The Great Book Seminar Saga Part V: Process

The Great Book Seminar Saga
Part V: Process

...in which Lisa divulges secrets...

And we're back.

Week ten was super productive, and I brought three new paintings and sketches for four new spreads to Viktor's class. It was amazing to see everyone's progress this week. Though everyone had a ton of beautiful things on the wall, it was a admittedly a harsh crit this week for all of us. I have quite a bit of tweaking to do on nearly everything I brought in. That being said, I do feel pretty good about the work.

AND I may have even received ... gasp! ... a compliment from Viktor on one of the paintings.


Sweet!

I still have a bunch of tweaking to do on painting number two, so I'm going to wait to post it. In the meantime, I thought I'd post the in-process work for the third painting.

The lighting is slightly wonky because they're photos rather than scans. Regardless, it gives you an idea of how I've been putting these images together.

This is the sketch I brought to class two weeks ago, and the major comment was simplify, simplify, simplify. Why clutter up the background and foreground? So I took everyone's advice, scanned it into photoshop, erased all of the superfluous pencil lines, shrank Grandpa and the boy down, stretched the tree, and printed my pencil sketch super lightly onto a piece of watercolor paper.

Once I had my sketch printed, I hauled out my brown ink and dip-pen, and inked the sketch. When the line-work was done, I set it aside to dry so as not to smudge any of the nice clean outlines.

Step two is laying in a brown wash using the same ink as the lines. I started with the tree because it is the largest shape in the image and was probably going to remain just an ink wash with no other color laid over it.

This is the painting all inked. When I was done with the wash and once the wash was dry, I went back in with my pen in a couple of places to darken the shadows and reinforce some of the lines. And you guessed it, another round of waiting for the whole thing to dry.


Once the ink wash was completely dry, I began dropping in spots of color in places. A little green in the leaves, the grass, and grandpa's sweater. Blue on the boy's jeans and a little ocher and raw umber on his shirt. And finally a little of the reddish umber color to warm up some of the browns

Ta da! All done!

And thus ends Part V and week 10. What will Part VI bring? What insanity ensues during week 11? Will there be more art to show? Will Viktor wear another black t-shirt to class? The suspense is killing me...