art and my iPad~ michellechoongkhoo

i think it is so cool to have so many gadgets available to help our creativity along…..

This morning, I wanted to continue with my experimentation of the portable watercolor sketch box ……
It was pouring dogs and cats~ how appropriate to sketch my Tobie ;)
And with the aid of my iPad and caffeine induced energy….i set up the stuff on the coffee table and got to work~
Wooooo, its such a breeze~ sketch, paint , photograph, upload and blog all within 15 mins…..
Wow Very very handy indeed…..I'm loving it ♬

wooooh I think pretty soon I may become addicted to doing this quickie sketching stuff , hahahaha

sketch~boy @ Gurney Drive Penang~michellechoongkhoo

it feels good to hv the creative juices flowing~

testing pocket field sketch box~ michellechoongkhoo

I bought this portable watercolor set w reusable waterbrush a few months back….
After a self imposed hiatus of inactivity, today I just decided to test it out !

aaaaah, pretty satisfying…..easy to manipulate the waterbrush and watercolor palette.
okay, am going to bring this along with me whenever I travel from now on…..

art activities upcoming

link to MIA website  http://www.mia.edu.my

in rememberance of Roxy~

Am taking a short hiatus from painting …..
Am grieving the death of my darling GSD, 9yrs old Roxy…
may she rest in peace, may she find MAX in dog heaven ~

Oil Lesson 5: Using a Painting knife

I thought it might be a tad boring but it wasnt , not the least bit~

As a matter of fact I did enjoy the lesson thoroughly today….it reminded me of doing the sugar icing for cakes ;)

And well, I am no baker….in fact I suck big time at anything to do with cooking so it was daunting to try to use the painting knives at first.

Definitely the first stroke was the toughest.

Ms Shia showed me how to practise on my palette, after which yea, I did loosen up and soon was gleefully plying the paints liberally.

As usual, one starts with the darkest shades and Ms Shia said it was important to paint the eyes so as to get a firm anchor for the other locations…she was as usual right, of course! As soon as the eyes and nose, ears were in place, the rest came easy enough.

Luckily I had bought so many different types of painting knives….

Applying the paint thickly requires a large or medium trowel shaped knife; to get the illusion of fur, I found it best to use the small paddle shaped knife and for the outline of eyes, I prefer to use a small diamond shape knife but here I must admit that alas for Tobie's beautiful pupil, I had to cheat by using a brush !

At first my Tobie looked like a street cat until Ms Shia told me to fatten her up by making the head rounder and the eyes much much bigger. Wow, it works.

The magic touch was the whiskers….it pays to ensure that the paint beneath the whiskers are of darker shade and also not flowing in the same direction as the whiskers…such simple adjustments and I have my beautiful Tobie looking right back at me from my round canvas….

Mmmm, cant wait to finish the other two canvasses of Roxy and Tiger when I come back from diving the Maldives ~

P/S:

Some of you may have been wondering whether water mixable oils are of any good….Well, for this painting I prepared the background 3 days ago with a combo of sap green and viridian hue from Reeves water mixable oil colors (box set of 12 tubes x 1.2ml for only RM $22.50 , just about USD7….what a bargain).

I know that I will use it often for backgrounds because it has proven to be very economical as well as efficient , looks good and dries super fast…

Oil Lesson 4: painting on "imprimatura"

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Technique : Painting landscape on a green background

Step 1: the colored ground was prepared a week earlier with all the left over paints from previous lesson, thinned with turpentine and left to dry thoroughly

Step 2: since the background is now dark, I had to use white crayon to help me draw the outline of the landscape instead of my usual pastel pencils.

Step 3: As my chosen landscape was a golf course with a mountaineous background of which parts are reflected onto the lake, Ms Shia told me to block in the colors according to light and dark areas for the landed portions.

Likewise I was to repeat the same for those reflections on the water.

Step 4: Creating the water effects was simple enough~

a) by stroking the paints with a clean brush vertically , resulted in a smeared blend of vertical lines that mmmm, do give an essence of reflections!

b) Then at some areas near the lake's edge, we stroked in some horizontal lines to represent the water ripples.

Landscapes are never my cup of tea but I guess its nice to know how to do it ~

Pretty cool ~ oh yea.

Verdict?

I think painting on imprimaturas is interesting as well as economical to speed up the painting process . But I think it is critical to choose the choice of the colored grounds well before painting because when I look at some classmates' completed works which were done on a reddish ground, the feeling was a very old masters, matt dull finish.

I guess this is where our understanding of color wheel, opaque versus transparent colors comes in…. of which I am still unclear, so for now I prefer to do sons portraits on white ground!

today, our imprimatura was opaque because the colors were mixed with titanium white.

Next week I may attempt a portrait of my beloved Tiger or Tobie on colored ground with either

a) using thin acrylic gold wash

b) thin watercolor stain