Carrasco Studio

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.                            

Offerings to the Lilac Buddha

I wish I was light enough

to climb to the top of my lilac bush,

drape myself

across its crown of flowers

and take a nap.

The Light of the Moon

This lesson is actually  about sunrise or sunset, and all the wonderful cloud effects of those times of day.  I don't happen to have any sunset paintings for examples, so this nighttime view of trees against the Sound, the far Olympic Penninsula and a night sky will have to do. 

The basic techniques...top to bottom, light to dark and back to front puts the painting together.  Instead of vivid background sky, I just used a "manganese? blue, went around some star spaces which I softened later with a scrubber brush and dropped water into the moon shape so it would bleed out.  When all was dry, I started laying in the foreground...working with a light lunar black and lunar blue combination and waiting until all was dry to do the darker forground...note, that I put a little sap green in with the lunar black in the closest tree.

Lesson 3, CandP watercolor lessons 11/10/09

1. Review and look at work.   Discuss complementary colors.....Demo how they work. Review graded washes.
...re-read 86-89

3.  New students....do graded washes on 1/8 paper.  Cool color on top, warm color  on bottom, 2nd paper, vice versa .
#1. Cobalt blue or pale pthalo  on top, raw sienna on bottom. Leave some unpainted areas for clouds. and let the color blend imperceptibly toward the middle (barely any color in the middle) show examples.
#2 a pthalo blue or cobalt on bottom and a pale auroelin yellow on top. Blend imperceptibly toward the middle. 

Pick out three gourds  and  sketch them, overlapping, on a piece of bond paper which is the same FORMAT as your watercolor paper.  Think of the negative space. Show Garret’s example   Do your designing on tissue paper (quickly!) and draw hard on the back to trace VERY LIGHTlY onto your cobalt blue and raw sienna paper.  Paint the entire gourds with a medium wash of Auroelin or raw sienna yellow.  Develop the gourds step by step, always thinking of where the light hits and the shadows appear. (In this case I used a little cobalt violet (transparent) and lunar black (granulated for the shadows...)

On the #2 paper,  create some “sunset” or sunrise clouds in the yellow sky with some soft alizarin crimson and purple ( mix alizarin crimson and pthalo blue or cobalt blue  to make purple). work wet with this part, then let dry while you work on your gourds  and put in a bluish mountain range toward the bottom  (read page 88 and 89)  Work back and forth between #1 and #2

3.  Old hands.. Sunrise or sunset? You choose.   Again, demonstrate how you can match value “tabs”
 
Read all through before you start.
 Wash one entire 1/4 sheet in pale auroelin yellow

  On  a smaller piece of WC paper, do some cloud studies while you wait for the bigger sheet to dry. Do #1with an orange and greenish  sky and the setting sun behind the clouds. (see page 86 and my example ....You can substitute a light value of alizarin crimson for rose madder)

 Do #2 with daylight clouds  with the sun behind the clouds.  Pay special attention to the shapes of the clouds as they recede in space, and the color of their “ragged” edges....look at values...use your tabs. Squint damnit! 

Think about the negative space (sky) and where the light is coming from (in this case behind the clouds), and how the sky seems to lighten as it goes down to the horizon. Soften some of the edges of the clouds while the paint is wet, and be sure to keep in mind that clouds seem to "flatten" on the bottom and become more narrow as they move away from you.

For the bigger sheet covered in auroelin yellow wash.  Pg. 88-89

Think of gazing either east (sunrise) or west (sunset) through a landscape of trees and far away hills or mountains.  In both, the color would be warmer and more intense at the edge of land.  What steps would you take ( write them down if it helps) to evoke the fierce exultation of the sun rising on a cold winter morning through the bare trees?  Or, the bittersweet end of a winter day as the sun disappears behind the mountains and casts the tree skeletons into sharp relief?  Think how the long shadows cast by early or late sun can “marry” the trees and their bases to the land ( and show the curves of the land as they are cast in long bars across the ground)  Remember, shadows are TRANSPARENT and usually COOL.

Work as quickly and as emotionally as you can, using large brushes until the end.  You have the information and techniques to do this now.  Be Brave.  Be Bold.  Go to the edge of your comfort level and if the work  doesn’t turn out, you can always do something else on the back.  Try to finish in this class session.  If it ends up somewhat abstract, that’s cool.  Like the poem below, "Make big shadows"
If you have to wait for an area to dry, work on your night landscape or try some more clouds or tree shapes on your scrap paper.

And here is one of my favorite poems .......

You, sent out beyond your recall,

go to the limits of your longing.

Flare up like flame and make big shadows.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.

Just keep going.  No feeling is final.

  Marie Ranier Rilke

Assignment:  Both old and new students read pages 24 to 31

New students..........try placing some trees in front of your sunset.  And, try  finishing your gourds.  If you like, get wild and crazy with the remaining colors.  Experiment.

Old students........do another sunset or sunrise if you like....place a grove of trees in the foreground, or a reflecting lake.  How about some fiery clouds?

Turn on the Night, CandP Watercolor class, November 3, 2009

Instead of bats in your belfry, try birds in your chandelier.  Messy but cheerful.

11/3/09 CandP Watercolor class, 2nd class

1. Review and look at work.....clouds....page 86-87.....look at photos.... shapes and values. 
Look at flowers...match values, look at grey scales...squint!  Show how a sweep of cobalt blue can  unify the petals...look at page 21.  Format is off...explain. Show all the colors in white...the lilies, the clouds.  Look at pigment chart....Why shouldn’t you use stains as glazes unless very diluted......add  all Quinacridone colors to stains list.  Show leaf chart.

1.New Students... Review color wheel.. Page 15..warm and cool, primaries, secondaries and tertiaries......make your own color wheel mixing pthalo blue, alizarin crimson and azo or aureolin yellow  ONLY. Re-read 6-15 Carefully!

Here is a very rough study of Pat Robinson's beautiful photograph of lilies.  I substituted a greenish blue at the end...ran out of manganese!  This is to show how a sequence of glazes can define form.  Think of the gathering of lilies enclosed in a transparent dome.  Each time you ad a glaze, leaving the top brightest petals unpainted, the furthest lily petals recede in space.

 

  




 

2. Night Moves for Old hands..... READ DIRECTIONS ALL THE WAY THROUGH FIRST!   Work on two 1/8 pieces and work back and forth. Do two night scenes..for # 1...follow Jan Hart’s book, page 23, step by step and substitute alizarin crimson for quinacridone magenta. . 

On #2, use medium value (check with tab) wash of pthalo blue for night sky but skip areas for a  white moon and some stars.(Show my examples.)Analyze  Negative space.

 When dry, go back and add a mountain range and put in a darker ground      Mix some alizarine crimson and pthalo blue  for a purple and add some lunar black.   Start lighter and  paint in tree skeletons.  (show tree shapes) When they dry, overpaint some more Larger trees with a darker value of same aliz. crimson, pthalo blue and lunar black.  Lay the pigment in with water and let the pigment travel.  Work deliberately...this is a two class assignment.
 

4. New Students..... Sketch a leaf on one of your papers .    Think of negative space. (show leaf example) lightly draw five minutes only!........using primaries to get all your colors....start very light..  Work back and forth.  Don’t work wet on wet this time...use glazes, ie., a yellow azo over a dry pale blue pthalo to get green, or a very pale thalo blue over a dry azo yellow. All the primaries ( a mix of complements is the same)would give you a neutral (ie., brown or grey or black)

Again, I'm placing my interior painting because I want you to think about the underglaze...auroelin yellow....and how it can affect any glaze that goes over it. 

©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.

Summer's Last Sigh...Watercolor class #5

There's a grove in Lincoln Park that opens up like a cathedral...the branches are gothic supports for the sky ceiling, the floor is laid with laths of green and gold,  and in the afternoon, the sun is a giant golden monstrance on an altar of leaves.

Water Color Class # 5.....

Not a lot of instruction for this class...just reminders of working from light to dark, large to small shapes, top to bottom, background to forground.  Remember, this is just a set of guidelines for traditional transparent watercolor.  With any medium, there are many different approaches. 

No pronouncements from on high from this woman.

Lesson 5.......Review and Landscape.

Look at finished assignments.....Show types of paper. Different weights and the challenges of working with each...and the hot press, cold press and rough with the different qualities...

Review....hand out “Maxims.... Value, relative size, grouping, negative space, etc.

Choose a Landscape from the photographs I brought.  Interpret it with your watercolor.  Remember, where the water ends is your horizon line.
Do a thumbnail first (show sample) of three values in pencil...light, medium and dark on the same format. (show sample)
Don’t use any color straight from the tube!

Show mine...start light...light to dark., top to bottom, small to large, etc.  Match the VALUE with whatever color you are using.

For the next class, please bring one 1/4 section of GOOD PAPER and two 1/8 sections of GOOD PAPER already taped.

Next class will be the last of this series.  Will start the next six units on October 27th....let me know if you are planning to join us.  I need ten people to make a class.

....and my Boston ivy is burning out of control on my concrete garden wall....

Light in the trees

I tried again with my sun through the late summer trees, and I'm happier with this.  I think I'll do a series of these pieces.  This is probably closer to my true self as an artist.  Not the subject, but the approach....a little messy, more emotional, more abstract. I can do the exquisite,  controlled pieces  for clients, but for this personal work  I want the feeling, not every leaf.  Transcendant yearning, awe.

"Oh how that glittering taketh me!"....Robert Herrick

©Jennifer M. Carrasco 9/25/09  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.

Perils of Pauline, or the challenges of painting in the woods

A lovely late summer afternoon in Lincoln Park...listening to birds singing, the high wind in the trees and the lulling wash of the waves in the beach below.  I painted for three hours and loved it....hidden in the weeds, off the beaten track.

BUT DON'T GET ME STARTED WHEN IT COMES TO THE SHEER ICKINESS AND SOMETIMES DANGER OF THE WEIRDO GUYS THAT HANG OUT AND RUIN THE OTHERWISE SERENITY AND CALM OF THESE EXPERIENCES!!!!!

Today I talked to another woman who was painting in the same area at the same time, and she had to call the cops because some creep in the bushes near her was getting off on the Highly Sexual Context of  seeing her paint images of trees on canvas. 

And some years ago, my friend Gina actually had a naked guy jump out of the bushes at her!  Fortunately, Gina is a fast runner.

OK.  I am reminded to paint with friends, carry mace and a cell and watch my back at all times.  It is a fact of this modern world.  It still makes my feminist gorge rise.

A malediction on these creeps. May their fundaments shrivel and fall off in the filth  of their own making. 

Classes, Yup! Plein Aire, Yes!

Plein Aire painting is a joy and an aggravation.  The serendipity of centering a mosquito right in the middle of a divine splooch of yellow and green, the popping and groaning of joints when you sit on the cold hard ground, the approval or disapproval of onlooking squirrels, crows and people.  The sweet person who wants to tell you all about how his mother used to paint (before she had all those demanding children and a grumpy husband).

There is an energy that goes back and forth between the painter and the actual landscape that, on good days when the planets are in proper arrangement, practically vibrates on the paper. It's fast and loose (mostly loose), so you are never sure what you will arrive at.  You also get the whole spectrum......the sounds and smells and textures that you never get from the lovely but dead photograph.  This embeds the memory forever, and when you are drowsing at the edge of sleep , the vision of this experience will accompany you to your dreams.

I still remember, in 1969, painting at the edge of the Hein Palace lake in Kyoto.  I was looking across a bed of iris, across the shimmering lake, to the incredible delicate Hein Temple.  The purple haze of the iris bed, the dragonflies skimming the lake and the polite whispers of the Japanese behind me..."Ah so, des ka" they murmured.

So, I sigue into An Event going on in the World and Seattle..........

Paint Seattle / Worldwide Plein Air Paint Out / Call to Artists
Seattle joins the world for Paint Seattle, part of the Worldwide Plein Air Paint Out from September 11 -13, 2009.  Plein air artists are invited to create their art on site throughout the city as artists around the world simultaneously paint plein air.
Deadline: 9/7/09
 
Details:
Seattle joins the world for Paint Seattle, a part of the Worldwide Plein Air Paint Out from September 11 -13, 2009.  Plein air artists are invited to create their art on site throughout the city as artists around the world simultaneously paint plein air.
Artists wishing to participate in Paint Seattle should complete the registration process on the Walking on Water Gallery and Studios website.  There is no fee. Artists will be included on the Paintout Map and can show in the Gallery on Sunday at the Artist's Reception and Exhibition from 3-6pm at 4333 Fremont Ave N, Seattle.  16 to 20 works will be selected by Walking on Water and be displayed until October 13.  All art during this event must be created in 'plein air' during the three-day event.
For more information and to register visit:
http://walkingonwaterfremont.com/


Deadline: September, 7, 2009

I plan to be down, for this event,  at Lincoln Park again, painting away.  I'll try to be more specific on where I'll be if you contact me via e-mail.  Feel free to join me.  No instruction or conversation.  Just being a Tree, or the spangled leaves or a patch of glorious weeds, and splodging and flailing away with paint and abandon.

And!  Watercolor classes Will Resume at CandP Coffee House..6pm to 9pm on September 8...will go in units of 6 classes for $120.  Contact me if you plan to attend so I can arrange for tables and I'll send you the details and Materials list  Come one, come all.  See ya.

Some of that Moon Paint

 

Mmmm, I do like that Daniel Smith Luna Black watercolor for mixing, drawing/painting/illustrating.  It granulates and doesn't stain....so it's perfect for modeling.

Here's "A Tree of Night" with compliments to Mr. Capote.  Somehow my tropical trees still look like Washington Maples.  I need to flatten out the crowns....the equator sun pushes down on the acacias to get  that distinctive shape.

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.....