Seascape Artist

Sunday is Mother’s Day – I went to the local art supply store today at lunch – I bought Dr PH Martin’s Bombay India Ink – two sets of it – lots of colors! I’ve NEVER used India Ink so this will be a learning experience. I’ve done just a touch of reading about it so far.

Wikipedia has a short article about India Ink. What I found the most interesting about this article was that it is now most commonly used for drawing instead of writing and printing. (No the “prison tattoos” part with a sharp sewing pin was NOT attractive to me – I cannot imagine anyone sticking themselves with a pin through wet ink on their skin – HOW do they NOT get blood poisoning and have to have their body parts amputated? – I digress – I dislike needles and poking self with pins is right there with it to me – now back to art & ink resources!)

I much preferred Wikipedia’s article about Pen & Ink – there is quite a lot of history information – some about Hebrew scholars and illuminated bibles of the 9th & 10th century for anyone liking history research – I found it fascinating to find out more about historical calligraphy – I have very childish handwriting – I was never good at Penmanship class – so calligraphy is not something I would probably excel at or even like … I do like doodling with abstract drawing shapes though – that is why I think I will like the india ink – it will be lots of fun to experiment with and see what I can create that is different from what I usually do – keeping an open mind about new art materials keeps creativity flowing at my house.

Mongo’s Ink Log has a lot of info about a lot of brands of India Ink – way over my head since I am so new to it and know nothing – it was helpful but I do not yet understand the terminology – my neighbor bought black india ink for his drawings last week-end (he did not get any colored inks) – I’d never thought about it before but I saw the pretty colors LOL … and I LOVE color … and I have a seascape to create as a gift … so trying something new will be lots of fun for me to do on Mother’s Day.

One neat family – kid activity for use with these inks I found was at Family Fun – Blow Painting – my grandson is coming over tomorrow for awhile … I need straws … he would love doing this! I don’t think I have any newspaper but we could go out into the backyard – but I will have to keep the puppy inside – or the nearly white puppy will be covered in various ink colors! A variation of this would be to use q-tips to paint with as the brush too! …. hmmmm …. I wonder how a seascape created with india ink and q-tips would look? That is a very intriguing idea! Maybe I will try that and find out – if it turns out good .. I will have my gift painting done and ready to dry, mat & frame!

I found an article about suminagashi by Nita Leland – I’d never heard of it and I am not really sure what it actually is even now (I enjoyed her article – she has a nice voice – she has been teaching watercolors for many years – she is interested in lots of things – very interesting place to read) – marbling paper with water & ink somehow – this is not for me – I’d have a real mess and I like the straw or q-tip idea much better than dipping paper into fluid and then letting it dry – perhaps part of my reasoning is because my grandson has been having me do that more or less with his paintings since he was little – they were always dripping wet and needing put on newspaper to dry – until I got the magic watercolor pencils! Much less mess … he likes drawing with them and he does not even want water to put on the drawing many times.

I will have to do a few different searches to discover more info about India Ink – I do not think the search terms I used were very good for the info I was looking for … but it was all worth my time though because I found things I didn’t know I wanted to know about this new-to-me art material until I found & read about them.

A lady at work is retiring next month – I have decided that I need to paint her a seascape painting but I am not sure yet what exactly to paint … so I am in the planning stages … for me, that means I will look at lots of ocean and sea reference photos and see what colors and format I think will work best for me to give to her.

I’ve already decided that I want to do a large watercolor for her – 18″ x 24″ – though I plan on it being a vignette type in the middle of the paper. I went to Hobby Lobby this week-end to get paper to wrap my grandson’s birthday present – I had to look at art materials while I was there {grin} just in case there might be something I wanted that I do not have. Sure enough … they had a clearance book that I decided I wanted.

The book is about keeping a watercolor sketchbook. I haven’t read it yet but I did leaf through it some and it looks really interesting.

Today I went to my daughter’s for cake for my grandson’s birthday even though his birthday is not until Wednesday – he has football practice on Wednesday anyway and they plan to take him out to eat as well – he isn’t getting his birthday presents from me until Wednesday – he got 1 present today – his step-brother was there this week-end and they wanted him to share in celebrating my grandson’s birthday.

Anyway, that is only one of the reasons I did not get it read from cover to cover today. The name of the book is “Keeping a Watercolor Sketchbook” by Brenda Swenson – it is a Walter Foster Artist’s Libray Series book. Here are some of the highlights from it that have to do with seascape painting – only because a lighthouse is the illustration probably but close enough in my mind.

On page 12 of the book, it talks about shape & corresponding forms. One of the pictures illustrated is a lighthouse. It doesn’t say which shape and form are the lighthouse but to me, the shape is two ovals on a rectangle which makes for a cylinder … until I started seeing these kinds of shapes in objects, I could not get any buildings to ever look even close to “right” when trying to sketch them … when I’m in a hurry … I still just jot down a quick impression but it is enough for me to sketch it much better and true to life in an actual painting because I sketch the shapes instead of trying to get the “reality” without building it.

On page 14, there is another lighthouse sketch that is more developed with shading and details instead of basic shapes / forms – the topic of discussion is about using visual shorthand in your sketchbook and how it needs to make sense to you even if no one else would ever understand it. This is good advice – I tend to write my self notes about the important things I do not want to forget as well as try to indicate where the shading was that I noticed in the light and how things overlap each other – in one sketch I have … I did the background then put the tree over it so I could see what would not be seen in a finished painting to know what I was taking out and to decide if I wanted it there or to move the tree to show some of the background in that spot. The sketch looks a little unusual to anyone else but I know what I was trying to get down to jog my memory later in the studio when I pull the sketch out to create a painting based on it.

On page 37, there is a lovely fully developed color sketch as well as a photograph of the lighthouse the sketches appear to have been based upon (to my eye anyway). The topic is about capturing the spirit of your journeys, vacations, trips here & there and how your sketches of the area may capture flavor and mood that a camera just cannot capture. I find that sketches done on-site many times will give me enough clues to get that flavor in a studio painting later that I would never remember from just looking at a photograph. I do not try to recreate detail by detail paintings anyway so for me … the mood, the colors … the feelings … the weather … all are very important to me later and the sketch will help me find it within my memory whereas the photo images are better for me to use as shapes such as the actual shapes of tree branches and how they make patterns against the sky perhaps if that is what captured my imagination about the scene.

Try to keep your sketchbook with you handy where-ever you go during your regular day to day life – that way if you find something you want to quick sketch for later … you will have it there and handy – before I started carrying mine with me in the car, I would find myself wishing I had one so I could jot down something interesting I saw on the way to work or that I noticed at lunch … don’t just make it something available only on vacations or special trips or outings to sketch on location.

It doesn’t matter if you use watercolors, watercolor pencils like me, ball point ink pens, markers, a school pencil or a set of crayons in your sketchbook – if you put in the sketches .. .they will capture moments of your life for later … that you can paint in the studio or that you can just remember the moment without creating a painting from the sketch. Right now, I have given all my sketches in my car-sketchbook titles as well as signing them. I am doing this on purpose as a reminder to myself that even my quick sketches are important to me and deserve my respect even if they are not something that I would want to put up for sale … though several are really good and would appear to be finished paintings to someone else and they capture something … special … to me anyway.