Sketchbook Experiments- Gouache, portraits and plein air (Patreon)

Making good on my promise to post things while I still remember what I want to say about them.  I've been having fun experimenting with things in my sketchbook after a pretty long period of mostly digital art. 

The first page is all done on crayola felt tips, a Classic plein air medium XD. I enjoy how it forces me to be bold with shapes and colours, and not be so precious with it!

After that  I was weirdly inspired to pull out my alcohol markers, which I actually enjoyed way more than I did the last time I tried as a teen. I debated buying some more colours, since I mostly have varying shades of peach, but I decided instead to also test out my old gouache too, because I think it's more my style. I haven’t really painted since school (over a decade ago), so it’s very weird to go back to it!
I've been pretty inspired by Emily Hughes videos, this banana boi video and of course James Gurney who also has a YouTube. I dug out my very very old paints and tried to learn again, I tried a couple of years ago but had such a terrible time with them that I gave up straight away haha! I actually didn't know about working with less water each layer to avoid reactivating it and it's SO much easier knowing that. Last time I tried to add a thin wash of blue over everything which went about as well as you'd expect. I also find that working from reference or life is far easier to learn something new than to work from imagination, which I did last time, but admittedly I'm also always scared to draw from imagination in my sketchbook! It always makes me feel like I've lost years of skill, but it's really just because I don't have as much freedom to fail, so I often commit to a worse sketch than I might if I could delete it and start again.

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Anyway! I found gouache a lot more interesting to use than I remembered, and I've actually bought some nicer ones after doing these, because mine are pretty much bottom of the range and half dried out, so I'm excited to have access to more colours. A big limiting factor in these was the amount of paint I had, both in my tube and generally I kept not making enough when I mixed colours!

I suppose to go through the pictures, I think my second attempt- the face on the left was my favourite of the lot, I was being really loose and bold and not getting too fussy about it, which is something I desperately need to try to implement again. 

I think my last face (below) despite being quite dimensional and detailed, is my least favourite because I got picky about likeness and not being able to make the colours I needed that I spent WAY too long fussing with it. I feel like it lost the boldness that I wanted.

I’ve included the process for that one. It had a very ugly middle before I defined the jaw properly, though maybe people who don't know who he is won't notice how off I was! (If you want to see the refs, feel free to ask, they're all from films) You can see I didn't start with a pencil sketch- the only one I sketched was the 3rd gouache face and I found I actually preferred just laying down the basic shapes with gouache, since you can kinda push and pull the values anyway.

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The last painting is a plein air- I took my stuff and wandered about anxiously trying to find something not too daunting to draw for my first time. I think I'm going to have to figure out a painting stand though, because whenever I found a view I liked, I would crouch down and realise that I couldn't see it from the ground haha!

I'm so lucky to live somewhere so beautiful, and so quiet. A big worry for me was being seen painting, especially on my first ever try.
I did struggle with mixing on this one- especially making a dark enough black for the tree shadows. I'm a beginner at colour mixing, and often I'd mix the wrong blue or something and it would be a mess! I think in general I need to be more patient and let layers dry before adding more, and I also think I need to work larger, or with a sharper brush, because I kept trying to do detail and just fudging it haha!

I've got a makeshift stay wet palette (which admittedly doesn't really work very well), it's a tupperware with a sponge, and baking paper! The colours there are all I took and I wish I had taken my whole tubes, because I ended up needing more than I expected. Next time!

I'm happy I was brave and just gave it a go though, rather than waiting until I had the proper tools, I think the pressure to be perfect is lessened by using worse materials, and I'm glad my first go came out like it did. Lots of room to improve!

Also as I was walking home the sun was so pretty, I wished I had enough paint left!