Value Study - Summer Flowers: Clintonia

Preliminary Drawing

Value Study for Summer Flowers: Clintonia

Digital drawing, 600px x 600px

Today is a sunny day in November, very nice in its own right, but my mind wants to hold on to pleasant memories of summer wild flowers.

This drawing is of a lovely wild lily with small yellow flowers, variously called Clintonia, or Carrion flower, or Blue bead lily. The blue beads are the seed pods or berries of this plant, which are as startlingly bright a blue in the fall as the yellow is a shimmering chartreuse in the early summer.

How wonderful to recall things like this.

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Texture Study - Rocks, Ripples and Refractions

Preliminary Drawing

Texture Study - "Rocks, Ripples and Refractions"

Digital drawing, 800px x 600px

I always found what goes on at the bottom of a pond fascinating to watch.

Underwater, rocks and sticks that look so clearly defined on land get covered with a gooey brown blanket which obscures their features. On the surface of the water, there are waves and bubbles and patches of light which compete for your attention against the objects lying on the bottom. And where the sun shines through those waves, patches of light and shadow get projected, with reflections and refractions, onto the underwater rocks and sticks that are already barely recognizable.

It's a real game to figure out what you are looking at. And it's mesmerizing to simply follow the shapes made by the flow of the ripples back and forth. Surface and bottom. Bottom and surface. Light and shadow. Fascinating.

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Texture Study - Toad in a Jar

Preliminary Drawing

Texture Study - "Toad in a Jar"

Digital drawing, 800px x 600px

Sometimes while you are watching the ugliest things in the world, they become things of great beauty and fascination. Take this toad, for example. Warty and totally unappealing, dumped in a glass jar, no wonder he was so grumpy-looking.

And then, I saw the attractiveness of all those textures, the shininess of those deep, dark eyes.

Don't get me wrong, I still don't want to kiss the fellow, but I was pleased to release him into a friend's garden to start a new career keeping the insects at bay.

And he left me wondering if I could possibly capture the beauty of this creature.

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Preliminary Drawing - Lodge Bay 2 - Ice Edge

Preliminary Drawing for Bones of the Earth series
"Lodge Bay, Labrador 2 - Ice Edge"
Digital Drawing, 800px x 600px

Edges or boundaries mark where one thing ends and another thing starts.

The edge of the ice is the place where liquid water turns solid. An edge is generally not abrupt but rather is created as a process. The changes at the edge of the ice are gradual and are subject to conditions like wind and water current and temperature.

This drawing is another preliminary study for a painting I have underway. The drawing is done in a technique called grisalle, featuring marks of black and white on a gray surface. I like grisaille because it enhances the sense of three-dimensions in the drawing, and because it emphasizes the details the image that I will eventually paint in colors.
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Preliminary Drawing - Lodge Bay - November Thaw

Preliminary Drawing for Bones of the Earth series
"Lodge Bay 1" - Labrador
Digital Drawing, 800px x 600px

On a foggy November day, with late fall ice melting in the calm still air, I was enjoying driving over a new bridge on a new highway.
I suddenly felt disoriented.
After a moment, I realized why - this new road had brought me to a house I had stayed in many years before.
But I had gotten there by a different route and I was looking at it from a different angle than I was used to.
I pulled off the side of the road to enjoy the experience.
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Preliminary Drawing - Pinware River 5 - Rocky Textures

Preliminary Drawing for Bones of the Earth series
"Pinware River 5, Labrador" Rocky Textures
Digital Drawing, 800px x 600px


Drawings are made up of marks of different sizes and shapes that resolve in the viewer's mind and suggest the experience of looking at something tangible - in this case, the rocky textures along a riverbank, above and below water.
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Preliminary Drawing - Pinware River 4 - Value Sketch

Preliminary Drawing for Bones of the Earth series

"Pinware River 4, Labrador" Value Sketch

graphite on paper, 9" x 14"

One way for an artist to check that a composition will work in a finished painting is to do a preliminary value sketch in tones of black and white. The artist ensures that areas of one tone lie against areas of contrasting tone.

Textures and details are not important in a value sketch, just placing tonal masses so that the composition reads well.
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Preliminary Drawing - Pinware River 3 -Rapids

Preliminary Drawing for Bones of the Earth series
"Pinware River 3, Labrador - Rapids"
Digital drawing, 800px x 600px

I realized as I was completing this drawing that a rapids is a waterfall inside a river. Wow!

For computer drawing, I use a digitizing tablet and stylus, and a graphics software that lets me use layers. In this drawing, I used one layer for the black lines, another layer for the airbrush gray spray and a third layer for the white background. Keeping each component separate simplifies how I work. When I have finished the drawing, I flatten all the layers together and save the drawing in its final format to use online.
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Preliminary Drawing - Pinware River 2 - Waterfall

Preliminary Drawing for Bones of the Earth series
"Pinware River 2, Labrador - Waterfall"
Digital drawing, 600px x 600px

Over time, even the smallest waterfalls split open rocks and create their own erosion zones. This is another preliminary drawing for a painting I have underway.

This technique of creating an image in white and black on a gray background is called grisalle.
Grisaille creates an enhanced sense of three-dimensions in the artwork. Some artists use grisaille as the background for painting, because it gives strongly modeled forms. I am using it as a way to explore the way streams of water fall over rocks and break apart over obstacles in their way.
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Preliminary Drawing - Pinware River 1

Preliminary Drawing for Bones of the Earth series
"Pinware River 1" Labrador
Digital Drawing - 800px x 600px

Water flows downhill, seeking its easiest path. As it flows, the water cuts its way through layers of rocky riverbed. Over time, at this place along the Pinware River in southern Labrador, a break in the rocks has eroded and become a funnel for the full force of the river.

This drawing is a value study for a painting I am working on. One of the tricky parts about painting water is that water tends to look like a mirror and not like a solid material. When the surface of the water is uneven, it reflects the texture of the surroundings to a viewer in unexpected ways. An artist has to take into account depicting the texture of the trees, rocks, clouds, as well as the reflections off the water. This drawing is a study in putting the lights and darks in their appropriate places to show these textures and surfaces.
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