Steinberg, encourages students to literally copy in detail her cover art, I Thought I'd Lost Them. She included the original photo reference albeit small, and this has helped too, especially since I sketched from the reference instead of copying her line drawing even in part. I wound up getting some reflections wrong and with others, I changed them because I'd moved the marbles and they'd reflect differently against each other.
It's become an original piece and I will be very proud of it when it's done. It's more than a one-day project, but it's been a long time since I did some slow detailed colored pencil realism piece just for myself. When I decided to do it freehand and use Stonehenge paper instead of just putting it in a sketchbook, I should've known it'd be a keeper.
I will post later stages in later posts as I work on it. I'm so happy about it I don't even feel bad about not finishing it in today's session -- it deserves more than the six hours of work it's had so far, it needs to become one of those little pieces of finite perfection that make me happy.