An ink and watercolor painting of a plate of dim sum. (Clockwise from top left: pork bun, pan-fried dumplings, snow pea leaves, barbeque pork, and shrimp dumplings, with chili oil). A pair of black chopsticks rests on the edge of the plate, which is porcelain with floral patterns glazed on in blue.
The paint palette and pen used on this painting are pictured beside it.
I picked up a box of Platinum Carbon Black cartridges at a local art supply store yesterday. It's waterproof, so I thought it would be a good tool to have when I'm out and want to draw something to paint later.
I was holding out on trying Carbon Black because it tends to dry out from neglect in speedy fashion, and I'm a professional art supply neglecter (real title, it's on my resume). Fortunately for me, Tina Koyama's idle testing found that Platinum pen caps seal tight enough to keep even pigment-based ink wet for months. I had a spare Platinum Preppy laying around, so it's the designated Carbon Black pen now (and until the end of time, probably)!
I got lazy mixing colors, so I used a whopping ten paints (not counting white). I panic-added yellow gouache at the end because I didn't feel like the chili oil was orange enough, and I don't have yellow watercolor... Perks of only using secondhand tubes!
After experiencing some success with plein air drawing (as detailed in the tree-drawing post), I was consumed by my own hubris and set out to assemble a field painting kit. This is a well-tread road, but I wanted something small enough to stuff into a backpack or fanny pack.
I cobbled together a kit with a mint tin palette and a small tupperware container for water. These are attached directly to the book with magnets: I used a pair of small neodymium magnets for the water container and a magnetic metal clip for the palette. This setup has been working out really well, even in situations where I'm sitting on the ground or somewhere similarly uneven. It's not great for standing work, though, since the water needs to stay perpendicular to the ground.
A gouache painting of a pine tree. The underpainting is burnt orange and visible underneath the layers of green. The sketchbook is also displayed with the palette and water container attached.
This is a reprint of my submission to Salad Magazine issue 3. Check out what everyone else submitted too!
An ink painting of a spilled ink bottle. (The bottle in the painting holds the ink that was used to paint it.) The spilled ink transitions into a painting of a starry night sky looming over a forest of deciduous trees. The trees and stars are reflected in a lake. The sky was created by dropping ink in water, resulting in abstract blooms that resemble clouds. Glitter varnish was brushed over the sky to create the stars.
I've been thinking about my sketchbook in terms of "how" instead of "what": I pick a medium or color palette I want to experiment with or improve at and dedicate the entire spread to that. It's helped me avoid succumbing to perfectionism-induced decision paralysis because I just think about cool stuff I want to try instead of getting stuck on making a pretty picture.
Drawings using one ink and water. Left: A coffee cup drawn with Diamine Pick Me Up, a brown ink, and Diamine Safari, an olive green ink, used to draw its own bottle. Right: A tree drawn with Rohrer & Klingner Alt-Goldgrün, another olive green ink.
This is a reprint of my submission to Salad Magazine issue 2. Check out the other cool stuff people did too!
A gouache painting of an Eastern Tiger Swallowtail butterfly (Papilio glaucus). The butterfly is a bilateral gynandromorph: its left wing has the dark morph female pattern, and its right has the male pattern. It feeds on a white daisy with the dorsal sides of its wings facing the viewer. The flower is slightly out of focus and melts into the green background. The butterfly's wings extend out of the frame.
The painting was done using four paints: Prussian blue, cadmium red, yellow ochre, and white. A glitter gel pen was used to add iridescent glitter to the blue spots on the butterfly's hindwings. The photo of the painting was taken in a sunbeam.
