Gosh it's hot outside!

Victoria Day in Ontario turned out to be sunny and ridiculously warm (28C)!  First time in several years that this has ever happened - it usually snows :P  It was great weather for gardening and setting up the kiddie pool!

But I digress.  Back to what I should be talking about - painting the owl.  Just for interests sake, I took another look at the illustration board I painted on Friday and I noticed a distinct warpage of the board.

On the left is the board I painted on, on the right, a fresh board.  You can see the edges have turned up a bit on the painted board.  I don't particularly think this will be a problem, I just wanted to mention that it happened.

So, in continuing with the owl, I took the copy from the tracing I did last time and coated the back with some charcoal sticks I happened to have.  This will give a nice transfer to the new surface.

Then I did my least favourite thing and traced the owl (again) onto the illustration board.  Then, because the charcoal was very dark, but also very loose, I used my drafting brush to sweep the excess off the board (we meet again zombie owl).

Now, because I'm anal (and partly because I'm nervous to start painting the owl and have thought up a conveniently practical avoidance tactic), I thought I should repeat the painting exercise I did last time, but hopefully with better results.  I chose a picture of one of our lovely tulips blooming in the front garden.  This time I used a combo of natural and synthetic bristle brushes.  

I've only just started it, but as you can see I've already had some difficulty with the veining.  Ah well.  My objective isn't to get perfect accuracy for this exercise, so much as seeing just how well I can paint on so small an area, and see how illustration board will take this very wet technique.  I will continue to work on the tulip before I do anything further on the owl I think.  I don't want to rush things unduly and hate what comes out :)

Working with the Owl...Ahem...more or less

Ok, so I got inspired (and a touch over-excited) by the new-to-me artist Rebecca Latham, and decided to try out the "miniature" technique on my owl.  It just so happens I have quite the stock of illustration board in my studio (yay) so nothing stands in my way :)

First of all, I'd have to prepare my illustration board.  It comes in these huge 20xsomething sheets, and I figured I'd cut out some 5x7 cards to work with.  I knew I'd definitely want one to test techniques on, and at least one other for the owl itself.

I got out my handy-dandy (and also new to me) t-square, and my large cutting matt, and measured out 7".  I used my exacto knife to cut the board lightly and repeatedly until the piece came free.  I then cut the 7" strip into 5" pieces.

Sorry about it being sideways - can't seem to remember how to fix it at the mo.  Okay, so now that I had my materials, it was time to figure out how I was going to transfer the drawing.  The first thing I thought of was my handy-dandy light table (i.e. window), but illustration board is waaayyyy to thick for light to go through.  My second thought was to use my projector.  It's exactly perfect for this sort of thing and I hardly ever get to use it!  Perfect!

Turns out, not so perfect.  The image I want to do is smaller than 5x7.  The projector REALLY doesn't want to go to that size.  I can do 8x10, but not smaller without the image being so out of focus as to be not useable.  Okay, okay, I give up.  Guess we go back to the tried-and-true method of tracing paper.

So I took my image to the my light table (read "window"), taped it on, taped a piece of tracing paper over top and started tracing. (yay).

I honestly don't care for the tracing step.  It's very tedious and boring (compared to creating the image) and then of course I will have to do it again to get it onto the illustration board (yay).  Also my image wasn't dark enough in many places to see through the tracing paper, so I had to stop at least once, to go over my drawing to darken the lines (grrr).

Well, now that the tracing (part 1) is done, I can go ahead and test the illustration board for painting techniques.  I have only used illustration board one other time to do an image of lillies on an inked black background.  It was done mostly with dry washes, so I hadn't really gotten a chance to see what the board could take (compared to watercolour paper).

I found out some interesting things in testing out the board. 1) I really should stand when I paint - I get a much better feel for the brush and things don't look quite so amateur (even though that is what I am). 2) illustration board dries MUCH faster than paper - even when you load it with water! 3) the board takes a lot more water than you'd expect.  I tried to use as much as when I did the crocus painting, but it was difficult to measure because the brushes were so small. 4) the board takes a lot of water and doesn't buckle or warp the way paper does.  It acts more like stretched paper, but I've even had that buckle on me.  5) acrylic brushes really must be used when applying pigment to a wet area.  I was testing with natural hair brushes, and they kept lifting pigment, or water, or even losing hairs (grrr). 6) dry-brushing fur is not as easy as it looks.  Here are my testing efforts:

I really looked like I knew what I was doing up till this didn't I?  Okay so there's a lot of learning curve here.  I think I will persevere with this one though.  I want to try the tests out again, applying what I learned and see if I can do better.  If not - back to basics we go!