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.