Al Fresco Art Club Strikes Again

The Al Fresco Art Club met indoors today. For the last couple of months the weather has been too chilly outdoors for true al fresco painting. I decided to do an ink sketch of my pug and throw on some watercolor. When I do watercolor, anything goes. I try to keep the color palette cohesive, but most of the time I lose my mind and just start guessing about what colors would be harmonious. I feel like a kid doing finger-painting and love smearing the paint around.

When I look at this particular ink and wash painting, I see my true, native style — raw black and white ink, lots of hatching and contour marks, and broad swathes of paint. I like this style a lot. It’s always fun to forget about being an “artist” and just start drawing.

When I was finished, I got to thinking that a spectator seeing my picture for the first time would think ho-hum, what a weird, wacky painting. However, that same stranger looking at a book— or series of books — made in my wacky style might think, “Interesting style! It grabs me by the guts!” There’s something to be said for quantity.

For today’s painting I used a Pentel Brush Pen loaded with Rotring ink, a 12-color Yarka White Knights watercolor set, and a $2 synthetic flat brush. I used mostly yellow ochre and burnt umber, with a carmine glaze in the shadows. Wacky! Weird! Wow!

View fullsize

Al Fresco Art Club Artrage Masterpiece Challenge for July 20, 2019

There was a full day of Arting around here today. It started with the Vitamin D sketch, which I do every sunny day it’s not freezing. In the Pacific Northwest we get short-changed on sunshine. Vitamin D deficiency is epidemic. While I’m catching rays and generating Vitamnd D, not to mention resetting my biological clock, I do these sketches in 15 minutes. With the short time limit I have to simplify. I like to do a pen and ink drawing when I’ve got just a few minutes.

Here’s the Vitamin D sketch. I used by Kuretake Sable Brush pen and a 5.5x8 in. Strathmore Visual Journal (140 lb. watercolor paper).

View fullsize

For the weekly meeting of the Al Fresco Art Club, we decided to do another one-hour challenge that forces us out of our comfort zone. We decided that trying to copy a masterpiece always pushes us to do some thinking. The bonus is that we learn something about humility, as I did today when I tried to copy Gaugin’s “Woman with a Mango”.

Here’s the Alfresco Art Club painting of Paul Gauguin’s “Woman with a Mango” done using Artrage on the iPad Pro. Really, you should check out the original here.

View fullsize

Sunday's Al Fresco Art Club's Artrage Challenge -- Paint A Cézanne Landscape

Farmhouses near Bellevue, Paul Cézanne

When the Art Club meets today, I’ll be attempting to paint a Cézanne landscape. I’ll be using the iPad version of Artrage. I’ve decided to use the roller brush because it can cover a lot of territory fast. The other brushes are limited to a size of 100% in the iPad version, which makes them tedious to work with on a canvas larger than 1500x1000. The desktop version doesn’t have the limitation of restricted brush sizes.

Here’s the masterpiece I’m working with, one of Cézanne’s lovely sunny landscapes, Farmhouses near Bellevue.

Later…

I spent an hour copying this picture. When I saved the image, Artrage crashed and my masterpiece disappeared forever. Witnesses told me afterwards that my copy was pretty good. Since the accident, I’m a little wary of using the iOS version of Artrage for critical work, but I’m not going to abandon it yet. Lots of programs crash, including Photoshop and Procreated. Artrage offers so many desirable features that I will stick with it, but in the future, I will save often, and export to the Cloud frequently.

In the meantime, here’s a random Artrage doodle done on the iPad. This is a 1536x1536 image.

View fullsize

Sunday Art Club Artrage Challenge: Paint like a Master

This week the Al Fresco Art Club challenge was to learn by trying to paint a masterpiece…that is, try to copy a masterpiece. We got to choose our favorite painting program. We could pick any masterpiece we wanted, and we had to work in one layer with no undo. I chose to copy a Cézanne still life using Artrage. I kept it simple by leaving out some details, including a wine glass, background details, and anything else that wouldn’t fit into my one-hour window. I used a two-color palette: bluish and orange-ish, pretty much the same as Cézanne’s color palette.

I chose a still life because I thought it would be something I could complete in one hour. In that amount of time I managed to get the basic shapes and a rudimentary foreground and background. I learned at least one lesson: Still life’s are harder than they look.

Here’s my interpretation of a Cézanne still life. My reference names this painting simply “Still Life.”

View fullsize

Al Fresco Art Club Day - Self-portrait using Artrage

This week the al fresco art club decided to have an Artrage challenge: paint a self-portrait on one layer without using undo. The idea is to learn to paint in a painterly way so that the final result will have the human-made charm of a traditional media painting instead of boring digital perfection.

I use my iPad’s version of Artrage. It has a all of the features I need to learn how to do “oil painting”. One thing I do like about the one-layer technique is that it helps develop confidence — my precious painting isn’t really precious. If you make a hideous error, you just paint over it without thinking twice and, hopefully, the second effort is better than the first. More likely, the 10th effort is better than the 9th.

View fullsize

Weekly Al Fresco Art Club Artrage Challenge

This week the Al Fresco Art Club did not paint in the great outdoors — we stayed in the studio. We decided, the two of us, that we would try out hand at doing a still life of things lying around the house, such as a bottle of wine we use as a door stop, a bottle of olive oil, and a small tomato. The real challenge was to use Artrage to make the painting. To keep it interesting, we had several restrictions: 1) Use only one layer; 2) No using Undo; 3) No using erasers. In other words, we were challenged to adhere to the same restrictions we would face if we were using real paint and a canvas.

Here’s my effort.