Tag Archives: Sketching

Stonehenge Oil Paper As A Sketching Platform

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I know that a lot of you think I’m nuts for suggesting the use of oil paints as a sketching medium.  You’re probably right but the typical discussions of this is not the reason(s).

A sketching medium must:

  1. Be Light and portable
  2. Be easy to set up and take down
  3. Clean up must be simple.
  4. Must allow for relatively quick sketches

There may be other things but these are the major demands on a medium.

Numbers 2 and 3 are solved by using water-mixable oil paints.  I use Cobra paints that feel just like Rembrandt oils if you’ve used those.  No solvents or mediums beyond good old H2O.  Requirement one requires a easel-less approach and while I’ve listed 4 separately, this mostly comes from items 2 and 3.

But in addition to water-mixable oils, you need a substrate that’s light and that doesn’t need a lot of support.  And that’s where Legion’s new Stonehenge Oil paper comes in.  Here’s a really quick test to see how well it solves the problem of oil paint sketching.  Please excuse the horrible painting.  I spent only 15 minutes on this, probably using too large of a brush, but the painting is not the result here, it’s paper performance that’s important here.

I wanted to test how this paper accepts a pencil sketch.  Several of the “Canvas pads” typically sold for oils are horrible for drawing.  Stonehenge oil is the opposite.  Its 140lb paper surface feels like you’re drawing on Stonehenge drawing paper, which is wonderful.  Here’s my sketch and the subject.

My typical way of drawing is to use a 9×12 drawing board with a metal surface so I can use magnets to attach things like paint palettes and water containers.  So, it seemed natural to use the same thing for this test.  I also decided not to tape the paper down because I’m lazy and often I just clip my sketchbook to the board and draw.  I did the same here, with a single clip.

Several things to note here.  There was NO curling of the paper as I painted.  Whatever treatment Legion does to the paper causes it to remain flat and prevents any oil from penetrating through to the other side. Painting on it feels very similar to painting on a masonite panel covered with gesso.  It’s just a LOT lighter.  This is an amazing new product for oil painters in my view.

Will I become an oil paint sketcher?  Maybe?  Probably?  I like the idea and I prefer oils to gouache that some find a great sketching tool.  But I still look at paintings that lack ink lines and think that something is missing.  Time will tell.  What I do know is that I’ll be buying more Stonehenge Oil paper when it becomes available in Canada.

Legion: Stonehenge Oil, A New Painting Surface

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I’ve been on a quest, some might say a fools errand, to adapt oil paint to a sketching environment.  I’ve talked a bit about this in previous posts but today I want to talk about a new product that could help me towards that goal.

It’s Legion Paper’s new Stonehenge Oil.    It’s a paper that resists oil penetrationand looks just like watercolor paper.  lts surface texture is very similar to their Stonehenge drawing paper that many of us know for its’ wonderful abilities to handle graphite and colored pencils.  This makes it ideal for doing a sketch prior to painting.  I find it hard to draw on a canvas-textured surface, particularly when working in sketch-size formats.

It’s sold in standard 20×30 sheets and, rumor has it, will also be available in smaller sizes either as pads or sheets.  Anyways, Legion was nice enough to send me a couple 28×21.5cm sample sheets so I could experiment with it as an oil paint sketching medium.  I’ll report back “real soon”  as it looks like an ideal surface for draw->paint work.

Sketching Is For The Birds

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It was only five days ago that I reported that we hadn’t had high temps above 10C yet.  Times change.  For the next three days we’re going to experience temps around 30C, which is kinda-sorta abnormal for us.  We generally get a couple days like that in mid-summer but certainly not in May.  But I’m not complaining.  I went sketching.

Another bit of news that’s relevant to this post is that I just got a hearing aid.  It’s not a fancy programmable one but it has allowed me to discover a lot of sounds I haven’t heard in a long time.

I stopped at a park bench and decided to try to draw/paint directly with a brush.  I’ve been learning how to handle brushes and Marc Holmes’ 30 in 30days (direct to watercolor) event is coming up next month and I want to try it. I didn’t bring my watercolors but I had a waterbrush with some diluted ink and so I did this simple drawing.  Look ma, no lines.  I include it here only for the sake of completeness.

I was walking along my river and the first thing I experienced was birds singing.  I love birds and spend a considerable amount feeding them every year.  But I haven’t heard them in decades.  Well, I can hear crows, but none of the songbirds.  Anyways, the trees along my river had birds, chirping birds.  And so my first act wasn’t to sketch but to lay down in the grass, close my eyes, and just listen.  It was wonderful.  I spent half an hour doing only that.

But I did want to sketch and so I sat up, noticed a line of trees and started sketching.  The “scene” wasn’t that great so I added my own mountains and came up with this sketch.

It was time to walk so I headed up river and eventually came across some rocks to sketch.  These sit, among others, at the end of a new walk bridge the city built last year.  I’ll have to sketch that soon but for this day these rocks were just the thing.  Color got added when I got home.

It was sooooo good to get out sketching.  Maybe I’ll do it again tomorrow (grin).

Frustrated By Bad Paper Choices

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I’m still working myself back into a sketching rhythm and that has meant a lot of spur of the moment decisions and results.  And so it went during the saga I am about to tell.

I’ve been doing a lot of my sketching on cheap paper, mostly card stock and copy paper as I try to get my eye back into shape.  Lots of sheets of ellipses, circles, cubes and spheres as well as sketches of anything in front of me.  That’s working great, lots of fun, and these sketcher calistenics me to get back in shape.  I feel like a baseball player, trying to get his “timing” back.  I know how, but something just isn’t quite right yet.

Anyhow, here’s a couple sketches that didn’t find their way into the garbage can.  The first came while I wandered around Pinterest.  I’m a long-standing train nut and I often ask myself why I don’t draw more of them.

Here’s one, which started as a quick sketch of the nose of a diesel engine I remember from my youth.  I did it on card stock and when I decided to turn it into a color sketch I got the msgs that watercolor provides when it hits paper without sizing.  Everything here is dull, somehow muddy, and I couldn’t add a lot of fine detail.  It’s about 4×6 and done with pencil.

On another day I drew this young girl.  Seems these days I’ve got a thing for little girls looking around corners.  This one was done on photocopy paper and I decided not to bother trying to do watercolor.  This, too, was done with a pencil.

 

 

I’ve just cut up some Fabriano Artistico sheets to provide me with some loose sketching paper.  That should solve this problem (grin).

 

Life Drawing And Sketching With Friends

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I’m getting behind in my blogging to I’ve combined a couple things here.  We’re still in pre-spring here, with lots of rain and we have only rarely gotten to a temp of 10C.  Still, sketching season is upon us and it’s been wonderful so far.

It’s also been a bit weird.  I find myself distracted from sketching by a need to reconnect, to catch up, with friends.  And so it was when I went out to Miriam Blair’s house on the Ile D’Orleans with Yvan to sketch.  It was so good to be there, with fellow sketchers, that I had a hard time taking the actual sketching very seriously.  We sat around a table sketching because it was cold and rainy outdoors and much of the activity was done with mouths and ears, not with our pens and pencils.

I drew these pears, first as a pencil drawing but later with some color added.  Then I spied a Ball jar in the window that had something growing from it.  It was too far away to tell what it was (later found to be geranium starts) but I started sketching it anyway.  I find it both hard and easy to draw things I can’t really see.  Hard because it’s difficult to make out the objects being drawn but easy because it’s easy not to be distracted by details when you can’t see them (grin).

This week I had my first opportunity to do actual “life drawing.”  Most of my drawing is done from observation but being able to draw someone while they posed is, somehow special.  But the danse school put on such an event and I attended.  Dancers would do short poses and I would frantically try to scribble down their form.  In spite of a bad headache, I had a lot of fun.  Wish they’d do it every week.

Anyway, here’s three of the pages I did.  Note that I have no “technique.”  I drew on photocopy paper and drew on top of previous poses.  That’s something I will do differently if I ever get another chance as it sometimes became confusing. I worked with a colored pencil and then a plain old 0.7mm mechanical pencil.  Very basic.