I blame Stephen Sondheim. This is an unnecessary hook to start this entry. As I chronicled in Finishing the Hat, my desire to create art again flared up. Along the path of trying to remember some watercolor techniques I discovered Leslie Stroz’ 100 Tiny Treasures challenge. It looks like there are a couple of these floating around and these kind of challenges are common. I remember Inktober was thing I didn’t do. Anyway, I discovered this video before Broadway Night and decided to do the challenge after Broadway Night, and I did. It did not start off well. You can see my effort in this PixelFed collection:
The first five painting are fairly poor. It has been years since I tried to do anything like this seriously. My inexperience in shape, form, color theory, and water control are obvious. I remember watercolor as being easy but only in that it was easy to clean up. This was a bad memory, as watercolor is a tough medium to control. Howard Rosenberg, my first college level art teacher, taught us to start with cheap materials because if you can create art with the crappy stuff, when you start using the good stuff you’ll be even better. Sadly, this doesn’t seem to hold true to watercolor. Cheap paper (like I bought) behaves very differently than the good stuff. Cheap paint behaves differently. There is a difference between staining and non-staining paint, too.
The first lesson I had to learn was patience. I know watercolor has to dry, but I didn’t want to give it enough time. I will revisit these paintings later and redo them. At first I was irritated, but now I am only disappointed. I had no practical recent experience, so why should I expect good results?
The sixth painting, “The Deer Chaser”, went better. It was based on a photo I had taken at Portland’s Japanese Gardens and I did a value study on it first, hoping to find the three levels of light in the sketch. I then did a loose pencil sketch on my canvas and did an underlay of the shadows, made sure to let them dry completely, and then did the main colors. It still didn’t work, so I decided to draw in the outlines of the sketch in pen. I’ll be damned, I had finally created a painting I was happy with.
Deer ChaserI was satisfied. The colors are muddled, the browns are weak, but there was a finally a feeling of “I’ve done something here” that I didn’t have in t the first five paintings.
I’ve continued to paint these little guys, they are only 2″×1¼″ or 2″×2″. Not big, not a lot of room to experiment, and so far not a lot of room for detail. That’s apparently a skill issue. Searching the #100TinyTreasures tag on Instagram shows hundreds of highly detailed little paintings. I am gob smacked by how much detail experienced painters can put in such a small space.
Someday those kind of details may be possible for me. It will take more patience, more explorations, and more attention to get it to work.
I suspect some of the really detailed stuff is done with watercolor pencil or even just colored pencils, which is fine for the challenge. It’s not, to my knowledge, a watercolor only thing.
I also started a sketching class on Skillshare, because I have that subscription and barely use it. My old failures from art school are haunting me a little bit, but what I have now is validation that how I used to draw is perfectly fine. I was a failure in art school because I could not draw negative space accurately without looking at the paper. Seriously. We were drilled on training the eye to trace an outline and draw that outline without looking at it. Because I couldn’t do this, I couldn’t draw.
But I’m better now. I’m feeling more creative and looking forward to playing with this stuff. Now I wish I could have the same energy for writing or the guitar.