Portfolio and traditional palettes

I always have so much going on in my life, both professionally and otherwise. There’s the gardening, the paintmaking, the painting, the writing, my family, exercise, research, drawing and painting classes, etc. etc. – and this is all aside from my day job. But it is time for one to take precedence over all the others (except my family and my job). It is time for me to get my portfolio together.

For about three or four years running, I’ve promised myself: “This is the year.” This time it really is. This time I’m forcing myself into the professional world: I’ve taken an illustration gig, a book cover job. Very low-paying, but with a not-insignificant promotional aspect. And there’s a deadline. If I don’t have a website up and running by the time the book comes out, it will all be for nothing. So… in a few months I need to have not only the illustration completed, but a professional body of work completed and online as well.

Cowboy Santa illustration

The illustration isn’t really down my alley – it’s a Western Christmas story book – but it’s fun, and it’s a good opportunity to try out some traditional paint colors. I’m doing a Western Santa Claus on horseback, and my working title is – of course – Cowboy Santa. I’ve just gotten to the point of covering the canvas – the second of the four milestones in completing a painting (one, finishing the sketches and comps; two, getting the canvas covered; three, getting everything to work; and four, the endgame). I’m doing this with something of a nineteenth-century palette: natural earths, bone black, red lead (that’s the bright orange color that will be glazed with madder to get a Christmas red), chromium oxide green, ultramarine, Prussian blue, rose madder, Naples yellow and lead white. It has occurred to me to keep an illustration avenue open in addition to the fine art and portraiture, since in illustration I’ll be able to make use of some lovely colors that would be problematic in professional fine art, such as carmine, weld and indigo. But none of those are called for in this image, so it will actually be pretty archival.

At Ivey Ranch - unfinished

My fine art portfolio will initially consist of Southwestern portraits, for a number of reasons I’ll go into later, when I’ve gotten everything prepared. Here’s an image of a partially-completed painting (in the middle of stage three), one of the four or five I’m working on now (not counting the Cowboy Santa). The palette on this one is very traditional: natural earths, bone black, lead white, lead-tin yellow and orange, rose madder, and um… yeah, that’s it. Oh: and a new one, pink pipestone, made from the same soft red rock as the Native American Calumet pipes. This color is magical, and very useful. See the pinks in the shirt and skin tones? Yeah. More on that one later, for sure.

The end of an era

Today I had to give up my old community garden plot that I’ve been working for three years. We moved to a different town last year; that plus watering restrictions means it no longer made sense to keep it. We hadn’t been there for months. Made me sad to close it down today; lots of good memories of gardening with my wife (then my fiancée) there. But I have another garden plot, one closer to home, and we have some containers in the back yard for tomatoes and eggplant. So it’s for the best. In honor of the garden plot we had to give up, the painting above will be titled At Ivey Ranch.

The next few months will be a little sketchy as I indicated; but I will check in when I can. I will also be putting a lot more effort into the attached blog, llawrencebispo.wordpress.com. Wish me luck!

Christmas card sketch, walnut ink

Pine cone sketch

Here is a new little drawing made with the homemade walnut ink. It’s intended to be the design for a Christmas card, of which I plan to put a couple up on my Redbubble and Imagekind pages. This one came out a little stiff – probably because I drew it a bit on the small side, and also because I just tightened up, knowing that I intended it to be a professional piece (sort of). I’m also not thrilled with the distribution of values, though that part at least is fixable. There’s a chance I’ll attempt a redo, larger and looser.

Isn’t it just a pretty color for an ink, though? I’m not the only one out there making and using ink from black walnut hulls. Here is an old WetCanvas post by a member named Bluegill (Mark Tabler), an outstanding ink artist, who uses homemade walnut ink as well. In this post, he has made available the results of some lightfastness tests he conducted upon his walnut ink. I was quite interested to see this, of course, since I still haven’t gotten around to setting up the Great Lightfastness Test of 2010 (we’ll have to see if that doesn’t turn into the Great Lightfastness Test of 2011), although I have at least obtained my blue wool samples and have them ready to go. In the meantime, Tabler’s tests seem to indicate that walnut ink is fairly lightfast, though not perfectly so. Good enough for me; and when I do my own tests, hopefully I’ll get confirmation on that.

Here is Mark’s House Portraits page, exhibiting drawings done in walnut ink, and here is his Homemade Black Walnut Ink page, sharing his recipe and procedure for making the ink. Good stuff. I also want to share one of the best walnut ink wash drawings I’ve seen, posted on this page at Science-Art. Go ahead and click on the drawing for a larger view. Beautiful. I’ll get there someday if I can help it.

If you’re interested in using real walnut ink, I’d really recommend making your own. If you don’t live in an area with black walnut trees, as in my case, then you can purchase walnut hulls from a natural dyes shop and simply follow the process described in my post here. Or you can do a hunt for walnut ink to purchase online – just beware, not all of them are actually made from walnuts, and the ones that are not won’t necessarily tell you that on the order page.

Looking at the design above, I think I will redo it. It’s gotten to an okay place, but it’s not finished yet. I’ve made many sketches of pine cones, from life, which I had collected over the past few weeks with this little project in mind. It’s so important to work from life, whenever circumstances allow. I could have taken a photo and traced it; but in sketching from life, I really learned about pine cones: their structure, their rhythms, their mathematical patterns. At this point, I feel like I could probably draw a pine cone from memory if I were asked to. I may not have the time to redo this – but if I do, hopefully that familiarity will serve me well.