The Lord God Made It All

Absolute realism in art is what I strive for.  It’s something I seldom attain.  Only a handful of my pictures have ever come remotely close to what I see swirling in my mind.  Since my outside forays are rather limited this time of year, I thought I’d do a blog entry on my best pictures for a change of pace.

The first really, really good picture I ever did was summer of 2003.  I was in an oil painting class and, true to nature, had picked the horse as my subject.  The picture below was the final product.  I’d have good reason to be satisfied, only my teacher did about 35% of the painting on this picture!  She was one of those artists that believed in shocking her audience and forcing them to look beyond the box.  She also taught me how to process what I was looking at.  I have good memories of painting this picture, even though oil isn’t my favorite medium.  One of my favorite stories is when I was struggling to paint the highlights on the horse’s coat.  I just couldn’t get the right shade of yellow and white to match the rich golden chestnut.  My teacher let me work on this for about 20 minutes before walking over to help me.  Picking up a fan brush (her favorite tool) she dipped it into a puddle of yellow ochre (the last color I would have used) and began painting broad streaks on the stallion’s neck and cheek.  My expression was so appalled that the other students (all of them adults over 40) started laughing.  But the effect was magical.  Suddenly, my horse had come to life.

As I said before, oil was not what I ended up sticking with.  I loved the rich colors, but found the brush to be unwieldy.  I am tight and controlled when it comes to art, so I decided to work more in Prismacolor.  Prismacolor is fun, but it’s very difficult to get those rich shades without using up the entire pencil.  Below is one of the best Prismacolors I have ever done, but I used up seven of my favorite green pencils building up the reflections on the water.

Detail of the T. Rex’s head.  Dinosaurs are always a fun subject, primarily because so much creativity is involved compared to other animals.  After all, we really don’t know what they looked like, so a realistic rendition is very subject to the artist’s interpretation.  In this case, I chose a blotched and striped appearance that would fit very well if the animal in question lived in a forest.  I’ve heard that this kind of subject is referred to as “Paleo-Art.”  I rather like it.  :-) My inspiration for this picture can be found at this link: http://www.dinosaursinart.com/trex.htm  Take some time to look at the other galleries.

About the same time I did the dinosaur picture, a friend asked me if I had ever worked with pastels.  She told me that the technique was similar to pencil, but it was easier to get those vibrant shades I loved so much.  She loaned me her set and some pastel paper to experiment.

This is the experiment.

What can I say?  I was completely hooked.

I worked on different pastels here and there for a couple of years before I got another really good picture.  This 16×20 was completed in May, 2007.  There was a lot of fingertip blending on this picture.  That basically means you use your fingertips to smudge different colors into something else.  It’s very time consuming.

In 2008, I began a series of Arabian stallions.  The first one I titled “Night.”  This was the last time I would use the “smudge” method of pastel painting.  After this, I switched to a more impressionistic layering of individual colors to achieve form. 

Second in the making was “Mid-day”.  Unlike the first, which was drawn on brown paper, I made a bright blue watercolor wash on white paper before I began work on the horse.  The result was spectacular.  The bits of bright blue coming through the orange, red, brown and yellow gave a shimmering quality to the desert.  This was the first picture I did using the impressionisitic technique.

The last in the series (if I don’t ever get around to doing the evening) is “Morning.”  I almost ruined this one.  Before I used my pastels, I created a wash of red, orange and blue.  I was hoping to create a richer desert sand by using the red.  Unfortunately, I accidentally drew the horse standing on the blue, which I had intended for the sky, sillhouted against the red.  How does one color a red sky blue?  By using a combination of cream, aqua and purple, believe it or not.  It was difficult, but the result was far better than I could have ever foreseen.  The red and orange actually enhanced the quality of the sunrise.

What I consider to be the second best pastel I’ve ever done I finished days before my ankle surgery.  My sister, Annie, asked me if I could do a painting of Walter Farley’s Black Stallion for her.  Using a combination of notebook sketches taken in Galveston, Texas the year before, I created this stormy ocean scene with the requested subject.   The storm behind the stallion is an actual reproduction one that I sketched in about five minutes.

This next set of birds really show off my favorite pastel technique of layering indavidual colors and lettin the eye optically blend them.  They are reproduced here at almost actual size - each picture is about 3×5. 

This set of song sparrows I did for my grandmother.  All these birds were originally drawn on a plain piece of paper and then transferred onto the appropriate piece.  I almost never use white paper when I’m doing a pastel, and frankly I don’t like using white with colored pencils either.  I like the added richness of brown or cream. 

Far and away the best picture I’ve ever done in my entire life I finished in October, 2007.  Not surprisngly, this was one I gave away.  For some reason, every time I draw something for myself, it never looks as good as when I’m making something for someone else.  I think it’s because I try harder to please, maybe even impress, the person I’m working for.  This one took me nearly four months to complete, because I was fussy when it came to the dapples on the grey horse.  Dapple greys are a challenging subject for me.  In the end, I used a combination of cream, pale blue and deep purple over a grey base. 

Now, here are some real paintings.  Dad took these pictures a few weeks ago at an Art Festival in Propser.  These are both oil paintings.  Truly beautiful.  I wish I had this kind of skill.

My favorite is, of course, the palomino.

An artist whose work I really enjoy can be found here: http://spiritofhorse.com/store/store/comersus_listCategoriesAndProducts.asp?idCategory=74&idProduct=A  Note: I don’t agree with everything this artist believes.  I merely enjoy those aspects of the horse she has chosen to reproduce faithfully.  She also works in pastel, and observing her work has been a good way to judge my own. 

As a side note: this is what commonly happens while I’m working.  I get interrupted frequently by a persistent cockatiel.

Many years ago, when I drew my horses in graphite, they looked like this.  There was little more than outline; back in those days, I did not know how to bring definition of muscle or fabric in my art.  Though the horse is full of movement, and the rider appears to sit naturally, the picture is two-dimensional.  (Hmm…I must’ve done this when I was 17.  I was still signing my pictures in cursive back then.)

A year or so later, I began to use more shading techniques, playing with light and dark shades to create the forms I saw in my mind.  Part of my problem is that I was locked by color, and couldn’t translate what I could do in prismacolor to graphite pencils.  However, there is serious improvment from the previous picture.

By 2007, I was adding more definition.  As I worked hard on training my eyes to understand what they were really seeing, I began picking up on how light and shadow combined to add that elusive third dimension on a two dimensional surface.

 It seemed every time I experimented, my skills improved.

The best graphite from 2007 was this 3×5 copy of a horse by George Stubbs that I gave to a friend.  This is a copy from a painting by George Stubbs.

In 2008, I did very little artwork beside several pastels.  No graphite, or even prismacolor.  But this summer, my mother gave me a surprise gift of a large Prismacolor Graphite Pencil set.  I was thrilled.  Now I had something to work with besides regular 2B school pencils! 

This was my first experiment.  This is what I can do with a regular 2B pencil without looking at any photo references.  The horse is basically good, but set at a wrong angle to the back and the ears are too far away from the eyes.  But then, usually I’m the only one who notices those particulars.

Using a B pencil and a photo reference, I began experimented with a human skull, something I have never drawn before, and until the moment I decided to do it, hadn’t been drawn to. A new technique I learned was shading around my subject to make it appear white - the skull is actually light grey on white paper.  Pretty clever, huh? As it came from my pencil more and more realistically, I felt so pleased.  I got through the whole thing and was delighted with my work when I realized that I had forgotten that most skulls have teeth.  Oops.

Okay, so skeletons weren’t such a good idea.   I turned to elephants, a subject I keenly enjoy working with.  I chose the African elephant (my favorite species) and this time used a 6H pencil.  That was an experience.  The only graphites I’ve ever used were Bs.  This was an H.  H stands for hard.  H stands for a pencil that draws very fine, light lines, lines that are almost invisible on the paper.  It took me thirty minutes to build up any kind of shade definition on my elephant.  But the result was well worth it.  When I was finished, I regretted that I had used computer paper instead of a finer grade from my sketchbooks.

My next choice was an old favorite - a stallion - using an 8B pencil.  B pencils are soft and the higher the number, the softer the grade.  Easy to work with, but easy to smear.  Plenty Coup, the gallant blue roan Pryor Mountain Mustang, formed quickly and easily under my fingers, with frequent usage of my eraser to manage the smudges.

4H was my next pencil.  Feeling bold from my previous successes, I tried something I very rarely ever work with - the human face.  After twenty minutes, I remembered why I never draw the human form.  It just doesn’t come as naturally to me as animals do.  I left this picture in a raw, half-finished state.

By this time, I decided to go back to horses, the subject I love the most and am the most comfortable with.  Man o’War, the greatest racehorse of the 20th century, was my next subject.  Thankfully, his jockey had his face turned away, so this was relatively easy.  I used a 2H pencil, which is slightly harder than a 2B (2B or not 2B - that is the question!).  The scan does little justice to how well this sketch turned out.  As with my elephant, I wished I had done this on better paper.

My experiments were done.  I was confident I could handle the medium provided I had the right subject.  But what is the right subject?  Well… that’s a subject for another blog entry.

As is true of most artists, I find myself doodling during spare minutes (or minutes that I should be doing something else).  Oddly enough, I’ve drawn some of my best pictures when I’ve put out the least amount of effort.  My theory is that I’m more relaxed, therefore my ideas flow from brain to finger more efficiently. There’s no, “I’ve got to get this absolutely perfect” frenetic mindset; I’m merely enjoying myself.

This morning was one of those times.  I was sitting in the living room listening to Mom read about the Ming Dynasty when I came up with this.  Actually, I was supposed to be drawing a coloring picture for some younger friends of mine, but I got a little carried away with the hatching and shading.  This is a picture of the farm lands around Dallas in about mid-May. 

I had to redraw the picture in ink for coloring.  I’m still getting used to the whole pen and ink thing, so yes, there are a few mistakes.  But I’m getting better.

The real attraction of drawing like this is that, just like when I read a book, I’m transported to wherever or whatever I’m drawing.  Metaphorically speaking, I was no longer in the living room; I was standing on a hill top overlooking the beautiful Blackland Prairie watching the large cumulus clouds floating past.  I have thousands of mental images from my childhood like this stored away, and it’s when I put pencil to paper that they come to life.