Man and Woman - 15 October 2011, India Ink and watercolor on paper, 7"x10"

This one has been 95+% done for a while… and I liked it, so I didn’t change it all that much… but for a while I couldn’t tell if it was quite finished. I actually scanned it about a month ago (and I never really scan preliminary versions of stuff), then decided to work on it some more. Here’s the earlier version:

earlier version of Man and Woman piece

The earlier state is cleaner perhaps… but somewhat lacking in contrast (this happens sometimes when I like a drawing – I go into it somewhat gingerly, not wanting to disrupt what already works well.) After this early state,  I still mostly deepened some of the grooves that I’d already begun to carve.

It’s another genre-well that I return to over and over. Paired portrait man-woman couples that aren’t entirely compatible (see somewhat recent somewhat successful examples here, here, and here.) She’s the green woman, and he’s pretty much reds and blues. Some of the incompatibility comes from my improvisational drawing style… I tend to draw in ink with no tight composition in mind, so I draw each of them separately, and they end up not entirely pertaining to each other. I don’t necessarily think it’s all about incompatibility… in some ways, perhaps they’re complimentary sometimes… I don’t know…

Overall I like this one… but I think her hair looks a bit too cartoony.

Woman with Halo - 21 December 2011, India ink and watercolor on paper, about 6"x8"

This one falls into my somewhat frequent categories (nothing new here at Handmade) of mainly primary-colors urban scene portraits. Pretty much all of those feature brick walls.

After the ink drawing, I put down a wash that’s a fairly light red. Then I mostly covered it up with lots of opaque watercolor, though the initial red wash still visible in the mortar between the bricks. The mortar doesn’t read all that red though – in contrast to the red bricks around it. I didn’t put the wash down in the halo itself (I don’t think I’ve done that before) so it ends up standing out as a bit brighter than all the rest of the piece (almost too day-glow though.)

I included a grain to the shading and painting – so it looks like everything is emanating from the halo… this kinda works. It all ended up getting pretty dark… which ends up not scanning all that well. I do, for some reason, like the shadow in the left center of the drawing – just below her face.

I tooled around with the border – thickening it quite a bit. I would have made it thicker at the bottom, but I bumped into the title/date/signature… the hazards of not really planning ahead (and dating/signing pieces when the initial drawing is done.) Oh well.

Face - 23 December 2011, India ink and watercolor on paper, 4"x6"

Another postcard-size sketch… did a lot of these in the last week, then scanned and posted ‘em all tonight. I think this one works – the contrast between the green wash layer and the opaque watercolor layers hatched on top of it work well enough… so both the paint and the drawing do their shares of the overall work. The light to the left is a little more reddish; to the right more ochre… a few interesting lines around the nose… though I could have tweaked it more.

Man - 23 December 2011, India ink and watercolor on paper, 4"x6"

This is a rather generic postcard-sized sketch… usually I do women in green… but this is a guy (though almost generic enough to be nearly androgenous) … and green guys look a bit too much like the Hulk.

It’s not a remarkable piece, but a tiny bit interesting in that I did build up a few layers… and I changed the outer contour, so there are these sort of warm yellow strips on each side. I used to (wow – around 10 years ago – late ’90s and early ’00s) play more with those borders/contours. I think some of that play was to bring bigger pages down into a smaller composition. Lately I tend to work smaller, so there ends up not being all that much margin to play with, because the page and image are already small.

Woman - 7 November 2011, India ink and watercolor on paper, about 4"x10"

This one is another example of a rather boring drawing that was made somewhat interesting through over-working the paint on top of the drawing (described here earlier, and done frequently in my artwork – some of my best painting is on top of drawings that I am just not all that invested in.) I definitely used a sort of hatching grain in the painting – though tilted (not vertical like here.)

I was initially trying to do a subdued old-photo sepia sort of color scheme… which I sort of did… though I think I ended up with a lot of canary yellow displacing what was earlier more earth-toned ochres… so it’s a limited color pallette… but not quite the one I initially had in mind.

I added the halo late in the process of working and reworking this one… and I think it’s still a bit boring overall.

Woman - 22 December 2011, India ink and watercolor on paper, 4"x6"

I’ve been doing this sort of grained-shading-style-painting here and there – where I sort of paint in vertical hatching which the way I very often draw. I described it here and here. I think it works well in this piece – it sort of shows planes where lighting hits various surfaces. I think this piece ended up in a fairly sweet spot between loose and tight – not overly labored, but not clumsy either.

This postcard-size figure is, nearly cliche in my work, the green woman built up over a Payne’s Gray wash background.

Man - 15 January 2011, India ink and watercolor on used manila envelope, about 9"x12"

This one took me a while to tool around on and finally to decide it was actually finished. It’s sort of nicely overworked. As I’ve mentioned before, it’s in a sort of portraits with hands category.

Though I doubt that they’re really archival, I actually really like working on manila envelopes – the ochre color gives a lot of contrast to whites and blacks. With a used envelope, the layers get built up into a sort of palimpsest. See earlier envelope examples here and here – both of those sent through the mail post-artwork, though – this one above was originally mailed to me (from the Bus Riders Union) but I didn’t mail it to anyone.

The envelope was too big to scan, so I did it in two pieces, and they don’t quite match up all that well… but I try to spend as little time as possible in photoshop, so that assembly is good enough for handmade!

Woman - 22 December 2011, India ink and watercolor on paper, 4"x6"

Another basic postcard-sized sketch that didn’t turn out badly… had fun adding all the freckles. Uncommon for me to red-haired people… not sure why.

Man - 22 December 2011, India ink and watercolor on paper, 4"x6"

This one is a really quick postcard-size sketch (yawn)

Woman, 15 October 2011, India ink and watercolor on paper, 6"x9"

Here’s a fairly quick watercolor/drawing that I think turned out fairly well. It’s the same process I’ve used often (described here) where I do a drawing, then put down a wash of Payne’s gray, then build up opaque watercolor to lighten. The grained hatching is something I do all the time in drawings (all over this blog – for example here) but only now and then in paint (including here) and not usually this loosely. I think that the overall effect – light and dark, warm and cool, realistic and distorted – works well on this piece.

She’s, of course, the green woman.