Monochrome Bromeliad

I haven't been very good at updating my progress on the Touchstone course. It has now officially completed (the live session anyway) but we are free to return to the private members group on Facebook, to continue sharing our progress. I will endeavour to continue updating this blog, with the art I made during this time.

Recently, I drew a monochrome study, as part of the course. The aim was to get a feel for the different values between white and black.

Bromeliad - click to enlarge

It was recommended charcoal and gesso (thick white paint) be used together. Although I found it really difficult to work with them. The gesso went over the charcoal, no problem, but the charcoal ate into the gesso - leaving indent marks, instead of black.

I switched to an oil pastel however and it worked much better on the gesso. If I were to do this again, I would just use my white and black charcoal blocks. It was a fun exercise nonetheless.

Cockatoo background

So I've worked a little more on my picture. I like the new colourful background, but I'm also missing the loss of the white paper. I feel like I've gone overboard with colour again, as I feared I would!

It's not finished, but I may give it a few days to think about my next move.

Cockatoos

After finding a wonderful picture online, of a bunch of cockatoos feeding, I decided to select only two birds from opposite sides of the tree to represent. While I love the cockatoos, it was mostly for the NSW Christmas bush in bloom I wanted to capture...

Forgive the darkness of the photo. As the cockatoos aren't surrounded by foliage yet, it's difficult to see their definition. I'm using watercolour pencil and its still a work in progress.

I like the sparsity of this portrait so far, having all that white space, and yet I know it needs a lot more colour added too. I'm experimenting with colour, choosing lavender for the shading of the cockatoos, and trying to incorporate magenta as much as possible, in both the flowers and shading of the foliage (to come).

I'm worried I'll stuff it up, so I'm going as gently with the colour application as possible. Any new work is approached with much thought, because I could easily drown it with flat colour with little ability to lift it - as I learned with my bush creek landscape portrait.

It's a very peaceful piece to work on.

luffa

My daughter received some art supplies from a relative for Christmas, only she doesn't like to work in colour she later told me. While grateful for the thought behind the gift, she didn't feel she could use it, so gifted them to me.

The charcoal pencils came unsharpened and fell apart when I tried to put a point on them, with two separate sharpeners and a blade. They weren't well made so they were binned. But she was also given a tiny A5 (8" x 6") sketch pad of black paper, the charcoal pencils were meant to be used on.

So out came my watercolour pencils for an experiment.

The thing with experiments is, you never know what you're going to end up with. I learned the limitations on such dark paper, with pencils. They weren't very vibrant. I used the watercolour pencils dry, so I struggled to develop highlights on a black background.

I tried to use a black marker pen, to get some detail in the leaves, but fear I only made it look more messy. You never know if you don't try these things out though. This was not meant to be my best work, just demonstrating the results of an experiment. Perhaps prisma coloured pencils would have worked better? I know with such a small pad, I cannot use my chunky charcoal blocks or oil pastels.

The inspiration was my luffa vines, which are sporting a lot of leaf cover at the moment, but no flowers as yet.