The potbelly stove in ink and watercolor

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16/365

Again, the the gouache painting is too leaden. I’m going to move on from the Zorn palette to something a little brighter. I haven’t decided what colors I’ll be using.

Today I punched away wildly at my Daniel Smith Ultimate Mixing palette and the colors were okay until I painted the little flower pot on top of the stove. That Cerrulean Blue Chromium it a little too wild, but I approve of the rest of the picture. Pen and ink really floats my boat.

The squiggly lines show that there’s a complaining jaybird inside that stove.

Could use a shadow under the stove…that’s that voice of my inner critic talking to me. What a pest that guy is. All he ever does is bitch and moan.

The fireplace in watercolor

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14/365

My first version of the fireplace in gouache struck me as dreary and too tiresome for a children’s book, so I did it over in watercolor thinking I’d liven it up. I used my Daniel Smith Ultimate Mixing palette for the first time. Even though this palette will allegedly mix 60 bazillion colors, I managed to mix only two, a dark gray for the inside of the fireplace, and an off-white for the bricks. Plus, I photoshopped the bejezuz out of this image to change the color of the wall using a linear burn mask. In other words, this image doesn’t look anything like the original watercolor. I’m fine with that.

Note to self: Muji gel pens run like crazy with watercolor, but they don’t run with Copic markers.

Even though I’ve looked at this fireplace thousands of times, I couldn’t draw it accurately from memory. I used a photo reference for this version.

Realistic and Comic Jays

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Day 3/365. A quick realistic sketch (as realistic as I could draw it) of a Steller’s Jay. These rascals are especially obnoxious and lovable in the Fall as they pass through Ashland on their way to the sunny South. Standing next to the real Jay is Jimmy Jay, my comic jay. Jimmy seems to be changing his appearance every day. I see that today he has some hatching to indicate form instead of being totally flat as he was yesterday. Eventually I want to create the perfect Jimmy Jay…so perfect that I won’t want to tinker with his looks for the next 20 years.

I use my Cheap Joe’s Legend Kolinski travel brush for this picture. They are awesome.


Day 1 of a 365 day learning project

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I’ve been mulling over doing a “project.” The project is simply to practice what I need to learn in order to do a children’s book. I have high hopes and grand aspirations, and slim skills. The project, which I’ve signed a contract to complete, is to practice what I need to know everyday for one hour even if I don’t feel like it, even if I’m tired, bored, sick, anxious, impatient, and so on.

So what about this “contract” I’ve signed? Of course, the contracting partner is the part of myself that’s lazy, tired, sick, anxious, and impatient. In other words, it’s a promise to myself. Sure, I've made promises to myself before and then given up when things got tough. And now, in this case, I want to learn how to do pen and ink and watercolor painting even though I know that watercolor painting is the hardest kind of painting in the universe. So be it—that’s the path I’ve chosen. I’ve signed a contract, and today I’m delivering the first installment.

Looks like gouache instead of watercolor. I’m working on it. The Speedball ink seems to dry slowly. There are a couple of spots where the watercolor made the soft ink run. Impatience strikes again.

A touch of Hergé

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Barnes and Noble lured me into their trap again, this time with a 20% discount coupon. I was in Medford to go shopping at TJ’s, where I bought 12 cubes of Kerry Gold butter to my keto diet. After a quick trip to Chipotle, I casually dropped in to the local B&N to look around. And I bought Tintin: Hergé’s Masterpiece. What a guy Hergé was, except for his passivity during the nazi occupation of Brussels. Besides being the master of the Belgian ligne claire, he was an agnostic Taoist-Buddhist. That makes him a member of my tribe. Except for the clean line, which I’m still working on.

My homage is 100% derivative and respectful, drawn with my trusty Pentel brush pen and painted with my faithful Daniel Smith watercolors, all of it cleaned up in Photoshop.

Here you see that I’ve got my jaybird disguised as Tintin. When you see him sweating he’s usually running to a fight or running away from someone villainous who wants to do him in with a long, curved sword.


Character sketches

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After going through The Simpson Handbook, I realized how completely undecided I am about what my bird family should look like. The pros over at the Simpsons have every detail of their characters codified in a look-book. To do my children’s book right I’ve got to standardize my characters so they’ll look the same on page 28 as they do on page one.

So many decisions to make… Should birds have hands? If so, how many fingers on a hand? Five? Four? Should they have mouths or beaks? The can fly, so should they have wings or arms? If they have wings, should the wings be able function like hands? For example, should Momma bird be able to point a finger towards the chimney and say “Don’t you ever mess around with that chimney!”

Here’s are some drawings I did today —- a character sketch showing the relative sizes and color palettes for the Jay family, Momma Jay, Jimmy Jay, and Sammy Jay. Creating a look-book is right there on my mind map for this project, so today I can say that moved forward another inch.

But… now that I’m looking at Jimmy, I’m thinking he needs to be a little more endearing if he’s going to be the hero of the story.