Look Ma, No Lines

I’ve made a big deal about putting down my pens while I learn to create art without relying upon outline as the main element.  In spite of this, in one way or another, all of my oil paint experiments have started with some sort of drawn outline of the objects I was trying to paint.  These outlines, in fact, have been part of my experiments.  I’ve used pencil, colored pencil and painted lines.  I’ve used complete outlines and very loose location-only marks.  I suppose this remains an area of experimentation but I’ve been pretty happy using thinned oil paint and a small brush to do the drawing.  I’ve learned that I need to keep these lines light, however, as otherwise I struggle to cover them up.

A week or so ago I did the first experiment where I used no outline at all, relying only on placing spots of color of the appropriate hue, value and chroma to create the object, which in that case was a pepper.  This really pushes the thinking towards shape and form as you have to develop those shapes by including backgrounds as much as setting color in the objects themselves.  I liked that thought process.  It felt, somehow, empowering.

The result isn’t really a complete painting as all I wanted to do was see if I could make the pepper look, well.., like a pepper.  I vaguely blocked in another pepper in the background but I never really finished it.

I realized that I never shared it here, but since it’s sort of a landmark of sorts, I thought I should.  It’s only 8×6 on gesso’d MDF.  For what it is, I’m pretty happy with the result.

Drawing Straight Lines

I have to begin with an apology to the person I’m addressing with this post.  A couple weeks ago I had an email dialogue with someone who told me she couldn’t draw a straight line.  I couldn’t explain how to learn to do it in a way that was clear to her and I told her I’d do a blog post on it.  This is that blog post, albeit at least two weeks late.

Truth is, you don’t have to be able to draw straight lines, but it helps to be able to get them somewhat straight.  Artists talk a lot about “hand-eye coordination” and “muscle memory,” neither of which have much to do with eyes or muscles, but we don’t do much to show people how to achieve it.  The reason is that, well, it’s boring and the internet has become all about showing people fun stuff.

In fact, we don’t do much at all to teach what we mean by “practice” and everyone believes it means that you should go out and draw stuff.  But a home run hitter doesn’t get good at the craft by playing baseball games, they get good at it by endlessly hitting balls off a tee, practicing one-arm swings along a particular path, and watching videos of themselves doing these exercises.  We need to be more like home run hitters.

Anyways, I went back into my piles of sketchbooks and found one set of exercises done back when I “couldn’t draw a straight line.”  Let’s discuss them.

2-point lines

The first thing you have to do is learn HOW to draw a straight line.  You don’t do it by drawing very slowly while watching the tip of your pencil.  This NEVER works.  Instead, you look at where you want to go while quickly drawing the line.  A good exercise for this is to 1) drop pairs of points all over a piece of paper. 2) put your pencil on one dot, look at another dot, and 3) pull  your pencil to the dot you’re looking at.   It will take a bit of getting used to but you’ll soon see that drawing straight lines isn’t so hard afterall.  In short, hand-eye coordination isn’t about drawing buildings, it’s about acquiring these sorts of skills such that it become automatic.

3-point curves

The same sort of exercise is done to draw curves, only now you’ve got to start the pencil on one dot and take in two other dots with your eye as you draw the curve.  Just don’t look at your pencil as you do this.

Super-imposed lines

This is another useful exercise.  Draw a series of line (use a straight edge) on a piece of paper.  Then, repeatedly draw lines on top of those lines.  I found this enforces the hand movement and improves your brain’s ability to do these movements, and it is your brain, not your hand, that is doing these movements.

I hope this helps at least as much as it embarrasses me to post all these crooked lines.  They say that looking back on your earlier work is a good thing.  I’m not so sure (grin).

Quick Sketching In The Cold

I started posting my sketches to this blog as a way of maintaining a history of them.  It’s since morphed into a way of sharing with others but that original idea remains, although I long ago stopped posting everything I draw.

And this week has been a cold one.  The beginning of the week had us enjoying -32 to -38C temperatures.  The 58C difference between our inside and outside temps stretched our house heating system to its limits.  But on Wednesday is “warmed up” and we needed milk so I decided to walk to the store to get some.  It was -16C at the time but the walk is only 3-minutes in each direction and so I headed off.

And here’s the crazy part.  That morning I’d seen Alissa Duke’s post of some quickie sketches she’d done of the backs of cars and I couldn’t help but see every rear-end of a car as a target.  It was nuts but I drew several really quick, really frozen sketches.  By the time I got to the store I was frozen, though each sketch took less than 30s.

The funny thing is that you can actually see the shivering shakes in some of the lines.

But since pursuing the oil colors, purposely putting my pens down, it’s been a while since I’ve enjoyed pen sketching.  When I got home and warmed up I drew this guy from a reference photos used by a YouTuber to do a very detailed charcoal drawing.  Let’s just say mine was less detailed.  Then again, mine only took a few minutes (grin).

It was fun to lay down some ink again.  We’re back to really cold and a blizzard is swirling outside.  What kind of stupid people choose to live in a place like this?

 

More Watercolor With Oils

I continue to experiment with recreating watercolors I have done in oils.  I’m interested in this for a couple reasons.  First, I’m not just learning how to oil paint; I’m learning how to drive a brush, color mixing, and how to shape objects with paint rather than ink.  Thus, I see watercolor <-> oils to be a two-way educational process for me.  So far I’m learning a lot if learning is measured by the number of mistakes I’m making.

Here’s one of them.  I took yellow paint, created two tones (one too brown I think) and quickly drew three bananas.  This took me about five minutes and it shows.  I messed up the dimensions of the middle banana and didn’t render any of them very well.  But, as I said, it only took me five minutes to make these mistakes (grin).

At one point I also decided replicate a sketch I’d done on a park bench during pre-pandemic times using pen/ink/watercolor.  Here is is, done in oils.  I don’t find it bad but it smacks too much of the original pen and ink sketch.  I didn’t notice this until I was done.  Some habits die hard.

Field Sketching vs Oil Painting

The title of this post is probably a misnomer, but I can’t think of a better one.  Truth is, I’m comparing what I’ve done as a field sketcher to what I’ve tried to do as a neophyte oil painter.  Sort of apples and oranges but the apple and orange were both done by me and they’re both apples.  Does that make sense (grin)?

Ok…it was September of 2020 and a lull in COVID lockdown was in the air.  We went apple picking at an orchard on the south side of the St. Lawrence.  Everyone was enjoying being outdoors, climbing picking ladders and filling bags with apples.  I relied on my family for the picking while I wandered around looking for just the right view of apples and a mix of leaves.  I’m sure people thought I was nuts as I walked around and around trees, moving from one to another without picking a single apple.  But I found the spot.  So I sat down on my tripod stool and drew this with my fountain pen (S&B Beta sketchbook).

When I got home I added watercolor.

Fast-forward to 2022… and we’re in lockdown (again) because of Omicron.  I wondered what would happen if I tried to replicate one of my sketches with my very limited oil painting skills.  So, I applied a couple light coats of gesso to an S&B Beta sketchbook and went to work, using pencil to draw the closest replica I could from the original watercolor.

I’ve got to say that my limited abilities reared their head when it came to replicating the original.  Also, my pen and wash style relies so heavily on the pen lines to convey their msg that I struggled more than a little bit without them.  Still, the result kinda sorta looks like the original, though the watercolor apples look better to me.

This was an interesting experiment.  Painting in a sketchbook with oils works pretty well except you can’t close the sketchbook for a couple days.  This might slow me down as a street sketcher (grin).