Debbi Friedman’s Blog

Here is an installment after two weeks of work.  I approached the beginning of this drawing in the same fashion as the still-life that I featured in my blog post of October 15, 2009.  I worked in the background first, and then started in on the bowl from the outside in.  This will leave the rocks and water for last.  I’m  having a lot of fun working on this, but there is a challenge in the colors, as I’m slightly tweaking the color to a more “blueish” shade than a more “purple-ish” shade. There are no blacks in the drawing, so the darks are made by layering blues, purples and browns.  I am so excited to move on to the reflections that continue on the glass down into the water.

When I start a new drawing on paper, I jump right in and start laying out the drawing directly on the drawing surface.  Not so with a sanded surface, such as the Rtistx board I’m using for my new drawing of stones in a bowl of water.  The sanded surface is nearly impossible to erase lines from, so I follow a system that seems to work well for me, and I think many artists must do very much the same.  (I would be most interested to hear what others do when laying out a drawing on Ampersand Pastel board, Rtistx, or a sanded paper – so feel free to share!)

My first step is to create a basic line drawing – not too detailed, but everything in it’s place, on drawing paper at actual size, as below.

Then I make a copy of this drawing onto a piece of tracing paper, as follows.

Next I take the tracing paper drawing and layer it on top of the Rtistx board, with a piece of transfer paper in between, to offset the drawing onto the board.

Below is the finished product, a transferred line drawing of my future drawing on the piece of Rtistx board.

I’ve been working on this piece for a week and making good progress, so my next post will include a recent photo of the drawing.  To close I wanted to share something that  I discovered for the first time, which I know many other colored pencil artists have experienced. . . . inconsistent product color.  As you can see in the photo below, both pencils are Prismacolor Grayed Lavender, but the lead color is quite different.  Fortunately I had several pencils of each, varying shade and was able to continue without difficulty.  But it was a head’s up for me to always check the consistency of color when changing pencils.

I’ve started a new drawing and I find it interesting to note how different my approach is to this one compared to a similar one I recently completed.  Both are of stones in glass vases, but in the first one I drew the rock and glass first and the background last.  With this newest drawing I executed the background first, then moved on to the glass vase, and saved the rocks and vase interior for last.  This drawing also contains a water element; the rocks are resting in water in the vase.  In the first drawing there isn’t any water.  I’ve posted the comparable stage post below.

The new drawing is almost complete, and I’ll be posting a photograph of it soon!  Listening to books on tape/CD is really helping my output, especially when the genre is mystery/thriller.  I can’t stop working and can’t wait to get back to work . . . .

Finally!  I can’t believe two weeks has gone by since my last post, but it really has been a busy time.  We had a wonderful week of scuba diving in Curacao and man is it hot at the equator in August!  There are so many wonderful birds down there on the island including Venezualan Trupial, Yellow Orioles, Brown Pelicans, Brown Footed Boobys, Yellow Warblers and my new favorite island bird, the Bananaquit.  These little birds, called “Honey Bears” by the locals, come up to your dining table and try to fly away with sugar packets, drink your orange juice, or scrounge fruit off your plate.  We took to feeding them (for photographic purposes, of course!) and as the week progressed we found that a nice piece of watermelon with some raw sugar on top was just the trick for attracting lots of birds.  Check out the photos below.

Okay, one more vacation photo, just one more. . . . promise.  I couldn’t resist putting this guy on here.  My son found this iguana resting in the shade of it’s self-dug hole in the midday heat.

On to my drawing, which I finished today.  I really like this one, but like most things I work on, I feel too close to it right now to see it clearly.  I am really enjoying developing this body of work, which is surprising to me, as I originally thought of doing perhaps one or two rock drawings.

I’ve already started the layout of the next piece, which will be much larger than the previous drawings in this series.  I’ve been keeping them to approximately 9 x 12 inches in size, either horizontally or vertically.  I’ve decided to work larger on this particular drawing, and am starting out with dimensions of 15 x 20, although it may change some with the cropping for framing.  I going for a more dramatic presence and lighting with the new piece, and I think increasing the scale will help accentuate that.

Here is the finished version of “Balancing Act”.  I have actually grown to like the green paper and the way colors of the rocks look on it.  It was, however, very difficult to achieve certain colors with the green as a background – and difficult to create as many subtle gradations as is possible on the tan or blue backgrounds.  Any comments about this, or anything regarding the drawing, are most welcome!

Most of these drawings are approximately 9 x 12 (or 12 x 9) inches in size.  I’m going to start a smaller drawing in graphite on white paper of a stone with another object, and then return to working on the colored papers.

Another week and a new rock drawing underway.  Isn’t that green paper wild?  It feels so to me.  I’m not sure I entirely like it, and it’s difficult to control the colors I want for the rocks with the green base.  But it’s fun to experiment with these things, and overall I’m enjoying and liking the drawing.

We’re going to Little Compton, Rhode Island for the weekend, and the beaches are covered with these rocks.  That’s where I collect most of my rocks, and I plan to do some more collecting this weekend.  I’m always looking for interesting shapes, colors and rocks with lines on them, rocks that are very flat, rocks with interesting flaws, rocks that are almost round. . .. .. pretty soon I’m going to have the whole beach in my studio!

I’m very excited about this new drawing I’ve almost finished.  I love the glow of the bag on the white rocks inside, as well as the composition.  I’ve posted three photographs below, the first one is the start, working up the darks to establish where they are.  I don’t usually draw this way, and it was fun to do so for a change.  The second photograph is with the bag pretty much finished and the rocks waiting to be worked on.  I left the bag  “looser” than I usually work as I like how the texture of the paper lends itself to the texture of the paper bag.  The third photograph is the drawing as it is now, almost complete.  Just some tweaking on the shadows underneath the rocks, and maybe some adjustments to the lines between the rocks.

Since my younger son is coming home from sleep-away camp today, and I had an unexpected but fun trip to Baltimore last week, I’ve had to reassess my initial thoughts that I might complete 10 drawings this summer.  I realize that’s not possible now, not with going to the CPSA convention at the end of July, and away on a family vacation in August.  But I’m going to do my best to finish them by September 21st or so, which is technically the end of summer.  I have lots of ideas about how to proceed with this series, doing at least one variation piece for each idea, so that there are two ways of looking at, say, the rocks in the glass vase, or the rocks with a split rock, etc.

I’ve almost finished this drawing of rocks which I have entitled “Fault Line”.  As is usually the case with my posts, there are areas that aren’t complete and need more development and tweaking – the two red rocks, the white rock and the broken granite rock.

I’ve already developed my next idea for this rock series and am eager to move along, so I hope to finish this drawing tomorrow.

Wow that was a long break, and believe me, I did not spend all of that time working on this drawing.  In fact, I have had very little work time lately, and none at all this past week.  This drawing is basically finished; and as always, I will probably go back and tweak some areas for a day or so.  I like the way it came out, especially the light filtering through the glass vase, and the colors.  It was also a lot of fun to switch back and forth between colored pencils and Derwent Graphitint pencils.  I may try doing a drawing with the Graphitints exclusively at some point in the future.

I have another idea for a drawing of rocks that I will have to play around with and see if I can make it work.  I saw such amazing rock cliffs and formations on my recent tour of the Desert Southwest, and I have a vision in my mind that may or may not work!

It has been interesting to use the Derwent Graphitint pencils in combination with regular colored pencils to draw these rocks.  The soft tones of the Graphitints lend themselves very nicely to shading stones.  At this point, I’m jumping all over the drawing to get an idea of what it will be like, and balancing out the values and space.  Nothing is finished yet – the glass  vase, stones and bird’s egg, and foreground all need a lot more work.

I’ve started a new drawing experimenting with Derwent Graphitint pencils.  I was intrigued by them last winter when I received the Derwent commission to work with their Graphite Collection, thinking they would be interesting to use for a rock drawing.  Stones have so many subtle colors in them and lots of grays, and these pencils are graphite with just a tint of color.  You can also use them with water to intensify the color.  However, since I’m working on Canson Mi-tientes paper I’m forgoing the water, as this paper is not really intended for wet applications.  I decided to put the stones in a vase to “contain” them, and added one different element (a bird’s egg) for variety of interest.  I like the juxtaposition of the transparent glass with the solid heaviness of the stones.  I’m posting a photograph of the set-up, as this time I’m working strictly from life.  Often I will set up a still-life right on my drafting table and draw what I see right in front of me.

Other times I will use several source photos and combine them, using certain elements and eliminating others.  This was the case in the drawing of the Wellesley Public Library’s fish tank.  Below are two of the photographs I resourced from, as well as the finished drawing.  You can see that I eliminated most of the fish, and worked to create the composition I wanted – adding in more empty space and using the placement of fish and plants to lead your eye around.

Here is my drawing after another week and a half of work.  It looks like I’ve gotten a lot done since my post a week ago, but in reality this is almost two weeks of work.  I’m excited that the background is almost done.  The plant and rocks on the far right are not complete, and the water needs a bit more work to add in the fuzzy aquarium algae on the inside of the glass.  You can see in some places that I’ve added it in.  I’m excited to be starting the fish soon, as well as the message tape.

I’m trying out a new idea for this post.  Above are four photographs of stages of the next part of this drawing.  Each photo represents a different phase in the layering in of base colors and/or water to mix the water colored pencils.  The first stage shows the area I’m working on covered completely with yellow ochre, and part of the layering of a pale green over that (on the left side).

The second stage shows the entire area  covered with both colors.

The third stage shows the effect of mixing the pencils with water and a brush.

The fourth stage shows the next plant drawn in and mixed with water.

These layers become the base for the dry colored pencil that goes on top.  It helps me to complete this type of filling in of a flat color in a large area, cutting down on time spent building up layers of color.  The watercolor/pencil wash fills in the grain of the paper and makes working on top of it easier.   I’ve finished this area, and will post an update tomorrow of that progress tomorrow.

I’ve started a new colored pencil piece, and I had hoped to have more work done before an initial post, but I’m off on a spur-of-the-moment vacation tomorrow, and didn’t want to go another week or so without any news.  This piece is coming from source photographs I took for potential pieces on Wellesley.  As you may recall, my last piece was a Wellesley-themed drawing for the Wellesley Society of Artists 75th Anniversary show this spring.  This was a close contender for that show, and I decided I liked the humor and whimsy of it enough to do the piece.  It’s a view of the fish tank outside the Children’s section of the Wellesley Public Library, and they have this funny sticker on the glass with a request, and all of the fish are glub glubbing looking at you. .. are you being quiet enough?  I wished I could have held the “punch line” back until the end, but I was anxious to make sure that the lettering worked and was in place and not going to fade away, so I put it in at the beginning.  Oh well, the cat’s out of the bag!

I finished this piece yesterday (actually I have a few places to tweak, like the interfaces between the car and the background).  I’m really pleased with it.  It’s like a little window into a moment in time, capturing the feeling of living in the town of Wellesley (and hopefully many other places as well!).  There were many challenges to the drawing – the color changes in the sky, the trees in silhouette, the wet pavement reflections, the taillights on the SUV – all things I have never drawn before!

I’ve had another full week of work on this drawing, and I really like the way the hard lines of the SUV give contrast to the wispiness of the clouds.  And does anyone notice anything unusual about the license plate?  This drawing is about 12 x 8 inches in size.  I’m off for vacation in a couple of days, so there won’t be an update for a while, but you can think of me down in Tobago, walking the beaches, looking for tropical birds and scuba diving.  I can’t recall ever being so eager for a winter break as I am this year!

As I mentioned in a previous post, I am in the process of doing a landscape about Wellesley for the Wellesley Society of Artists 75th Anniversary Exhibition this spring.  The first piece I started was a fall view of Rockridge Pond, colored pencil on Colourfix paper.  I abandoned the drawing after two days of work, finding the paper too rough to achieve the delicate layering and shadowing of autumn foliage.  You can see that drawing below.

The drawing I’m currently doing for this show is a view of the sunset over Route 16/Washington Street.  Everyone who lives around here knows how frustrating it is to be stuck in traffic on Rte. 16, trying to get somewhere on time, only to watch the clock tick away as your tires aren’t moving.  (In fact, I’ll bet almost every town has a main thoroughfare like it!) I actually set out that day to photograph the town hall or Wellesley Library, but this shot really caught my eye and imagination. It’s colored pencil on Rtistx 320 board, and I find that I can get much finer detail with this than the aforementioned paper.