anika mari

When my mom left for a vacation in Germany recently, she gave me this challenge: Go get some good (but not too good) big paper and make art for at least an hour or two every day that she’s gone.

Most of my drawings and paintings tend to be on the smaller scale. I really branched out lately when working on 9×12 watercolor paper, and then took a leap and made some drawings on 11×14 bristol. I’ve been wanting to go even bigger, but have felt nervous about it, so I thought I’d take her up on the challenge.

Just after she left, I got sidetracked with a 5 day impromptu road trip to Boston, Niagra Falls, and NYC, but when I got back, one of the first errands I ran was to go to the art store and buy some good, but not too good, 18×24 paper.

A big blank sheet of paper is one of the most intimidating objects in the world if your goal is to actually draw something on it. I left it sitting on the dining room table for the rest of the day.

That very night my brother who lives in California showed up for a surprise visit. He opened up his computer at the dining room table to show me what he’s been working on lately. As we were sitting there waiting for the computer to cooperate, I noticed the shadows of nearby orchids cast onto my pad of paper. I opened the cover to see what they looked like on the white surface, and it was really pretty.

I casually mentioned that it would be fun to trace the outlines of the shadows. My brother suggested that I use watercolor and make it look like the actual shadows.

I was too tired to try out any of those ideas that night, but the next day I lowered the shades to see if I could get the same shadows in the daytime. They weren’t as distinct, and there weren’t as many of them, but it gave me something to work with.

I traced the outlines on a couple of sheets from my sketchbook, and then colored them in with watercolor. Next, on a big sheet of paper, I painted where the shadows were, also in color, but without outlining the forms first.

In the image above, the top painted flowers are a little obscured by the orchids, but those turned out a lot better than the bottom set of flowers which are big muddied blobs. Since this paper is so big, I have to rely on photographs to document my work, and unfortunately none of the detail shots came out. If I get a chance, I’ll take a better shot of the big watercolor painting to show what I mean.

My next attempt was to block out the shadows with frisket, then color in the background in some manner, to leave a crisp white area to be outlined after the fact.

As I was working on the composition, I decided to incorporate a grouping of leaves at the bottom of the page that I also blocked out with frisket. I was a little wary about how the paper would behave if I used a watercolor wash in the background, but I was using a bristol paper that said it was appropriate for “light washes,” so I decided to try it out. I applied a yellow watercolor wash over the entire background.

The paper wrinkled a bit, but it held up relatively well.

When the paint had dried, I removed the frisket from the leaves area. Unfortunately I might have been a little too excited to see the result, because the paper tore in one area as I removed the rubbery film. Of course I wasn’t going to let that stop me, so I applied a light wash of a green color to the leaves. This didn’t work as well.

For some reason, when I added the green wash, the other corners of the paper decided to curl in. The green watercolor kept pooling in the wrong areas, and as I fiddled with it, the color got a lot darker than I’d intended. It also just looked yucky compared to the rest of the painting. The texture was all wrong.

So I took drastic action after thinking about it for maybe a minute and cut away the leaves.

That threw off the whole composition, so now I’ll have to work with it some more to see if it can be saved, or if I’ll just chalk it up to a learning experience. In retrospect I probably should have waited until the green dried completely, and maybe tried adding some drawn detailing to the leaves. When I looked at the photo of the painting with the leaves still intact, it didn’t look so bad after all.

Oh well. By this time it was dark again, and as I was not satisfied with any of the days’ results, I decided to press on and work on the idea I’d originally had the night before. Without the interfering sunlight, all the shadows showed up, and I sat down to trace them. I wish I’d paused to take a shot of the drawing with only the lines, but I was on a roll, so I colored in the gray immediately.

This one makes me happy.

Not that the other works make me unhappy, but there was a lot of experimentation going on with unfamiliar techniques earlier in the day. I’m familiar with pen and marker, so it was nice to have a finished product that I was pleased with and not only experiments that are still evolving.

This happy accident of noticing the shadows on the paper might lead to some really interesting paintings and drawings, so I’ll explore working with shadows a bit more in the future.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been in a creative lull. I’ve been somewhat busy with other stuff, but I just haven’t felt incredibly inspired to do anything. I’ve been working on some daily drawings in my sketchbook, but that’s about it.

However, at the tail end of my last creative burst, I did a few drawings/painting that I just now got around to photographing and uploading. I love being in Saipan, but there are a few things working against me: the humid heat which makes me prefer to swing in the hammock with a cool drink instead of working on art, and the slow internet connection which makes me want to do almost anything else than hover over uploads that can take hours. It took me almost 8 hours and a few false starts, but I eventually got the new photos uploaded.

My sister-in-law, Rachel commented that she really liked seeing photographs of my art in their environment. I started taking photos of the artworks hanging on the clothing line or carefully propped on one of the back steps because I don’t have access to a scanner here. I also zoomed in and took some closeups, but uploaded a variety of shots to give a good sense of the scale of the drawings and prints. After hearing her feedback, I embraced the idea and worked with the concept a little more deliberately. I am pretty happy with 2 of the art in environment shots in particular.

I think it’s fitting to photograph my drawings in this manner since I get so much inspiration from everything that I see around me. Not that I can pinpoint exactly where the inspiration for these works come from–they tend to be a general response to visual cues that surround me. Although the cinder blocks didn’t directly inspire either of these works, I like the visual similarity they offer to the drawings, as well as a certain amount of contrast to the surrounding plants.

Perhaps I’ll continue doing this when I’m back home, and I can use my scanner just for the details.

I’ve been wanting to try out an idea that’s been hovering in the back of my mind for a while. Often when I draw I start off using black ink, and then I like to add color after the fact. My coloring tool of choice is usually Prismacolor markers which have the unfortunate tendency of dissolving the crisp black lines and causing unwanted smudging (sometimes just a little, sometimes enough to ruin a drawing for me).

Since I’ve been working with watercolor paints lately, and the ink I use says “waterproof” on the box, it occurred to me that the two materials might be the perfect match.

I quickly drew some simple blobby shapes with my rapidograph pen and let the ink dry for a few minutes.

I mixed up a rich red using my watercolor paints, and then filled in the previously drawn shapes.

I purposefully painted over the lines and even tried to rub up the ink a bit with my brush, just to see if I could get it to bleed at all. But the lines stayed put! No muss, no fuss. I think I’m in love.

It took me much too long to actually try it out, but now that I know that it works so well, I definitely will be putting this technique to use more in the future.

I might revisit this painting and add in some more drawing, and who knows, maybe more color. I can see adding details to turn each red shape into a flower, or giving each blob little eyes so they become some kind of creature.

I had intended to do another watercolor similar to my recent scalloped drawing in order to practice getting a specific painted watercolor effect that I didn’t quite get on the first try. For the new piece, I decided to change the overall composition slightly, so I started out by drawing in the shapes with a watercolor pencil.

When the drawing was complete, I looked at all the tiny shapes and didn’t feel like painstakingly filling in each one.

Not sure about what I did want to do, I switched directions and did a loose sketch of similar shapes on a much larger piece of sketch paper. I continued using a loose stroke when painting in the shapes, and ended up using orange overlapped by blue.

I really liked the end result. This is definitely one of those results that reminds me that I should always work on “good” paper, even when just doing sketchy stuff. Sometimes those are the pieces I love the most, but if it’s on wrinkly, acidy paper, it’s hard to justify framing it.

I was inspired to try out a simlarly loose style with the smaller piece I’d started earlier. The final result was quite different since the technique didn’t transfer precisely to the smaller scale.

I layered 5 different colors, and the result was much more spiky and chaotic than the orange and blue composition. If you are interested in seeing the progression of each layer, I have those photos up on flickr.

I wasn’t too happy with the end result of the 5 layered painting. I think that is because it was so different from what I’d originally intended to create, and also so different from the blue and orange composition that I liked so much. I got some pretty good feedback about the smaller painting that got me to look at it in a different way and appreciate the end result for what it is.

Even if it’s not my favorite thing that I’ve ever created, it’s a good example of what I love best about art–that by experimenting with techniques and following the path of ideas that lead to other ideas, I can come up with stuff that is very different from what I set out to do. By hearing what others thought and liked about my unexpected result, I’m reminded that having a final piece that is great every time isn’t what’s important. It’s the process that I love!

After I finished my latest sea urchin print and the squashed caterpillar byproduct painting, I had the novel idea to do an actual non-experimental painting. Watercolor is a relatively new medium for me though, so I ended up experimenting anyway.

I started out by drawing what seems to be my favorite shape in a scattered pattern across the rough surface of the paper. I used watercolor pencils to create the pointy ended ovoid shapes. When I do watercolor paintings that start off with a drawing, I like to use watercolor pencils. They are forgiving in that you can usually dissolve errant lines and marks with some water and not affect the overall painting when all is said and done.

I began the actual painting by smoothing out the drawn lines with water. I then added some blues and greens and got some really cool textures.

The painting was done, but the bright white background bugged me. I figured that I could painstakingly color in the background by carefully working around each blue shape, but I wanted to figure out an easier way. I reasoned that it didn’t really matter if I messed the whole thing up, so I could try something new.

The idea was to color in the background as quickly as possible. To achieve that end, I used a paper towel. First I dipped the towel in water and swept it across the painting, back and forth until the whole surface was moistened. The blue shapes bled a little as I expected they would, but still maintained their delicate textures. It was working! Then I dipped the paper towel in the light green color I had prepared, and using a similar stroke, I applied the color to the paper.

To get an even coat of the green, I had to work the surface more than I had when just wetting it. Sadly, the blue paint bled even more and blended with the green and dulled down the whole painting.

So my experiment didn’t exactly work, but I attempted to salvage the piece by re-painting the blue shapes. Because the entire surface of the paper was pretty wet, the darker blue paint bled out from the edge of many of the shapes. The watercolor texture isn’t quite as pretty either, and overall the painting looks somewhat dull, so I plan to add some ink drawing to the shapes which I think will help save this particular painting.

Since I had the paper towel out and ready, I used it to create a pretty light green wash on a new piece of watercolor paper. It worked great on the plain white surface. The color is bright and cheerful and not at all muddied. I’m discovering that planning is often my friend when I’m working with watercolor. I’m going to create a similar composition of blue ovoid shapes on the fresh light green background so I can see if the painting will turn out how I planned from the beginning.