KEEPING AT IT CHALLENGE "A Bit of Orange"

At the bank I looked past the orange twinkle lights and pumpkins in the window to the orange tree across the street. Orange truly is the color of October. Here's the challenge. Add "a bit of orange."

Zow! Color! Scary stuff! I'm not ready. I'm not good enough at black and white yet.

So let's try this: Not a full color picture, just a black and white sketch, pen or pencil--but with some orange on it somewhere. A pumpkin, a traffic light, anything big or small, just so something is orange. Use a colored pencil, Crayola crayon, felt tip pen, watercolor.

'Till "October Orange Saturday."

FF Sticking With Ink & WC

Although I'm not much pleased with the results, I find the combo addicting. I can see why so many on Urban Sketchers use it. Mayhap I'll fill a few sketchbooks and see what happens.

I have a kid's Crayola set with artist grade watercolors squeezed into the emptied pans. I use one brush, a diagonal flat, and a plastic honey jar for water. And lots of paper towels or Kleenex. I draw on site and paint on desk. From my color notes. Before I erase them they do make make the whole business look like a paint by numbers thing.

The bottom picture is a Kwik Trip garbage dumpster, plus a few other things. I'm calling it "La Crescent Schwedlers." That's what caught my eye, those turning Schwedler Maples. Went to La Crescent for apples. All the pick-your-own places are gone. Big thousand tree farms now. Minneapolis owed. When we talked about Greening Apples and going up those pointed ladders to get our own, the "Overseer" of the orchard looked at us as if we had steppped through a history book. No one has grown Greenings for decades. Not enough market. Not enough bakers of pies.

The top pic is a Victorian building in New Lisbon. Didn't have time to indicate a town. Worthy of a more careful drawing.

FF X-Zone - Ink & WC

Uniball tinted with watercolor. I paint dark, so my "X-Zone" is to paint as light as possible. This is a real strain for me. Like Dr. Strangelove, I have to grab my hand.

Thinking of it as "tinting" rather than "painting" or "applying a color wash" helps.

The bottom two are from our ImprmSktchDy at Chara's alley.

The top one is my favorite of these "restrained paintings." I drew the picture because of the odd roof on the big house, but then I noticed that the little shop was lavender. Actually lavender. And I was glad I was "tinting" rather than just drawing in black and white.

stickin with oink

Other things. Someone went to Brown Deer Park?!

stickin with ink

Impromptu sketch day 2009!

FF Ex-Zoned Still

This is a Uni-ball drawing with watercolor. I tend to paint dark, so it was a real effort to paint this as light as it is. It reminds me a bit of Pete Scully's stuff. ( http://petescully.com/sketchbook/) He's a guy from Urban Sketchers who has a very simple coloring-book style of ink and watercolor. His newer stuff is more painterly, but I have always enjoyed the simplicity of his coloring-book approach.

Try as I might to tweak my scanner's colors on Gimp, I couldn't get the yellow right. The reason in the first place that I wanted to add color to this drawing was because the Paneras buildings are striking with their painted stucco. Boldly colored exterior walls are not that common around here. The yellow was pure Yellow Ochre right out of the tube. It doesn't come across that way in the reproductions.

Mom went in to get bread and I drew what was in front of me, including my car reflected in the window. Mom came out with a bag of bread before I was done. While she was shopping at Woodman's, I went back to check the colors. I forgot the blue-green stripe. I guessed at it at home. The shadows on the windows are not shadows but reflections of the undersides of the awnings.

Watercolors have a charm all their own. In real life they have a luminosity from within, the light bouncing off the white paper back through the transparent colors. Not strobe-screamingly luminous. Subtly luminous. Nice. But not reproducible.

PS I didn't yet erase my pencil color-notes. You can erase right through watercolors, unlike the colored ink sketching pens.

FF Ex-Zoned Still

This one is a fountain pen painted over with water. I have this slick watercolor brush with a water cartridge. Without paint on it, it becomes a pen & ink tool. I just brush over the pen strokes and it blends them, nearly obliterating the lines entirely. This intrigues me and needs practice. There should have been less crowded shading in the shadows--the water brush mixing made the shadows too dark. More spaces between diagonal shadings equals lighter grays.