Frank's Tundra

We pick up our son Dan at the airport and head into the mountains. There we meet our other son Frank. He's a glassblower and a tiny-house builder in Salida, Colorado. 

I sketch his portrait in watercolor at a restaurant while we're waiting for our soup. 

Frank's Tundra, gouache over casein, 5 x 8 inches

Frank owns a Toyota Tundra 4-wheel-drive pickup. I do a portrait of that, too, because it's about to take us on an adventure on some of highest and most perilous roads in North America. 

The blinding highlights are what attracted me and struck me. The whole painting is a setup to be able to paint them. First, stone and metal, then light. Painting is a journey from the material to the immaterial.

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Previously: Video about Frank's hand-blown glass

Video tutorial: "Gouache in the Wild"
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• DVD at Purchase at Kunaki.com (Region 1 encoded NTSC video) $24.50

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Denver Botanic Gardens

Denver Botanic Gardens by James Gurney, casein, 5 x 8 inches

We visit the Denver Botanic Gardens, a world class destination for outdoor painting. 

It's hard to choose between the bonsai garden, the lily pads, the orchids and bromeliads, and the native prairie grass environment. Jeanette and I decide on a view from the Romantic Garden toward the Herb Garden.   

It's a study in greens, so I emphasize a variety of different shades of green, and set up spot-contrasts with adjacent red-violets and red-browns. I'm using casein paint in a watercolor sketchbook with my homemade easel with a nylon diffuser all of which fits easily into a small backpack.

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Previously: Homemade diffuser panel

Botanical illustrators meet at the Denver Botanic Gardens, and I did a program there back in 2009.

Video tutorial: "Gouache in the Wild"
• HD MP4 Download at Gumroad $14.95
• or HD MP4 Download at Sellfy (for Paypal customers) $14.95
• DVD at Purchase at Kunaki.com (Region 1 encoded NTSC video) $24.50

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Hotel at Dawn

Predawn, Denver, Gouache

We arrive after dark to our hotel in Denver, and I wake up early. Here's the view from my window as the dawn light comes up. I have only 20 minutes to work before the light changes too much.

I paint this in gouache over casein. The casein underpainting, painted before the trip, is a yellowish white. In the central area, the casein layer is thicker, but still thin enough that it doesn't crack.

Many of the small yellow lights are scratched with a scraper tool through the gouache, revealing the light yellow casein underneath. 

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Own the 72-minute feature "Gouache in the Wild"
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From Kansas to Colorado

We roll along on the small roads through the middle of the country. This old storefront is in Russell, Kansas. The sign at the top once said "BETHLEHEM."

The sign for the "Sky Vu" drive-in theater still stands in a field of sorghum—minus the movie screen. As we stop for a photo, there's a plastic skeleton hand backscratcher sitting in the grass. 

Heading farther west along the pioneer trails, we stop at a food supermarket. The magazine section has plenty of titles about guns, but not a single one about either art or science. 

Walt Disney's Boyhood Home

Marceline, Missouri is the small town where Walt Disney spent his boyhood. I stop to sketch a farm at the edge of town near the Disney family's place. 

Walt watched his first movie at the Uptown Theatre. He came back in 1956 to premiere "The Great Locomotive Chase." Today a stuffed Goofy slumps and grins in the box office admission window. They still give free Friday night family movie screenings here.

Marceline was the inspiration for the "Main Street America" in Disneyland. Today, Marceline is not quite the town it once was when Walt was a kid. There's a small Disney museum and an annual event called Toonfest that attracts animators and cartoonists. There's a hardware store and a cafe. 

But a lot of the other stores are closed, and the rest struggle to attract regular customers. Most of the traffic goes to the franchise businesses near the highway. 

Like most small towns in the Midwest, Marceline bravely clings to memories of its past glories. Walt Disney's gift to the world was to encourage average Americans to wish upon a star. But the reality sometimes has a hard time keeping up with the dream.

Yesterland Presents the Uptown Theatre

The Marceline Walt Disney Knew (recollections from Walt)

Corn Harvest

The corn harvest is still going strong in Illinois and Indiana. Yellow mountains of corn are piling up at the edges of towns.

Not a kernel of that corn will be eaten by humans. It will be processed into animal feed, ethanol, and corn syrup.

Journey to Colorado

Come with Jeanette and me on a sketching journey across America. Destination— the high mountains of Colorado, where we'll meet up with our sons.  

We'll explore some fascinating sketching opportunities of the USA. We're in Ohio now along the Interstate, but we'll soon be on the smaller roads. 

We visit the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force in Dayton, which has three huge hangars full of military aircraft, ranging from the early days of flight to the present. 

All the machines are intimidating and impressive in different ways. I'm attracted to the Sikorsky MH-53 special ops search-and-rescue helicopter, which flew all the way from the Vietnam War until 2008.

I use black and white gouache in a watercolor sketchbook to describe the details of the cockpit. I love the red glow of the inside, and I imagine the chopper lifting off in the dawn light, with dust kicking up from the left. For the smoke, I use white Nupastel after the gouache dries. 

Next, on to Missouri. 

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Serov's Gouache Portraits

Gouache is an effective medium for portraits. Here are some examples by Valentin Serov (1865-1911) to serve as inspiration.

Portrait of Henrietta Girshman. 1904. Gouache on cardboard. 100.8 × 70 cm. Tretyakov Gallery

Gouache lends itself to exploratory studies, allowing you to try out a composition quickly and efficiently. The board chosen can be a light brown, approximately equal to the dark halftone of the model's skin. Skin tones can be modeled with gossamer layers above and below that base tone.

Gouache can also be handled as a finished medium in its own right. This 1909 portrait of Yelena Oliv is 37 x 26 inches, and combines gouache, watercolor, and pastel on cardboard. 

Portrait of Alexei Morozov. 1909. Gouache and pastel on cardboard. 37 x 23.5 in.

Serov loved water media and drawing media because they lend themselves to simplification, to finding the essence of a sitter. In his later years, Serov was obsessed with the purest expression of line and shape, not for caricature, but for truthful, simple character. 

According to a recent article in the Tretyakov Gallery Magazine, he also used tracing-paper to help find the essential statement: "Having drawn a figure on a semi-transparent sheet, he would put another such sheet over the drawing and, having traced the best lines, continue to draw on this new base."  

Starting at age 9, Serov was a student of the great Russian portrait painter Ilya Repin. He also studied in Paris, where gouache was quite popular. 

According to Igor Grabar, "Serov believed that the artist ought to be adept in every available medium because nature itself is infinitely diverse and inimitable, just as the artist's mood and feelings differ from one day to another: today he wants to work in one way, tomorrow in another." 

"For this reason he worked with oil paint, watercolours, gouache, tempera, pastel and coloured hard pencils, recommending his students to follow suit."

An exhibition of the work of Valentin Serov, in honor of the 150th anniversary of his birth, is currently on view at the Tretyakov Gallery through January 17, 2016. The show takes up three floors of the museum, with extensive areas devoted to watercolors and drawings.

Valentin Serov on Wikipedia
Check out my tutorial video "Gouache in the Wild"

Brangwyn on Sketching

"Always I've had a sketch book on me...." 

"...And it doesn't matter how bad the sketch may be..."

Sir Frank Brangwyn, R.A., Portrait of A.H. Mackmurdo, 1 May 1945.
Red chalk on cream laid paper. Photo: ©Royal Academy of Arts, London.

"The fact remains that once I have tried to sketch the object—a mental photograph remains in my mind. Knock me down if I'm wrong."

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From "Brangwyn's Pilgrimage. The Life Story of an Artist by William de Belleroche"

Wikipedia on Sir Frank Brangwyn, 1867-1956. 

Character Design with a Charcoal Prelim

Every evil mastermind needs an assistant. His pale eyes are wide open, and his long, bony fingers timidly hold the magic lantern. 

I planned this character first in red Nupastel and charcoal on a separate piece of tracing paper. I then sealed the drawing with workable fixatif and transferred it down to the primed board, using transfer paper I made with graphite on another piece of tracing paper. 

The charcoal step allows me to solve a lot of problems early on when things are easy to change. It's the storytelling stage of picture-making.

I shot some photo reference of a timid, creepy looking model, and also built a little maquette.


Fun fact #1: The painting Birdman was one of the candidates for the cover of Color and Light, but lost out to a crowd-sourced blog poll for the final cover image of the sleeping dinosaur.



Fun fact #2: The oil painting was a revision of a paperback cover illustration called The Fleet: Counterattack. I gave him a mane of feathers like a harpy eagle, an embroidered jacket, and a little Quasimodo assistant to carry out his dark designs.