Just a little princess power for this evening.
Doodlecomics presents: LAUNDRY DAY.
I do laundry by hand a lot because industrial washers EAT CLOTHES FOR BREAKFAST. Here are some laundry-doing techniques.
So I’m about 12 years too late but I just watched the first Shmarry Schmotter movie last night and I was drawing these comics at the same time. THEY’RE LIVE ACTION COMICS.
This is a detail of another thing I painted. Sometimes I really want to lick paint, it looks so much like icing. I’m sure Van Gogh said that sometime shortly before he lopped part of his ear off. DON’T EAT LEAD, KIDS.
I’ve been pretty sick this month and am still kind of recovering so not much art to show. The one painting I did complete is still in my hands and it’s bad form to show it before my client sees it!
One thing I have been doing, aside from watching a lot of Miss Marple, is doing these cool Richard Schmid colour studies (he gets the glory for this exercise but I’m pretty sure it’s as old as paint). I’ve been trying to learn the secrets of a 5 colour palette: ochre, ult. blue, burnt sienna, mars black and white.
Here are some details, if you’re interested:
This exercise starts with pure colours mixing left to right over 5 squares (the messy “P” above some columns stands for Pure), adding white to tint the same colours 5 squares down; the bottom ten rows are the same as the top but with the addition black to cool the colours down. If I were doing it again I might add a speck of a lighter colour in the black-tinted squares to keep the colours from getting dull although I was surprised to find they really didn’t gray that much. It’s crazy how little black you really need, a tiniest salt-grain smudge covers so much ground.
The most important lesson I’ve learned is about how to systematically mix colours. I’ve often found colour mixing confusing - what do you mix first? when do you add white? what is this colour even? etc. The system I followed here each time was to mix the correct colour from the “pure” row at the top, add white until it was the correct value and then add black until it was cool enough. I tried not to “cheat” by adding white or black to anything I’d mixed before so that each time I was doing it according to “the system” and there was no chance to get muddled.
The hardest part was keeping the value shift consistent between the warm and the cool colours.
My favourite discovery was with the ochres, the black I was using has a blue bias so the ochres got all nice and green.
