Anatomy of a Drawing/Painting

Well, the husband keeps bugging me to do a blog about my artwork. He even hacked in to my art website and posted a blog that had NOTHING whatsoever to do with art, just to intimidate me into starting, so in self-defense, I reluctantly begin. I mean, WHO HAS TIME TO WRITE THIS STUFF, and WHO HAS TIME TO READ IT??? There. I JUST needed to get that out.

But, how do you write an art blog so that people who are not necessarily artists will find it interesting? I dunno. Post photos of ice cream?

So, I am working on a commissioned piece right now and thought I would kind of keep a progress log as I go.

My client saw another commission I had done, a pencil drawing of a horse & rider in the aspen with Pikes Peak in the background. She said, "I want EXACTLY THAT, but without the horse and maybe with a splash of fall color, but otherwise black and white." As we talked, Pikes Peak morphed into the Maroon Bells outside Aspen, Colorado. I love painting the Maroon Bells. I have spent much time hiking & skiing in the area.

Now to decide how to do it in black and white with color in just the leaves. I spent no small amount of time trying to work out if I wanted to do it in graphite & colored pencil, or all watercolor.

It was stressful. Like trying to decide between Edy's Caramel Delight and French Silk.

I finally decided to do BOTH! Because, life is not always an either/or situation. Sometimes it calls for a BOTH/AND decision! After all, that's how I do Ice cream:

:)

So anyway, (does the comma go after the "so" or after the "anyway"?) I decided on a combination of watercolor and Graphitint pencil by Derwent, something I've never tried. Graphitint is basically a graphite pencil with just a hint of color, kind of a cross between a regular drawing pencil and watercolor color pencil. You can wet them if you want a different texture, or more intense color. 
So, these are the colors I'm choosing from, watercolor on the left, pencil in the middle and on the right. The yellows are all Windsor Newton watercolors, Cadmium Yellow light, Cadmium orange and Permanent Rose mixed on the paper:

I'm working on Arches a full 22X30" sheet of 140 lb hotpress watercolor paper, which would be pretty heavy if I were carrying around a whole ream of it (about 140 lbs to be exact!) but as one sheet will do, I'm just fine. ;-) 
Hotpress paper has a smooth surface which my pencils will like very much. When I think I want to do a lot of small detail (which is...almost ALWAYS) I like hotpress.
I used Pebeo masking fluid (thanks to my brother Steve for telling me about Pebeo as I've torn paper using other brands!) to mask out areas where I didn't want paint.

You can see the Pebeo blue-ish masking in this second picture where I'm laying in the initial color. When everything is dry, I will peel off the blue stuff. 

As I lay down the yellows and oranges and reds I remember how startlingly brilliant the Aspen were the last time I saw them.  It was September, 2012 and Tom and I made an emergency trip to Aspen, Colorado see the Aspen change. Yes, I said emergency.  We needed to get away from the grind. It had been such a long time since we'd gotten away to anywhere. And Tom had never seen the aspen trees in the glory of their autumn. We used hotel points and gift cards and lived on the cheap for 3 days. We drank it all in like lost prospectors in the desert suddenly coming upon a spring. Seas of red and orange and yellow were everywhere, shimmering and quaking in the bright Colorado sun. Astonishing. (I like to use the word astonishing at least once a week)
We went home, our souls renewed. We called it our 24 Carat Gold Weekend.

Here is the beginning of putting in some background. Coloring in the negative spaces around the branches is fun!

I really enjoy putting in the trees. As the detail and texture creates itself beneath my pencil, I can almost smell the air out there. I love the random ways that aspen trees grow-some branches white, some black, and their wonderful black "eyes" looking everywhere, as if they too cannot take it all in.

For some of the detail in the tree trunk, I'm pressing down with white watercolor pencil, and/or some little styluses I have (because as we already know, life sometimes calls for a BOTH/AND decision!!!) to create little squiggles and lines and spots which show up white when I color over them, as the pencil doesn't go into the troughs created by pressing down. And the watercolor pencil acts a little bit as a resist also.

My Styluses: they have different sized round ends for different width troughs.

And here is the whole drawing composition: I'm only using the Cloud Grey and Midnight Black pencils for everything that is not a leaf; except for The Maroon Bells, (the mountains you can't see yet in sort of in the middle) and 2 big rocks in the foreground. They will be Storm (which is kind of the kind of burgundy/purply pencil) as those particular Mountains are that color rock, (Hence the name~Maroon Bells).

I apologize for the quality of the photos. I'm using my Iphone for cataloging.

Thank you for taking a look! If anybody decides to read this, I'll keep you posted. If anybody doesn't, I'll keep ME posted!

Okay, back to work.
May the Good Lord bless the trail you ride on today!

Jill

"Then shalt thou delight thyself in the Lord; and I will cause thee to ride upon the high places of the earth"~Isaiah 58:14