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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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 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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Monochrome Color Scheme - Green

Monochrome Color Scheme - Green

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Digital drawing, 800 px x 600 px
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The human eye can detect more tints and shades of green than any other color. I guess this is because we evolved in the trees needing to identify food plants and plants for other uses.

In this drawing, I used dark and middle dark shades of green, a saturated green and a pale green, plus a black line drawing to pull the design together.
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Monochrome Color Scheme - Red

Monochrome Color Scheme - Red

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Digital drawing, 800px x 600 px
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This is the final version of the monochrome image, with the four layers for pale pink, rose, saturated red and brown opened on top of each other. The black layer that you saw earlier is hidden.

All these colors are based on a hue (color) of red, with variations on their saturation (intensity) and their value (lightness or darkness.)
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Monochrome Color Scheme - Red [Level 2 - The Brown Layer]

Monochrome Color Scheme - Red [Level 2 - The Brown Layer]
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Digital Drawing, 800 px x 600 px
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I am working through the various color levels in this image, and placing each color on a separate layer. This makes it easier for me to see the effect of each color on the entire drawing, and yet make corrections, if I find it necessary.

This layer shows the brown tone in this design. Of its hue, saturation and value, the hue is red, the saturation is full, and the intensity is about half that of a brilliant red. That is the only difference between the colors brown and red, they're the same, but brown is darker.

Still more to come!

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Monochrome Color Scheme - Red [Level 1 - The Black Layer]

Monochrome Color Scheme - Red [Level 1 - The Black Layer]

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Digital drawing, 800 px x 600 px
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My working method for these digital drawings is to use layers to separate the colors I am using. I am finding that each layer has its own charm and individual beauty beyond its contribution to the finished drawing.

Although the basic hue in this monochrome image is Red, my starting point is usually a drawing in black to establish fundamentals of value and contrast, and to place the various shapes and areas of tone. So, from my work-in-progress, here is the black component.

There's more to come!
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Monochrome Color Scheme - Yellow

Monochrome Color Scheme - Yellow
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Digital drawing, 800 px x 600 px
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Monochrome means one color, and this monochrome color scheme is based on the single hue of yellow.
Other characteristics of color are saturation and value. There is only one saturated yellow in this design, all the other yellow tints and yellow shades are based on this one hue.

The background is a neutral gray, to provide contrast against the yellows.
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Color Variations 4 - Value

Color Variations 4 - Value

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Colored pencil on paper, 6.5" x 10"
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Value refers to the lightness or darkness of a color. As an artist adds white to a color, it becomes paler or higher in value, and as an artist adds black to a color it becomes darker or lower in value.
Different hues have different values, for example yellows have a relatively high value and reds generally have a low value. Artists can use this knowledge to put yellows next to blacks for greatest contrast, or next to whites for less contrast. In the same way, dark blues or reds will not stand out well against black, although they do show up very well when placed next to white.

In this drawing, I placed yellow lines against a white background. Because the yellow and the white are almost the same value, the lines appear to be fading away, giving a sensation in the picture of blinding white light exploding into a dark space.
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Apples 7

Apples 7

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Graphite on paper, 6.5" x 10"

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Apples sliced horizontally, across their equators, show the core of the apple as a star. The star is a group of pods gripping the apple seeds in place with just a tiny bit of room for expansion when they sprout.

With daylight from the window raking across the flat cut surface, you can see the structural details of the apple, too, reinforcing the pentagon geometry of this fruit, and you can also see the lights and darks of the paper underneath the apple.

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Apples 6

Apples 6

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Graphite on paper, 6.5" x 10"
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The surface of the apple has dappled color markings, as well as tonal gradations from the apple's spherical shape. It also has highlights and shadows from lighting, and more lights and darks from reflections.

Graphite leaves a grey mark on paper, and the softer the grade of graphite, the darker grey the mark is. The trick to drawing with graphite is to use different grades of graphite in order to achieve a complete tonal range that can represent all the lights and darks needed in the drawing.
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Apples 5

Apples 5

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Graphite on paper, 6.5" x 10"

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You don't think of still life arrangements as having movement, and you don't think of apples sitting on plates as giving gestures, but they do. This is a gesture drawing of an apple, selected out of a sheetful of apple gestures.

So what gesture does an apple have? An expression of weight, of sitting balanced on a base point, of mass, of a spherical form, and overall an expression of how the fruit grew from the core out to the surface. That is the gesture of an apple.

Apples 4

Apples 4

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Graphite on paper, 6.5" x 10"
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This somewhat lopsided apple shows highlights from two windows and reflections from around the room and also reflections from the shiny plate it is sitting on. The shiny plate acts as a mirror, too, reflecting the apple back to itself. The only true shadow areas are underneath the apple where it touches the plate, and at the boundaries of the spherical form.
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Apples 3

Apples 3

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Graphite on paper, 6.5" x 10"
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An apple cut in half yields two hemisperical forms each with a flat plane revealing the inside of the fruit. Cut from top to bottom, the apple's core shows a seed pod, with its distinctive oval shape, and tiny protective capsules holding the tear-drop shaped seeds.

Drawing the seed pod is a challenge because it is so small and so intricate, and while its lights and shadows can be suggested with graphite, the marks must be accurate to make the flat plane surface look like something is resting underneath.
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Apples 2

Apples 2
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Graphite on paper, 6.5" x 10"

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The spherical form of an apple displays beautiful gradations of highlights and shadows. The apple's peel is shiny and reflects its surroundings, so the highlights and shadows are changed.

Drawing a spherical form in graphite could become a mechanical job, but with the irregular form of the fruit and the reflections from the surroundings, observing and recording the apple becomes a lot more interesting.

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