Carrasco Studio

Accentuate the Negative, Drawing Lesson 4

Lesson 4...Negative space

Rabbit Watching the Moon                                                                   ©Jennifer M Carrasco 4/6/05

Seeing the immense design of the world, one image of wonder mirrored by another image of wonder...the pattern of fern and of feather by the frost on the window pane, the six rays of the snowflake mirrored in the rock-crystal's six rayed eternity....seeing the pattern on the scaly legs of birds mirrored in the pattern of knot-grass, I asked myself, were those shapes molded by blindness?  are n0t these the "correspondences", to quote a phrase of Swedenborg, "whereby we may speak with angels? "                                                                                                                                   ...............Dame Edith Sitwell

Ok, People of the Drafting Boards....this is the Real #4 Drawing Lesson.  Last week was the third lesson but I put # 4, but when I also post this on Facebook, it gets too complicated (and I get too lazy) to change it.  Anyhow, what's a little plus or minus one way or the other.  Those of you who missed the last class, you can find equivalent exercises in Chapter 7.

1.  Review of 5 perceptual skills...edges, spaces, relationships, light and shadow (value), the  gestalt or whole.   Pure contour? Modified contour?

Look at toned drawings.....start medium light (use the toned paper as your medium value)  Show drawing on toned paper.  Show steps. Draw lightly!  We used shells, but a flower would be appropriate for those who missed the class.

Tone another sheet in your sketch book.....medium value.

  Negative space and positive space..why important?  We are not accustomed, as a culture,  to look at the negative space.  We are a verbal, objective culture.  Negative space is just as important in drawing as the positive or the object you are drawing. .  Beginners are often oblivious to the format...they focus so intently on the object that they are oblivious to the shape of the format, which largely controls the composition.  Imagine a tree  in various formats.   How would you place, for instance, a tall thin poplar in a long horizontal rectangle format.

To define a shell with drawing with white pencil around shapes,,the contours are shared edges with the positive (left brain) and the negative(Right brain)  Demo.
 
Where do you draw your entry and exit points?  Draw lightly! Remove negative space with eraser, then highlights.  Now, find the darkest areas and add to those.  Spray with fixative.

Basic Units.......  where does the line or lines come in.....Show on a larger foam core.  Then  using the basic unit to measure the angles and lengths of the sail, the boat, etc.

Show chair and negative spaces...discuss...pretend to pulverize the chair.

With viewfinder,draw the folding chair.  First find  the negative space by staring at it, then find some entry points for negative space.

Read chapter 7. 

The Spaces Between.  Mt. Arayat Climb, June 6, l980, Philippines  ©Jennifer M. Carrasco 6/6/1980

©Jennifer M. Carrasco 9/17/09  All blog entries on this site, visual or intellectual, are the property of Jennifer M. Carrasco (unless stated otherwise) and cannot be reproduced or used without her written permission.

Drawing Lesson 1 The Path of a Pencil through Space and Time

"In Brazilian rivers, there exists a fish which sees with a two lensed eye, a kind of bifocal adjustment that permits the creature to examine the upper world of sunlight and air, which with the lower half of the lens, he can survey the watery depths in which he lives"....Loren Eisley

 

I like the idea of this creature as a metaphor for an artist, a creator who looks intently at the world and sees both the surface and the depths.  

I have decided to include both the present......the searchers in my class, their drawings and their presence,  and entries of my drawings and quotes I have placed in my journals. I also include a summation of each drawing lesson. 

I have 35 journals I have kept over about that many years...my mother, an inveterate writer, gave me my first journal and told me to fill it. Thirty-five years later, the first journal is a mess....the bindings are gone and all the pages are loose.  But I am so glad I have it, since I have forgotten so much.  It is a record of my past.  Time unbound.

 

I lived in the Philippines for 16 years.  the journal starts there when I was 36 years old.

Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain....4/28/10

You will learn five basic skills...edges, spaces, relationships, light, whole....components to whole.  And format.......(show demonstration with rocks and frame.)

My hopes and expectations for the class....that you can learn to switch over to “see”mode. I hope you can make it to every class...it will have a great deal to do with your success.  Life happens, so I will put the lesson and the assignments on the blog....do access my blog after every class and do the assignments in a timely manner .  These assignments can’t be done at the last minute.  Like piano practice, put aside at least 20 minutes for each assignment in a quiet place...not to be disturbed, not in front of the TV.  One a day. Consider it meditation.

All drawing is the same...some is just more complex.  Anyone can learn to draw.  This class will not make you an artist: it will teach you a skill, quickly.  For example, you can be taught to ride a bike, but not to be a cyclist.
In this class I will teach you accuracy and segue, hopefully into more expressive drawing.

Discuss  Milton Glaser video.  Conscious looking..to understand the world. 

Draw and date in your sketchbook: ALWAYS SIGN AND DATE.

a. Your hand.......Draw quickly..
b. Your face (use mirror)
c. A person from memory.. Draw quickly....

Training the eye......Discuss and demo stereotypes, natural urge to hurry, to be “efficient), YOU HAVE NOTHING ELSE TO DO BUT FOCUS AND DRAW. Don’t be anxious  We all start somewhere..

1. Read page 89 -92 Blind Contour drawing of hand......turn away from paper(taped), use soft pencil,  DON’T LIFT POINT,  Go Super Slow! Don’t look at paper.  Find an edge and follow it SLOWLY with your eye and pencil at the same time.

2.  Memory drawing...hold a live flower in your hand (not a daisey, please!)  Choose a fairly complex flower..  LOOK INTENTLY. TWO MINUTES, close eyes and see it in your head..   Hide it  and do a line drawing...don’t lift pencil.  Stop, fish out the flower, look intently for another two minutes. Hide and finish drawing.

3. Do a “semi-Blind”contour drawing of your hand, looking down at your paper only to change direction of your pencil line.  SLOWLY.  Don’t lift the point.  15 minutes 

Assignment.  Chapter 2 and 3

Do a “semi” blind contour drawing of: 1.  a crumpled piece of typing paper.  2. a set of keys   3. a twig with a leaf or flower attached  4. a dandelion or an alley weed.  Spend at least 15 minutes drawing the object....Don’t try to draw all of these projects at the last minute. (Defeats the purpose! )

Remember, take the time, make the time, to do these drawings when you can close out the demands of the world.  Fall into your drawing and your subject. Become the dancer and the dance.

".....great footed blossomer, are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole? O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,  How can we know the dancer from the dance?"

  W.B. Yeats        

©Jennifer M. Carrasco 9/17/09  All blog entries on this site, visual or intellectual, are the property of Jennifer M. Carrasco (unless stated otherwise) and cannot be reproduced or used without her written permission.                            

A Snort for Spring

Ieeeeeeeiiiii!  Cabin fever, spring fever and prison break fever all combined.  I look out my windows and see blooming tulips, daffodils and Weeds.  I am pawing the floor. Let me outta here. Four more weeks in the house.

This is an illustration I did recently for Tom Douglas's calendar (Tom of the fabulous restaurants, cooking fame and one-time Iron Chef).  Several artists contributed to the calendar, and mine was the month of September.  The illustration was supposed to be about one of Tom's favorite recipes, and his September recipe was full of tomatoes, garlic and olives and beef.  Well, of course I thought of Ferdinand the Bull, and to get him energized, I had to sting him with the mythical bee.

BTW, the first scream in my blog is an actual word.  I heard it spoken/screeched for the first time when I was riding a provincial bus in the Philippines.  We rounded a corner on the wrong side of the road and barely missed another bus.  We cringed by the bus by going off the road and went lurching madly through a ditch.  Everyone, including me screamed Ieeeeeeiiiiii, the bus righted itself, and continued to barrel on down the road. 

I always thought that kind of scream was just invented by the writer of "Terry and the Pirates".

©Jennifer M. Carrasco 9/17/09  All blog entries on this site, visual or intellectual, are the property of Jennifer M. Carrasco (unless stated otherwise) and cannot be reproduced or used without her written permission.

Fishing! (with watercolor)

Do you remember when your cousin dared you to jump off the edge of the patio?  Or when you balanced on the edge of the high board...drawn to the edge but afraid at the same time?  That's the perverse, frightened, attracted feeling I felt when I first saw this beautiful creature, waving it's delicate chiffon fins  about five feet below me in the coral reefs in the Philippines.  I so wanted to drop down and get a closer look, to put my bare feet on the coral next to it and double-dog-dare the fish to sting me with it's deadly barbs.

But I didn't.

I floated off, and lived to paint to and give art lessons to my friends in Seattle.

Here's the first watercolor lesson of the fall season.............and check below the lesson for the steps I took to come up with the Lionfish....the transparent staining colors, the granulating pigments, the glazing, etc.

Hi Watercolor students.....Here’s my recap of the first class and I want to tell you, you were fabulous!  Thank you all for coming, and thanks to Sarah, Ellen and Phil, we had enough tables for all.  I paid Phil for the table from your donations.  Cam and Pete now have enough tables for Lots of Parties and I was able to sail into the class, concussion free (remember, my canopy door is unreliable). with my back almost purring.
Now that you have experienced the first class, you know a little more about what to bring and how to arrange your supplies.  I suggest that you tear your big sheets of paper into four smaller sheets before you come to class, and “blue tape” around the edges (see fish example) to give it a clean margin.
  Get a hose or a kitchen sprayer to clean off muddy mixes or antique clots of paint on your palatte. Keep the newer paint blobs. Start clean...by the end of class you will have plenty of mud.  If you have a plastic palatte, either sand the wells with sand paper or rub with Bon Ami or Comet (thanks for the suggestion, Nancy) so the paint doesn’t “curdle” when you mix it.  Organize your paint tubes in some baggies....cool colors (blue, green, cool neutrals) and warm colors...red, yellows and warm colors...in separate baggies.  Wrap up your watercolor brushes in a table mat or get one of the handy brush carriers.  Paper towels or T-shirt rags are great for sopping up messes and dabbing, a spritzer to keep your paints and /or paper wet, two containers for water, and you are set.  Pretty simple,actually.  Advice from the Queen of Chaos.

And, with all of us, we are reminded that watercolor, despite it’s unmerited reputation for being a medium for Sunday painters, is a demanding medium.  I don’t know if you noticed, but it does need focus.  When I demonstrate, I am always torn between talking (language=Left brain) and painting (spacial and intuitive= Right brain). Not only does it wear me out, but it also usually results in an inferior product.  Women, especially, are supposed to be good at multi tasking, but I think most of us will admit we end up with most of the tasks half baked.  After a day of dealing with family and jobs, we need a break from being pulled in forty directions, and I hope the classes will provide this for all of you....a meditative companiable time to really sink into the process, to quietly focus and  leave the chatter and demands of the world behind.

1  Draw a LARGE Fish very lightly with pencil  on half paper....touching almost either end.

2. Painting your fish(es) with water, apply a watery tint of yellow (Azo yellow or Aureolin yellow is best
...transparent. on your largest fish)   Now, using only a turqoise blue or Pthalo blue, alizarin red or a perlene scarlet, drop these watery colors into the fish...barely touch the yellow paint...watch how the pigment moves.  You can tip it if you like.  Try this with some of your other pigments.  Also, see what happens when the paint starts drying.  Now, LEAVING A MOAT between your wet yellow fish and the background, prepare a wash of pale pthalo blue or turqoise (cyan) and carefully apply it to the wet  background, only. (negative space)                                                                                                                                                                            
3. Review of color wheel....mix on meat tray.  Secondary, Tertiary.  Complements (mix all the primaries together)  Show how after image appears.  show how all primaries make a neutral. (black eyed Susan)

4. Difference between  (Demo)
    a.Staining pigments (organic synthetics....pthalos, quinacridone, azos...bright, transparent stains)   b. Non staining, inorganic pigments......(cobalts, manganeses, burnt umber and raw sienna, ultramarine blue, lunar black , casecade green, cadmiums and chromiums) 

5  Demo a glaze across fishes and water,  Yellow (intensifies yellow on yellow, creates green on blue) Don’t over stroke! (and must be dry first)

6...color wheel....using only  the three primaries.  Secondary, tertiary, and a neutral in the middle.

7. Beginners...Then glaze stripes, zig zags and dots on your fish with primaries.   Experiment with your colors.

8.Extra time?  Do an arrangement of fall leaves....paint them yellow and drop colors in them while wet....experiment with your inorganic granulating colors as well.  How can one leave yellow or red “veins” in the leaves?

Assignment.....Re read page 1-15.  Try painting some small paintings of single colorful leaves, using the same techniques you used in this class (The rhododendrum leaves are always a good choice, any time of year)  Start with pale colors and work into brighter, more intense hues. If you want sharp lines, wait until the pale yellow or pale colors dry, then glaze into the shapes. Tape them on your fridge or your bathroom mirror so you’ll think about them)

First Step...I sketched the outline of the fish in brown Stadler pencil, a soft, water soluble brown, and then painted it in with a pale yellow (Azo Yellow, Daniel Smith) wash.  I also taped blue tape around the edge to mask off a crisp white margin.

 

Then, while the yellow was still wet, I touched in a mixture of lunar red earth (granular) and burnt umber (granular)  Both colors are inorganic pigments. I let the pigments "travel" without stroking them....just tipping the paper to help them move in the direction I wanted them to go.

 

Line in some defined light areas when the underpaint is dry.

 

Wet some areas with clear water and drop in some vermillion or burnt sienna and red into the wet area. Let it spread and bleed.

 

Mix some hematite violet (Primatek) and Luna Blue (Primatek) and apply to clear wet spots for eye and spots.

 

Add hematite violet and a little red stripes, then add hematite violet and luna blue thin line while the stripes are still wet.

 

Finish stripes and add more intense and darker colors.

 

Glaze over all of body with orange and touches of cobalt violet

Add Luna blue/black to stripes and more orange on body...then remove some paint from fins and some from the "swelling out" part of the fish's body.

 

Then add clear water , then Luna blue (Primatek) to background, leaving a "moat' between the fish and the background so they won't " bleed" into each other.  In some places near the fish, add more of the Luna blue pigment so the color can "travel" out from the fish.

The Flamingo Fandango

I've been thinking a lot about the tropics lately.  A client has ordered exotic animals for a card series, so now I am deeply immersed in the rain forest. flamingo communes and plants that look like they might eat babies.

Below are some of the more benign plants.  I had several of these palms and banana trees in my yard in the Philippines.
I am using water color, acrylic gouache and an old fashioned sort of cross hatching technique.  Very soothing....a book on tape, tiny brushes, toucan on the ceiling, bromelliads on the brain....late at night.....  I invented the red berried fruit tree.  I'll call them beeble berries in honor of Little Lulu.

Obsessive compulsive bird that I am, I sold 430 POTTED plants alone when we left for the US.  I  kept repotting and repotting...especially the large leaved begonias.  It was life or death.  The plants would have crept into our bedrooms during rainy  season and strangled us all in their green vines.

Let's do the Flamingo shuffle....1, 2, 3, weave and bob and clash our beaks.....

The Romance of Flying Fish

In 1966 my girlfriend Norma and I flew with some other Peace Corps friends to Zamboanga, Mindanao, and then on to Jolo in the Sulu Sea via a smuggler’s boat.  We left at night with a case of San Miguel beer and not much more than a promise from a cute guy I met on the plane that this boat would get us to Jolo and maybe beyond, if we so desired.  Beyond was Borneo, which we seriously considered.  The boundaries of the Philippines and Borneo were so permeable as to be nonexistent, and if we had decided to go on to that Sultanate we might even now be at the bottom of the Sulu Sea or languishing in some harem, or more likely, as slaves in a house of prostitution. Since we had to be back at our school to teach in two weeks, the mundane trumped the glamorous, and I am here to tell my story.

It has to do with memories of flying fish, called up by this sumptuous illustration of the creature  by Aldovandi (1522-1605).

Our Jolo trip has stories within stories, but this memory is about a full moon shining on a glassy sea, and the boat churning out phosphorous in the rear.....and  flying fish, leaping and gliding along our boat like small winged dolphins. They would rise, sparkle silver in the moonlight and fall like swords into the sea, except for the few that thumped onto the deck. Norma and I gathered around one fish to watch it as its colors, rainbow at first, faded to blue and then dark grey. A shawled Muslim woman came up silently behind us and picked up the fish from the deck, deftly filleted it with a sharp knife she carried in her belt, and motioned to us to come with her down into the hold.  There was a small box of sand  on the floor with a brazier with charcoal, and she lit the charcoal with a twist of paper and roasted the fish.  It was cooked in minutes, and we shared a flying fish snack.  Chewy (all muscle, this fish!), without seasoning, but certainly fresh.

Later, full of beer and worn out from the excitement, I crawled into one of the wooden bunks to sleep in the captain’s cabin. The captain, while polite, paid me little attention as he steered the boat through the shining sea. Mild breezes came in through the open doors and windows and while the bunks had no mattresses or pillows, I was grateful for a place to sleep.  Twenty-five and exhausted, I slept dreamlessly until sunrise, and  woke to the sound of the captain singing a minor song, a high ululation in an unfamiliar dialect.  Rising on my elbows, I saw that we were sailing through a pink fog where flying fish were arching in gleaming loops of mercury, slip, curve and shatter.

 It was so splendid and strange. For a half hour I dangled my legs over the edge of the bunk and looked out at a gauzy apricot world flashing with our glittering winged armada. The captain sang, the fish flew, and  I almost forgot to breathe.

 

Princess Boatrides Painting and Sailing in General

I did this as a demo piece for some trade shows and it sails sedately in the back part of my studio now.

The princess is from far Cathay, but her crew are mercenaries, and not at all reliable, in spite of the vigilant old crow duenna. (with umbrella)  The dolphins, of course, take nothing seriously, and don't care a whit about princesses nor destinations.  So, the princess dreams on (about her lover? chocolates? unbinding her feet?) and willy-nilly, sails to a distant unknown port.

I love sailing as a metaphor, but get bored with the actual process. Also, I am a little vague about directional issues, so lee and port and aft confuse me.

 After I got out of Peace Corps Philippines in 1967, I went to Manila and taught in a little nursery kindergarten....art and music, two shifts a day. During that time  I tied in with the two Bello brothers, Walden and Dennis, and started going out to their island home in the middle of Laguna de Bay, a huge freshwater lake about an hour out of Manila.  I would take a jeepney out of town to the town of Cardona and walk down to the end of the dock to the fisherman's tavern and ask someone to row me over to the Bello island (which they named Ceilito Lindo).  It would be dark by then, but in the 15 minutes it took to get to the island, one of the brothers would see our light, and I could watch them swinging their own light as they stepped down the long stairway that led up from their dock to their stone house . Dennis would tie up the boat, and we would trot back up and up to the very tip of the island and the house. That night I would sleep under starched white sheets and look out an open window down onto the lake, and see the fisherman's sailing boats ...."armadahans", they called them, silently drift in the moonlight across the great silver lake like ghostly moths...their two sails swelling in the night wind.

Later, Walden and I and another friend, Dick Ng, went together on  commissioning our own armadahan, and Dennis supervised the building of it.  We picked out the proper keel in the keel making barrio (the knot holes had to be in the proper place since they were the eyes and the heart (corazon) of the boat) and when it was done, we sailed it for 2 years. 

As I mentioned, I am an indifferent sailor and the boom kept knocking me in the water, so the guys tied a rope on me so they could drag me out of the drink easily, dazed or not.

Here's a picture (damaged) of our boat, and one of me doing my main job....going out on the outrigger to balance the boat.