Carnival Time

I just finished this for an exhibit I am going to be featured in with 3 other artists. The exhibit is called Eye Candy and will open this Saturday, April 24 at Bristol Art Gallery in Bristol, RI. I have done something similar and the gallery owner suggested I do another. Bristol is a very patriotic town and has the oldest and largest 4th of July parade in the country. I worked the drawing on 11x14" cradled gessoboard with white colourfix primer on top. I used lots of solvent with the pencil to smooth out the texture of the ground I worked on and not let white flecks of the background show through. The drawing goes right to the edges and because it is not framed, it looks exactly like this. I'm going to paint the edges white which I think will make it look very contemporary. Its fun to experiment! Difficult to keep the white around the drawing clean. I had to brush it very carefully and erase very gently.

Solar Plate Printmaking

Instead of always teaching, I've decided to take a class myself. I wanted to try something different so I am taking a class in solar plate printmaking. Because I love to draw, I am enjoying this art form very much. And rather than sitting or standing and drawing, drawing, drawing; I am doing more hands-on work making the plates, inking the plates, printing the plates. The top photo is my original pencil drawing on etched glass. The glass is placed on the solar plate and exposed to sunlight or a light box thus the image is transfered onto the plate by UV rays. Next you wash the coating off the plate with water and you have an etched image. I tried the a' la poupee method of inking the plate with several colors on the paint tube drawing and learned it takes a while to ink and you must wipe really well. I am really liking my print of the koi (bottom) and I look forward to experimenting more with this one.

Pet Portrait

This is a little Maltese that I drew in colored pencil for a customer. It's done on beige Stonehenge paper. I took a quick photo before she took the portrait home so its not as detailed as it would be if I had scanned it. Cute little dog and fun to draw.

C.P. Class Lesson for This Week

For my colored pencil classes this week, the lesson was to work colorful pansies on black paper. As we all know, if you put color directly on black paper it looks dull and if you put it under glass, frame it and hang it on the wall, it appears even darker. So our lesson was to begin with a reverse-grisaille drawing in white. Grisaille is a French word for a monochromatic value study, usually done in gray, which is a foundation in order to create form and value. When working on black paper and using white pencil, this would be done in reverse so that the lightest areas received the heaviest layer of white pencil and the darker areas receive the lightest amount of pencil in order to allow the dark colors to be applied. A good example is Cheryl's drawing (the last picture) in which she has laid in all of her underpainting and is beginning to add color to her composition. The top two photos are some of the other works, you will have to ignore the distractions of window light and my collection of shells, so you can see each person's choice of composition and layout.

The beginning grisaille drawing can be confusing and requires a lot of thinking and planning. It is a very good exercise to help with working on values which are so important in a drawing and sometimes get lost when we start thinking more about colors. Once a good value drawing is established, you will find it can be easier to apply color.