After my friend Richard saw a watercolor self-portrait I did a few weeks ago, he asked me to do his portrait and sent me some photographs to work from. He probably expected a watercolor, but this is the result, done using Procreate on my iPad. There's a lot more smoothing in this picture than I'm… Continue reading Portrait of a Friend
Category: Painting
Mixing It Up
This is a half-hour traditional-media pencil and gouache sketch in my 5 x 8 Moleskin, with a little digital finish thrown in. In the original, the model's left arm didn't read right. So for the first time ever, I took a picture of the painting with my iPad camera, imported the image into the Procreate… Continue reading Mixing It Up
Color Studies
Now for the real fun—I hope. After all those squares à la Josef Albers, this exercise is more along the lines of a real picture (exercises are from David Hornung's book, “Color: A Workshop for Artists and Designers”—see previous posts). The parameters are to use 6 or more colors, each twice, in order to get… Continue reading Color Studies
Back to Chicago
Bored with using charcoal when I got to the last half hour of the evening open studio at the Palette and Chisel, I decided to do this small (10 x 8) gouache sketch in a new Moleskin sketchbook. It's messy, but it was fun to do. I had trouble with the sketchbook paper because it's… Continue reading Back to Chicago
Early Morning at Olbrich Park
I kept meaning to “finish” this iPad drawing I did last summer looking east from the top of the sledding hill at Olbrich Park. I never got around to working on it again, so I'm now declaring it done. After all, we need something to remember the sun with this gray spring weather. I believe… Continue reading Early Morning at Olbrich Park
Color studies: Making One Hue Look Like Two
Here are my attempts at making one color, the small inner square in the pictures above, look like two different colors, based on a difference in hue alone. I don't think I was very successful. In the top one, the left square looks redder than the right one. In the second example, the right small… Continue reading Color studies: Making One Hue Look Like Two
Flowers for Easter
Some tulips for spring and Easter weekend that I originally bought for Lesley's birthday. I drew the sketch with my new Pilot “Young Rex” (dumb name) fountain pen with mixed Waterman black and brown ink, and then watercolor over that. I didn't realize how architectural the vase is until I just looked at the picture… Continue reading Flowers for Easter
More Color Studies
This assignment in David Hornung's book Color: A Workshop for Artists and Designers is to make one color look like two. The Inkpad app on my Ipad is perfect for this. It's really easy to make a template with two big squares and two small ones and then just copy it for each new attempt.… Continue reading More Color Studies
More Color Studies
This time the studies are painted in gouache (opaque watercolor), so as you can see a little cruder. But it's trickier to mix the paint instead of just moving some sliders in a computer program. Gouache, I'm finding, has it's own quirks. I can't use as much water as I do with watercolor and… Continue reading More Color Studies
Framed Watercolor
I matted and framed two of the alla prima watercolors from the P&C Monday open studio, just to see how they look, but also so I could put them on the wall and look at them. This is “Green Woman.” I'm hoping to mat and frame paintings as I do them and then have a… Continue reading Framed Watercolor
Ken Crocker Artist 