Continuing “Cheri and Larry”….
This album shows how I used watercolor wash to add the big chunks of color for their t-shirts and something difficult to do: the grey fadeout in the shape of a heart all around them.
Things didn’t go as planned. 😱
1
I’ve started putting in the guide lines for their t-shirts, with the appropriate pencil colors. Cheri’s shirt will be a solid bright red, Larry’s a blue to match his eyes. Both are large areas of solid color. To do that, and save myself a lot of work coloring those solid colors with pencils, I’ll do a watercolor wash in red and blue, as an underpainting, then add the folds and highlights of the shirts on top of that with colored pencil. In this pic I’m putting in the dark lines of the folds. When I do the watercolor wash, those lines will show through.
2
All of the shirt folds and guide-lines for shadowed areas have been put in.
I erased the lines below their shirts that indicated the heart so that I can barely see them. I don’t want those to show through the watercolor wash I’m going to put there to make the darker heart-shaped vignette. I needed the heart shape visible as I’ve been working on their portrait so I could judge how the hair and face color is working visually with the heart border. Particularly now that I’m down to the t-shirts. Because, unlike the faces, the shirts will have to fade into the grey vignette. That will be a little tricky. The bright red and blue shirts have to fade out at the bottom, and at the same time the dark heart vignette around them has to fade outward from the grey of the paper to a much darker charcoal-grey.
Now I’m ready for adding large areas of watercolor. A chunk of red, a chunk of blue, and (hopefully) a nice smooth heart-shaped gradation from grey to much darker grey, all around the outside edges of the whole piece.
Up to now, the only medium on this artwork is colored pencil.
3
First I put in the watercolor underpainting for their shirts. That was easy and straightforward. I let the red and the blue run together a bit near the bottom. Joined at the heart, these two. ❤️
4
Now the heart shaped vignette. The white paper protects their faces from possible paint splash, or - god forbid - a dropped paintbrush.
I made 3 mixtures of water with black paint, each one with more paint than the last, to make progressively darker greys. My plan was to wet the paper and let each heart-shaped band of grey flow smoothly into the next, as wet-in-wet watercolor will do.
Things don’t always turn out the way an artist envisions them. (As every artist knows.) This smooth transition from the grey of the paper to the much darker grey at the edges, didn’t go so well.
That’s the fault of two things: Canson Mi-Teintes paper is not a watercolor paper. (If it was, it wouldn’t have buckled this badly from being wet.) On watercolor paper, a w.c. artist can make smooth washes because they can wet the paper, and “flow” the paint into the wetness where it will spread — evenly, if the artist has the skill to do that. The paper stays wet long enough to achieve that smooth transition. But Canson paper is extremely absorbent. Almost as soon as I’ve wet the paper, it absorbs the water. I couldn’t even grab my loaded brush quickly enough to flow the first band of grey into the wetness, or each darker shade of grey smoothly into the previous one. Each band dried before I could even finish my stroke all the way around the heart. That caused blocky steps between each shade of grey — as you see. Not what I envisioned.
The second reason for the failure is I am not a watercolor artist. I’ve used w.c. it for years for underpainting, but I don’t have the skill of a w.c. artist who works in that medium all day every day like I do with pencils.
But I think even the most skilled w.c. artist would have trouble getting a smooth wash on this paper. ☹️
5
So this was as good as I could get my “smooth” transition with the heart vignette. Yuck. All that work with their faces - days and days of painstaking work - which came out so beautifully….and now I’ve ruined it with this ugly wash. I shut down my studio (and went to bed this night) with disappointment.
But wait! Colored pencils to the rescue. I can fix that…I hope. It would have been nice if this day’s work would have resulted in a smooth, perfect fade-out vignette. I can put down an amount of color with a big paintbrush in a few strokes that would have taken hours and hours to do with little colored pencil strokes. This has given me a lot of dark grey around the edges though. Something that would have been a lot of work with dark grey pencil. Can I smooth out those ugly, clunky-looking bands of lighter and medium grey and make a smooth blend into the dark grey? Can I cover them well enough with pencil to fix that? And make the pencil transition look smooth? (Not easy to do with small pencil-points on large transitions.)
Tomorrow will tell.
The damp paper has to dry overnight.
6
With a lot of erasing, I was able to “lift” much of that sharp band of grey closest to the faces. I was surprised, because paint pigment usually stains the paper fibers and it’s not possible to erase it. This softened the transition somewhat. It’s still not a smooth, beautiful vignette that I want. The shirts don’t fade out nicely at the bottom. And the heart looks lopsided. Now I’ll get to work with colored pencil. First, their t-shirts. Then I’ll spend quite a few hours on the vignette.
But first, there was a fun surprise in my studio while working on that ill-fated watercolor vignette…..
7
When I went to wash up my brushes I threw my painting apron over this stool. When I came back and looked at it I noticed something....
Cheri McNealy is an avid seamstress. She is well known in the dog world for her beautiful custom-made “toties”. Years ago Cheri - one of my biggest fans - made this studio apron and sent it to me as a gift. It’s made from a dog-patterned fabric and the ties have dog footprints on them. It usually hangs on a peg in my studio. I must not have looked at the inside of the apron for many years, and I had forgotten that it has an inscription handwritten in a bottom corner. But this day it happened to fall in such a way that the writing showed. This day that I painted the heart around Cheri’s and Larry’s faces:
For the Master Artist
“Kevin”
From the Master Seamstress
“Cheri”
August 2007
Double portrait of Cheri McNealy and her beloved late husband Larry McNealy, in progress.
🎨 Prismacolor pencil and watercolor on “Felt Grey” Canson Mi-Teintes paper, 20 x 24 inches.
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