I know. I know.  I’m behind already…not so disciplined as I imagined I could be.  No excuses, just forging on.  Saturday morning came around and then Sunday morning and then Monday I was called into work, which was wonderful, but totally unexpected.  Through it all, I managed to get some gesso brushed onto my boards and some under painting done, but this morning I’m left with all sorts of bits.  The nice thing about it is that it’s raining outside and sipping coffee and painting at the feast table feels like a luxury that most don’t have this morning.

I’ve slipped my new cd into the player and music is perfect as well.

Sketches inspired by an artist done this quickly have little in common with the originals.  If you look at the details of the lower left corner of mine and then look at Poortvliet’s you will notice what I’m talking about.  There is that lovely tint of green going through Poortvliet’s passage, where mine became an acidic yellow.  This is only one example.  Notice that on the horizon, the brush in the background of mine is a cool grey (again) and Poortvliet used a warm grey.  Let’s not even talk about the gesture of the running deer, leaving the middle ground!  The more I do this, the more I understand that I need to practice drawing for both proportion and the dynamic angles of the figures.

I’m convinced that my drawings of the animals and landscapes are going to be consistently different for their texture and detail.  This is primarily because of the tooth of the panels I’m using and the obvious smoothness of Poortvliet’s papers.  An artist needs to always keep in mind the tooth of the surface he/she is using as this has huge implications for the work.

I’ve provided an image here of ONLY three papers and the tooth.  You can imagine that pigments and media act differently on each, so the difference between a board and paper would be extremely different.  The difference between a masonite board and a sheet of plywood has the same dramatic impact on the image.

Poortvliet’s two images demonstrate the difference between an animal placed in the foreground and one moving into the background….larger and lower in the picture plane for close-up, smaller and higher in the picture plane for distant.  This is one of the ways that an artist creates the illusion of depth/perspective.

I also notice that I use a lot of pure colour…it has been difficult for me in this practice to mute colours.