anika mari

When I was at the art store recently buying myself some new markers for Christmas, I got to browsing around the store. I found a display with “watercolor panels”. The surface is prepared with clay, and has a nice texture to it. The description said that it can be framed without glass. That sounded interesting to me, so I decided to buy a set of 4 6×6 panels.

I prepared the background of the panel with a warm yellow color, then I used watercolor to create the composition, adding the line work in when everything was dry.

The panel definitely felt different than paper under my brush. The flat hardness of the board was the first sensation, and then I became aware of the subtleties of the textured surface. It’s not as absorbent as paper, but there is absorbency. The color layers pretty well, but I decided against doing a 4th layer on some areas since the paint seemed to be building up on the surface.

Oddly enough, the surface was still absorbent enough to suck the ink right up. I’m not sure if it’s because parts of the painting might not have been 100% bone dry, but the lines spread and bled a lot more than it usually does on paper. This was the most disappointing part of the process because I thought the thick black lines were ruining the whole painting. I was definitely going for a more delicate line, but if I overlook that initial intention, I think the piece holds up pretty well. In the future, I’ll either have to use a thinner tip than I normally would, or make sure the painting is as dry as it can be.

I’m looking forward to painting up the remaining 3 panels. I could well imagine that the next ones will get better and better, technically speaking, as I get more used to working with the clay surface.

My new job as been soaking up all my time and creative energy, so I haven’t been very productive lately, aside from a few sketches in a small sketchbook.

This felt like a particularly long week, so I left early on Friday and decided to head up to my mom’s house for the weekend. We are currently in the middle of some major snow fall. Already we have about a foot of snow, and it’s supposed to keep snowing all day!

On the drive up I decided that I wanted to do some art this weekend, but wasn’t sure what. When I saw my mom’s new orchid sitting on the dining room table, I was inspired to pick up where I had left off with the technique of drawing from shadows. try out a couple of new techniques. I’ve done shadow drawings before, and had a few next steps in mind when I left off that I never got a chance to try out.

These shadow drawings are made possible by my mom’s dining room light which casts multi-faceted shadows. There might be science behind the shadows it casts, but I like to think it’s magic.

The drawings shown below are smaller (11×14) than the last ones (18×24) since I just wanted to experiment a bit. Maybe I’ll do a big one tomorrow. I had to scan them because I don’t have my card reader for my camera, so the images below are only part of the entire piece.

First I traced the shadows with pen, then did watercolor, then added the line texture with my pen:

For the next piece I traced the shadows with watercolor first, then outlined the watercolor and enhanced the shapes with lines, but no line texture in this one:

I like the first one from a distance because although the line texture blends together, it still looks quite flat and sharp, contrasting the soft and subtle texture of the watercolor. The second one is best appreciated up-close since the lines and shapes and the watercolor texture are so neat, but you don’t see it as much from a few feet away.

The small sketches I’ve been doing lately weren’t all that great, and they left me wondering if I’d lost my knack. Now I think I’ve got it back.

Oh dear, that rhymed.

The other night I had an idea for a drawing in mind, but only the basic shape. I assumed I’d start drawing and it would progress naturally from there, as usually happens. I laid out the initial idea, but then I wasn’t sure how I wanted to proceed. I didn’t like any deliberate notion of how to continue that I came up with, so I left it for later.

The next night I decided that I’d like to add some subtle watercolor texture to the background to make the drawn shapes stand out. As I worked, I realized that the idea in my head wasn’t coming to fruition, so I just went where the paint wanted to take me.

When I was finished and happy with the painting, I surveyed the overall result and realized that the drawing and the painting didn’t harmonize at all. Far from subtle, the background texture had become the dominant part of the composition, and the drawing only muddled its impact. In another moment of “acting before thinking” I cut out the drawn parts with my xacto knife.

In retrospect, I should have photographed more in progress shots, but as it is, I only have the two “end products” to show.

the painting with holes:

plus a detail of the painting:

and of course the cut out drawings, arranged in a pattern:

I like the cutouts quite a lot, but I’m not sure exactly what to do with the painting with holes in it. I feel like I should take it another step or two, but I’m not sure in which direction. Perhaps I’ll wait for inspiration to strike, since it seems letting something sit for a day or two leads to good things.

Yesterday I decided to experiment some more with frisket, the masking liquid I used to block out the flowers and leaves in this painting, so I could get a consistent background texture.

I started out making a sampler of patterns with the frisket. Then I painted over the whole composition with long strokes.

You can see that the paint pools over the frisket, where it is not able to reach the paper.

When the paint was dry, I had fun peeling off the frisket to reveal the crisp white areas underneath.

(The colors appear different because the first one was a photograph, and the second a scan; the true color is closer to that of the scan.)

While I was making the sampler, I had the idea for another painting.

I first painted a dot pattern with the frisket and let it dry. I thought it would look neat to have a crisp white circle in the center of a more amorphous red shape. After the dots were dry, I started painting the red shapes around the frisket circles. I had to do them in batches, making sure that wet circles didn’t intersect. It was a test of patience to wait for them to dry. I mostly succeeded in waiting long enough.

When the painting was done and dry, I peeled away the frisket circles.

I think the dots look a bit like red blood cells. I plan to add some ink drawing to the painting which might change that impression.

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.