anika mari

I never finished the Creativity Boot Camp. I still want to, but other things came up.

I went on vacation to the beach for one week. Of course when I had time to relax, my body decided to get sick, so it wasn’t the most enjoyable vacation ever, but it was restful at least.

I brought some art supplies with me to the beach, but never had the energy to work on anything. As I was unpacking my supplies, back at home, I decided to make a few watercolor sketches. Watercolor is a little tricky, and there are certain techniques that I still haven’t mastered. For my first attempt, I drew a few blossoms with pencil, and then added layers of watercolor.

The color is still a little muddy. I think I need to work on being more patient so that each layer thoroughly dries before I add the next layer, and I also need to make sure I keep the washes pretty light. I think on some of the flowers, I started with too much yellow pigment on the first wash, so the other colors built up too much and look caked on.

While waiting for the layers of paint to dry, I intuitively painted various small marks and dots and later added some small details with pen.

While then waiting for both of those paintings to dry (I was rather heavy handed with the yellow), I painted a simple texture with crossing lines to create a woven pattern. As I painted, parts of the lines would dry while the other end would stay damp. As a result, when painting the next lines that overlapped perpendicularly, some of the color would bleed a bit. It adds and interesting dimension to the pattern.

I next did a simple composition of some swooshing lines to play with transparency (one of the things I like the best about working with watercolor), then added in some texture with a pen when the color was dry.

I wanted to do more with transparency, so I started out by painting some blob shapes on the paper in what I thought was a gray color. As the paint dried, it had a decidedly purplish hue, and suddenly the shapes reminded me of sea urchins. Instead of adding more overlapping blob shapes, as I’d originally intended, I added a few more similar shapes in a grayish green color.

When dry, I added in the urchin details with a pen.

Later on in the evening, an idea for a shape popped into my head, and I drew it using the implements that were nearest to me: watercolor paper and pen.

I might go back later and add a wash of color to the background and might possibly paint the shapes themselves. Good thing I used waterproof ink!

It’s funny how creativity sometimes comes in bursts. Six images in one afternoon, after nothing for over a week. Hopefully my next post will be about the next theme in the Creativity Boot Camp, but who knows? Maybe another unexpected creative burst will come along instead.

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.