Sketches in Time

Purple Coneflower Sketch and Marker Rendering

It's been a while, hasn't it?  We've been soaking up the sunshine and making the most of our Summer days here. Every time I walk past flowers, I feel the compulsion to pull out my phone and get a few shots for future drawing reference.The echinacea/purple coneflower  that modeled for me was on a clearance table outside our local Home Depot a couple of weeks ago.

Here was my initial rough pencil sketch--very rough! 

I used my Copic Warm Gray 0.1 Multiliner and inked over the penciled lines that I wanted to keep, and erased all of the pencil lines that I didn't need.

I started by rendering the petals--Copic Violets and Red Violet, as shown above.

Next I worked on my greens.

I worked on the flower centers here. I was happy with their roundedness, values, and color, but I still needed some highlights. Usually when I need to regain highlights, I resort to either my Copic colorless blender (if it's a small area that doesn't need a crisp white), or sometimes colored pencil if I do need a crisp shape. 

For this piece, I tried a new-to-me tool, a Gold Kirarina Wink pen. You can see the gold metallic dots above. They are standing out a bit more than I needed, so after the gold ink was completely dry, I used my darker Copic colors (E49, RV99) to obscure the precise dots just a bit. (For more information on the Kirarina WiNK pens, look HERE.)

Here's my finished marker rendering. Flowers make me happy--so does coloring! ;-)

If I have any adult-coloring-book friends out there, here is a somewhat cleaned up .jpg file of my original purple coneflower artwork for your coloring pleasure:  View this photo for gray lines, and  View this photo for black lines.

Enjoy!

Crabapples in progress. . .

 

I am tickled pink to be headed to Italy tomorrow to help with a sketching class taught by one of my art heroes, Ken O'Connell. We will spend the first couple of days in Rome, and then two weeks in the Terni area at La Romita, with side trips out to several different small hill towns to sketch. This is one of those bucket list items for me--can it get any better?

I sketched the crabapple blossoms with a Copic W2 Original marker. Ken has been encouraging me to try sketching with a marker or multiliner rather than my tool of choice, a pencil. I chose a light value, warm-toned marker knowing that I could always cover a bad line if I really needed to. I can still see the original circles that I started building the larger blossoms with, but if I just fill in some color, I think those lines won't be distracting. 

As you can see, I'm not finished yet. It's a sketch in progress. (Is it my schedule or a touch of ADD? Who knows?)

Want to know my BIGGEST challenge for the sketch class in Italy? Working with a really limited palette. I think Ken suggested twelve colors. Then I picked another twelve. But I still had no oranges, no purples, and precious few blues. So, I'm up to thirty-six now. (Shhh! Don't tell.) I will still be missing my other 322 markers, so it's quite a limited palette, in my opinion. ;-) I'm taking watercolors too. Now there's another challenge. . .

Thanks for visiting--ciao!

Bird of Paradise in Anaheim

Welcome! Today I'm finishing a few days in Anaheim and heading back to the land of perpetual winter tomorrow. (They say that we have just two seasons in the U.P.--Winter and the Fourth of July.) While it's not really that drastic, you would never see bird of paradise growing outdoors there. I took several pictures of outdoor flowers while I was here so that have some new sketching material when I get home, but I had to sketch this one right away--such an exotic flower!

Here is my pencil sketch, with some Copic Grey 0.3 Multiliner lines on top of the pencil. It was a pretty quick sketch, and when I started rendering with marker, I found some things that I need to change. If I wait for time to post perfection, however, it could be a few years! 

Since I had worked too close to the edge of my sketchbook (yes, I need a larger sketchbook), I laid a sheet of natural white Copic marker paper over my original and quickly transferred the lines before rendering in Copic marker. I may try this again at home after correcting a few spots in the initial sketch first, but this will work for now. Thanks for stopping by!

Copic Sketch Markers Used

BV000, BV02, BV04
V15
YR20, YR65, YR68, YR18
YR000
YG61
BG000, BG90
G40
B21, B23, B60
C1, 0

Sketching in Italy, anyone?

I just saw this post on the Copic blog and had to share my excitement with someone! Have you ever wanted to sketch in Italy? Well, I've wanted to do that since the first time I heard Ken O'Connell talk about the sketching tour that he teaches in the Umbrian region of Italy every other year. Quaint Italian hill towns, great food cooked by Italian mamas every day, and sketching? Oh. My. WORD. . .

Ken, shown above, the President of Imagination International (North American Copic distributer) and Professor Emeritus from the University of Oregon, is teaching this class for the fifth time this coming September 2-16, 2012, and I am going too!!! (Normally I'm opposed to extra exclamation points, but I think these are totally justified--don't you?) 

Want to come along? If this sounds like an adventure that might interest you, be sure to check out the Sketchbooks in Italy blog post. I can't wait!

Radish Quick Sketch

Welcome! Yes, I know it's been a long time since I posted here. Life's been busy. . . I just got back from a trip to Oregon last week where we made plans for next year's Copic classes. We were fortunate to have Ken O'Connell (President of Imagination International, Professor Emeritus from the University of Oregon, and inspirational sketchbook-keeper extraordinaire, among other things) teach us a brief class on sketching. (Ken's blog is here, and I found an interesting article about his sketches here.)

Ken walked into the room with a handful of radishes and announced that we would all be sketching them, then handed out a few Copic markers and multiliners. (Thankfully, I had brought 72 of my own Copic markers with me, along with my Gray 0.3 multiliner, just in case!) He gave us about 10-15 minutes to sketch the radish in front of us in ink--no pencil under-drawing. This is mine, and I discovered something: if I'm sketching in ink rather than pencil followed by clean ink lines, I'm less uptight about perfection. I know that it won't be perfect, and I can live with that. If I sketch in pencil first, I'm much more careful about the ink lines and the entire piece. Hmmm. . .

Next, he had us draw a rectangle about the size of two packs of cards, then sketch the radish again, touching the form to all sides, and extending past the edge with one piece of the radish. After we did that, he said that we should color only the negative space (in this case, the parts that are not the radish), in two different hues. You know how I love my Blue-Violets and Blue-Greens, right? 

Finally, he told us to do one more quick sketch and then add color to the radish and to least one leaf. 

Oh, and one more thing. . . those funny little people! He gave us a quick lesson on sketching people with very few strokes and told us to sketch two or three people looking at our radish. (Yes, I know that three would be more pleasing visually, but I hated to mess up my painterly-looking radish!) What did I learn? It is not a newly learned thing, but more like a long misplaced lesson: you don't have to spend HOURS on something for it to be worthwhile. And you don't have to have time to make it photographic before you sketch. I like my 10-20 minutes sketches. In fact, they feel fresher than some of the ones that I've labored over for hours and hours. Maybe less is more sometimes? 

All Copic colors used are listed on the sketches. I'm headed to Lansing for both Copic Standard and Intermediate classes this coming weekend. The Standard is pretty full, but the Intermediate still has room if you are interested. Thanks for visiting!

Debbie

Trillium, a work in progress. . .

Welcome! It's been a while since I've had time to work on this blog--the "real job" kept getting in the way. I've been working on a sketch from a trillium photograph that I posted HERE several weeks ago, and I've learned a few things on this piece.

1. I don't like hard lines on white flowers. If I did it again, I might still use a gray multiliner for the perimeter lines, but I would leave off the internal lines. They distract me when I am shading, especially when I want to change my mind on something and am stuck with the original pen line.
2. Darker-valued greens can be almost as tricky to work with as reds. I think that the die particles in the darker greens must be larger, as the darker reds are. This means that you can't fiddle with several coats of color without risking that shiny build-up layer--the point of no more color adding.
3. My son probably gets his attention span, or lack thereof, from me. . . and we'd better stop there!

I began with a pencil sketch from my photograph. (Click on any picture to see a larger version.) I was working in a Copic Sketch Book, the 5" x 12" one. And, yes, I should have left more room on the left. . . Also, if you compare this photograph to the one that I inserted in my previous post, it printed quite a bit darker in value and cooler in color temperature than it looks on screen. 

Here I have inked with a Copic Gray Multiliner over the pencil lines that I wanted to keep. If you read my previous note about things I learned from this piece, you will realize that I wish I had left some of those lines un-inked. That's okay--experimenting and learning are all part of the process!

Pencil lines have been erased here, and I am ready for my Copic Sketch markers--the fun part! By the way, my two favorite erasers are a white rubber eraser (not a pink one, which can discolor the paper), and a gum eraser, the crumbly kind. A kneaded eraser (gray and malleable) works too. I generally use those for pencil pieces where I need to shape the eraser and pick out highlights from a pencilled area.

Here is what I have finished so far. I think that the lines around the white bloom would not bother me as much if I added background. Hmmmm. . .

These are the Copic Sketch markers that I have used so far--as many blue-violets as greens! The pale BV's were used on parts of the bloom, while the darker BV's were used to deepen shadows on the greenery.

The second bloom seemed more colorful to me than the first. Maybe I was just getting tired of playing with gray though. ;-)

These are the colors that I used in the bloom above.

Moving on down to the leaves: by this time I've spent at least three hours sketching and inking, and another six or seven rendering my image. I have to confess that my attention span gets s t r e t c h e d when a project takes me this long!

These are my leaf markers for the bottom leaves.

Woohoo--finally finished--or at least for now! I might like it better with some background, which would help with taking attention away from those stark lines in the white blooms, especially the top one. But for now, it stays. . . 

Thank you for stopping by,

Debbie Olson

P.S. To anyone in the Green Bay, Madison, and Milwaukee areas, as well as the U.P. of Michigan: I have a Copic Intermediate Certification class scheduled for August 20 in Appleton, Wisconsin (about half an hour south of Green Bay).  That class is filling slowly enough that it is likely to be cancelled unless some applications come in very soon. Any interest? Check <<HERE>> for details. Thanks!

Texture with Copic Markers

Welcome! I am getting ready to leave early Wednesday for Boston to teach a Copic Intermediate Certification class on Friday, June 10. Anybody else want to join us? It's a small class, so there should be plenty of time for individual attention. I am running a bit behind on the sketch that I was intending to post before I left; it is drawn and even inked, but it isn't colored yet. So, I am sharing a textural piece that I have in my Copic art portfolio and waiting until I get back from Boston to color and post the trillium image. I have some fun ideas up my sleeve for that piece, and i don't want to rush it!

The oranges were sketched from photograph that I took last year in Germany. Rather than the gray ink that I feel more comfortable drawing with, I used one of my Copic Black 0.3 multiliners on this one. (The gray one is in the picture because I added a bit of cross-hatching in some shadow areas with it.) This piece was intended only as an experiment with texture. I love using my colorless blender to push color back and reclaim highlights!

[If you click on either of these images, you should get a larger-than-life pop-up.]

Copic Markers that I used:

0

YR31

BV02, BV04, BV25

RV95, RV99 (I used Blue-Violets and Red-Violets in shadow areas to cool the oranges, skipping the grays entirely.) 

YG11, YG61, YG63, YG67

YR00, YR01, YR02, YR04, YR07, YR09 (Yes, I overdid it here--could have gotten by with fewer, but why?)

E08

Pens:

Black and Gray Copic 0.3 Multiliners

 

Paper:

X-Press It Blender Card

That's it--thanks for stopping by!

Debbie

Some Nature Photos for your Sketching Pleasure

I'm wishing that I had time to sketch this weekend, because I took some nice photos in our yard today! I will put them here in case anyone is inclined to sketch from them besides me. Click on the image to get a larger version.

Cherry Blossoms

Newly emerging ferns

Trillium

And another trillium

Enjoy!

Hydrangeas on Different Papers

Welcome! Last week someone asked what paper I had used on my calla lilies, so I decided to experiment a bit with papers this week. As a preface, what you really need to know about Copic markers and paper is explained clearly here on Marianne Walker's blog. You can test any paper for both ink and marker compatibility. 

I have been sketching mostly in my Copic Sketchbooks, although I really need a larger format sketchbook than the two that I currently own--a 5" x 12", and a 5" x 7". I think a 7" x 10" sketch book would work best for me since I really do like white space around my image. What size would work best for you? That I don't know. But the best one is the one that you will actually carry and USE. Perhaps a 5" x 7" would be perfect for you if you don't like to haul around larger books. Just pick one!

The next part is plain old confession: I've colored only ONE image in my sketchbook, though I've colored several images recently. There is this little voice in my head that says, "What if I mess it up after I spent so long drawing it? I'd better make a copy and color the copy instead!" (You would never do this, right?)

Today I have a hydrangea that I sketched on a Strathmore 300 Series Bristol Vellum pad. This was not a pad formulated for markers, but for dry media such as pencil, charcoal and pastel. It worked great with both pencil and my gray Multiliner. The sketch above is in pencil, then inked over in my favorite, the Copic 0.3 Gray Multiliner. This was right before I erased the pencil underdrawing. I took the hydrangea photograph in the top left corner with my phone, and it was not as clear in some areas as it would have been with my good camera. Still, it was workable, with a little imagination. (Picture was taken with permission of the nice ladies at the Garden Place in Norway, Michigan.)

Here it is after I erased the pencil lines. Once I started coloring, I found some errors, but that is the nature of the beast. Nobody else will generally see the photograph, and nobody else will look as closely at a photograph as the person coloring the image! So don't let imperfection stop you. If you wait to get perfect, trust me, you'll never accomplish a thing.

Now for the paper part. True to form, I scanned my image before starting to color on the Strathmore 300 Series Bristol Vellum pad that I had originally sketched it on.  When I scanned it, I printed it onto two different papers, a Borden and Riley #234 Paris Bleedproof Paper for Pens, and a sheet of X-Press-It Blender Card--more about those two later.

As soon as I had a scan tucked away safely on my backed-up hard drive,(yes, I'm cautious), I started coloring the original image drawn on Strathmore Bristol Vellum. As expected, it feathered a bit--not the fault of the paper since it is marketed for DRY media, and worked perfectly for that.  Also, the Bristol had a cream tint--not bad, but you should be aware that when you start with anything a little less bright than a true white, you lose a degree of potential highlights. You can't get any whiter than the paper you start with, unless you add an opaque paint afterward. Still, I don't dislike the effect that the bristol surface gave me. It is a bit more painterly, a bit softer; but as long as you don't over-saturate the outer edges where a feathered edge would distract, and as long as you don't require a hard edge, it could work. 

Please Note: I used basically the same Copic markers for each paper, so color differences can be attributed to the paper or the white balance of my editing, though I tried to keep that part consistent.

The Borden and Riley was a very good marker paper--smooth surface, whiter than the bristol, and non-feathering as you can see from the sample above. (Keep in mind that this is about a 2-1/2" square of paper, hugely magnified, especially if you click on it.) It is thinner than both the Bristol and the X-Press It Blender Card. That means that it does not absorb as much ink in order to blend. While I love those qualities of a good marker paper, the one thing that was a bit of a drawback for the way I usually work is that a colorless blender will not do much to the surface once the ink is dry. That means that you have to finish an area when you start it. You won't be able to come back two hours later and easily push in a few more highlights.

Finally, the X-Press It Blender Card: artists don't generally color on cardstock, but it is another great surface--about the same whiteness as the marker pad, but thicker/heavier in weight. While it takes more ink to saturate the surface and blend than a marker pad takes, it also stays wet for longer giving more wet blending time. With the X-Press It Blender Card, you can always go back with the colorless blender and still push ink around on the surface. On the other hand, when the ink was dry, the image was definitely lighter in value than on the other two surfaces. I will have to go back and darken both shading and shadows in some areas.

Finally, I pulled a piece out of my Copic Sketchbook--the only one that I had both sketched and colored directly in my Copic Sketchbook so that you could see how it works as well. These apples were some that I sketched in Phoenix while sitting in a lobby waiting for check-in time at the hotel last month. The original photograph was one of those huge ones that they hang over the breakfast bar--just wanted to be clear about that so I am not taking credit for someone else's photo! I sketched minimally in pencil here, then used my 0.3 Copic Gray Multiliner to get the main lines reinforced before erasing the pencil and coloring with the markers listed here. (I erase pencil because pencil discolors the marker tips.)

Back to the Copic Sketchbook paper: the weight of the paper was similar to the weight of the Borden and Riley marker pad. The whiteness of the paper was good, a slightly warmer white than the Borden and Riley Marker pad or the X-Press It Blender Card, but still a nice, crisp white. As you can see from the edges, feathering was not a problem, and I was able to easily get good darks, even using red markers, which can sometimes be a challenge to work with. I was also able to go back with my Colorless Blender and push in the highlights that I needed for those speckles on the apple. My conclusion: I really need to grow some confidence and go ahead and color directly in my sketchbook more often. . . as soon as I get a BIGGER one! ;-)

I'm not finished with my hydrangea, but I was far enough along to get a post together for this week. (The piece above is on X-Press It Blender Card, by the way.) I will finish them and post them when I get a chance. This is a busy week since I am headed to Minneapolis for most of next week. Thank you for taking the time to stop by--I hope you will pull out a sketch pad and sketch this week!

Pink Calla Lilies

One of my son's favorite places to visit is a garden store in our little town of Norway, Michigan. He's been on a botany kick lately and is pretty sure that when we go to the Garden Place, he can successfully hit Mom up for a new plant or two. We went there on Friday, and I took a few flower pictures with my phone while we were plant shopping. One of the beauties that we saw was a pot of pink calla lilies.

I sketched in pencil first, simplifying a bit by leaving out one of the mostly-hidden lilies so that I would have an odd number of lilies in my picture. Now, I need to share a secret about drawing: YOU CAN DO IT. It's not about some special hand muscle that some people are born with and others are mysteriously born without. It's mostly a matter of careful observation.  Can you draw an "s?" Of course you can. If you have the manual dexterity to draw the alphabet, you can draw simple shapes, right?

Granted, it gets easier the more you do it (and it's been far too many years since I've regularly worked in my sketchbook). But you just look--look at angles and shapes and how they relate to each other--and then you draw what you see. Avoid the temptation to name everything. It is sometimes simpler to draw the negative spaces (or the spaces in between the shapes) than it is to draw the shapes themselves. I'm sure I'll gab more about this later, but for now, get used to the idea that you CAN learn to draw.

I used a Copic 0.3 gray mutiliner to ink the pencil lines that I wanted to keep and erased the others. I used the gray instead of black because I didn't want it to look like a line drawing when I finished coloring it. Besides, gray lines are less intimidating than black lines. Guess what? It isn't perfect. But that's okay. I gave myself permission to NOT stress so much over perfection that I never accomplish anything. Try it--it's very free-ing!

Here I have started coloring the greenery, using the Copic markers shown above. You know something else fun about art? It doesn't have to look exactly like the picture when you finish. That means that if I see purple in my shadows, I can put purple in my shadows instead of just a darker shade of green. Often you see a detail and emphasize it more than it really is. That's okay. You are exercising artistic license. By the way, getting the value right is much more important than getting the color right. A blue apple, shaded nicely, still looks like an apple. A red apple shaded poorly or inconsistently may look less like an apple than the well-shaded blue one. Trust me on this unless you want to draw some blue apples!

You may have noticed that I have more room on my paper above than I did in the original sketch: I scanned and printed my original sketch on some X-Press It Blender Card. Then if I really mess up, I still have the original.

Here I've shaded one of the lilies using the markers shown above.

Here are the rest of the Copic markers that I have used so far.

It still isn't finished. I'm not sure what I want to do with the foreground. I don't think I want the pot in the picture, nor my son's hand. I'll figure something out. But so far, I'm happy with it. By the way, I'm guessing that I have almost seven hours in this so far. Yes, I'm that slow!

__________________________________________

Now for some Copic Certification Class updates:

On May 26, I will be teaching a Copic Standard Certification in the Minneapolis/Eden Prairie area. (Later this year, probably around Scrapfest, I am hoping to get back to the area for an Intermediate Class.)

On June 10, I will be teaching a Copic Intermediate Certification in the Boston/Cambridge area. 

On June 23, I will be teaching a Copic Intermediate Certification in the Wichita, Kansas area. 

If you would like to know more about these classes or register for one, click here for more information.

Thank you for stopping by!