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Watercolor's so HARD!

Thursday, May 16, 2013

The most oft-repeated and least true thing that gets said about watercolor.

"Oh. You paint in watercolor?? Watercolor's so HARD!"

Always makes me scratch my head. It's this thing that people who've never even tried watercolor say. It's this thing that people who've tried watercolor say. And I think they repeat it because everybody else says it. But...harder than what? Acrylic? Oil? Pastel? A rock? Diamond drill bits?

It may have something to do with the fable that you can't correct anything in watercolor after it's dried. Not so. I'm here to show you how.

As an illustrator, you do a lot of stuff. You get asked to illustrate things about which you may know next to nothing. Before the Age of The Google, you were stuck with what reference in books and magazines that you could get your physical gloms on. And it was in this Age of Innocence that I painted a big brown bat using echolocation, for a Bird Watcher's Digest booklet by Rob and Kim Mies titled, "Understanding Bats."

I did my best, and my best pretty much sucked. I didn't know anything about bats, and I kind of made up the face. Maybe there's a bat somewhere on the planet that looks like this, but it sure isn't a big brown. Some kind of weird African mastiff bat, maybe. And those teeth? From hunger.

So Bill asked if BWD could re-use this and a couple of other paintings for a new, revised edition of the "Understanding Bats" booklet. Sure, I said, and miraculously, and after four passes through a 12-drawer oaken flatfile, I finally found the originals.

And was aghast. I couldn't let THAT fugly face go to print, with all I've learned and all I've loved about bats between 1996 and now! I remember it was 1996 because I was pregnant with Phoebe when I painted it, and Rob and Kim (then of the Organization for Bat Conservation) let me watch them feed their bats in their camper trailer in the parking lot of BWD. And I was all uncharacteristically spooky about contact with the bats and being pregnant and disease and stuff. Being pregnant will do that to you. Fortunately it was a correctible condition.

As was the mastiff-like face of the bat. Eminently correctible, even 17 years later. What you do is

you dip your brush in clear water, pool it on the offending area, and scrub.

You suck up the pigment and the bad juju in the brush, rinse and repeat. If the ear's bad, you scrub that out, too.

And then when it's all dry, you paint a big brown bat face what am a big brown bat face over the scrubby part. Better. Far from perfect, but not fugly.

And the whole thing looks a lot better for it.

Ryan Amos, Big Brown Bat. Note blunt-tipped tragus. If he were a little brown bat, it'd be pointed and narrower.

Speaking of bat faces, I've been doing some retro-research on the True Identity of Ryan Amos and Drusilla, the two purported big brown bats I took through this past winter. I finally knuckled down and consulted some field guides. Couldn't make hide nor hair of the differences using photos in the Kaufman Focus Guide, because they didn't show the tragus (the little process in the front of the ear); nor did they show the back feet of big brown or little brown bats.

So I consulted Fiona Reid's Peterson Field Guide to Mammals of North America, which uses her careful watercolor paintings. And then it was clear. Both my kids were big browns, with a wide, blunt (not pointed) tragus, and short hairs (not long hairs) on their hind toes. Yes, these are the distinctions we use to differentiate bats. It's subtle stuff, and I'm always questioning myself. Do I even know what I'm looking at?? They looked like big browns; they acted like big browns (feisty as all get out, and bitey too), but they were small (15 gm for Ryan, and 17 for Dru). And I wondered. Now I know.

Yahoo. Here's to watercolor painting, here's to paintings in field guides, and here's to the search for truth and somewhat improved beauty.

And making your mistakes into birds. Yeah, they're birds now.

Painting Imperial Woodpeckers-Part II

Tuesday, May 14, 2013

6 comments

Why do I mask all those nitty pine needles, and cuss for hours trying to clean up the boo boo's that masking fluid always leaves?

Because, with enough cussing, it winds up looking cool. Realistic. Ooh! Almost time to paint the birds!! It's been a long day, and I've got more to do on the habitat first. I go into the second day of painting, still cleaning up pine needles.

Those rough scumbled edges on the trunk shadow are deliberate. I want to make sure it still looks like a painting, not a photograph. I want the paint and the process to show around the edges.

I'm excited to start the birds. I always start on the feet. They're non-threatening, fun, hard to mess up, a good place to start. I have to get in the mood to switch from habitat to birds.

Huge claws, and from what I can tell from skins, they were pale--horn-colored, perhaps-- as were the scutes on the legs and feet. I recall Nancy Tanner, widow of ivory-bill authority James Tanner, telling me that ivory-billed woodpeckers had very pale, whitish feet and claws, so I go with her advice and my hunch.

Here she comes, emerging from the clouds. The strongly recurved crest is typical of a female imperial woodpecker. Female ivory-bills showed it too, to a lesser extent.

I try to convey how bouncy it looks in the video. I decide to paint all the blacks on the male, too. I'm guessing on eye color. I have always thought their eyes would be more white than yellow, though most artists depict them as strong golden-yellow. I tend to follow George Sutton's lead, because he painted ivory-bills from life. That's as close as I'll come to knowing the eye color of the imperial.

See how, in painting the sky wash, I've swept a little blue in where I know the white wing patch of the climbing bird will be? I knew I wanted that white patch against blue. These decisions must be made quickly. Wet washes won't wait.

Here comes the red of the male's crest.

That's why I've made him emerging from the hole--so I can put that red against the tree trunk.

Shadows on the birds, highlights in Chinese white stroked across their foreheads and shoulders...I think I'm done. Never mind the pinkish sky here--snapped late at night under incandescent and flourescent light.

The next morning, when the sun finally breaks through, I take the piece outside to photograph it with my Canon 7D. It does such a good job, handheld, that I can see the texture of the watercolor paper (140 lb. cold press Winsor-Newton) in the jpeg. And it nails the colors. Amazing color shifts occur under flourescent and incandescent light. Pardon the progress photos--they were snapped in varying light conditions (mostly poor) and some with my iPhone. I was working so fast I could hardly stop to photograph it. When it's going well I don't stop even to eat. I keep a jar of almonds on the table and keep going.

That's how I work best--with a wicked deadline. See the painting and my review for The Wall Street Journal here.

Or, if you click on this image, you can probably read it right now.

Photo by Myra Owens, kindly scanned and sent to me. Couldn't find a Weekend WSJ in Marietta...but some hard copies are on their way as we speak.

Painting Imperial Woodpeckers

Saturday, May 11, 2013

12 comments

I am excited.

photo by Myra Owens, thank you!! If you click on it, you can read it!

In their Weekend May 11-12, 2013 edition, The Wall Street Journal published my first book review, and one of my paintings to accompany it. It's a review of Tim Gallagher's excellent book, Imperial Dreams, about his quest for the most likely extinct imperial woodpecker in the Sierra Madre Range of northern Mexico.

You can read the review at this link.

Longtime readers know that April and May are crazy life-in-a-blender months for me and my family. To the usual mix of nature festival speaking engagements, teaching and travel, add the track meets of our two (ack!) teenagers, various banquets and ceremonies and functions. And then put spring migration and wildflowers and morels and the endless phone calls and now endless Facebook questions about baby birds and nests and what do I do with this bat/bird/injured turtle?

All of which I answer

So I wrote this review and the editor liked it so much he wondered if I might illustrate it too? When could I get a painting to him?

Um, third week of May?

Hm. Not soon enough. We may need to go to print earlier.

Um, first of May? (sweeping an arm across the drawing table to clear it)

Because I really, really wanted to paint this bird for this newspaper.

So I didn't fool around. I got down to deal with it.

Coming to the concept and drawing took a couple of days. Over and over, I watched the only photographic record of the imperial woodpecker, a video made by William Rhein in 1956. I was almost born in 1956.

I decided to paint a nesting pair. Why not? It's a fantasy, right? A what-if scenario. What if these incredible birds were still alive somewhere and breeding in the Sierra Madres? I went there to live for three days. At least in my painting. The sketch is very basic, but it's got all the information I need encoded. I know where the darks will be, how it will roll out.

I masked out the birds's heads, a bunch of Apache pine needles and branches and got busy.

Pasted that paper down and sprayed it down and threw on a sky wash. They come out how they come out. There's no going back over a wash like that.

Ghosted in a mountain range from one of Tim Gallagher's photos. I love the purples and mauves. And laid in the suggestion of more pines behind them.

I decided to put in a couple of big emergent pines to further darken the backdrop against the foreground needles. In the end, those foreground needles would take longer to paint (and correct) than the whole rest of the durn painting. It is ever thus. Grass, pine needles...big old pain in the butt for a watercolor painter.

You can see that I've masked the parts of the birds I don't want to get blue--their heads, backs and white wing patch on the climbing bird. And you can see the ghosted masked pine needles.
I have yet to remove the masking compound ( a rubber cement like liquid).

I put some needles overhead, too, to make it look more like what I saw in the film.

I can't wait to get to the bark of the Apache pine. It's so fluid and colorful. So I start striping varying shades of brown with a big round brush, just moving my hand and brush freely from the elbow, running up and down the trunk.

I want sun on that trunk. And the way to get sun on the trunk is to give it deep shadow. It really starts to pop when I wash in the shadows.

If I want the pine needles to pop, I've got to bring some darks in behind them.

Time to get down and deal with the dang needles. Ugh. I peel off the maskoid by rubbing it with my finger. It makes little plastic boogers everywhere. And then paint the white needle spaces. But most of it is cleaning up where the maskoid blobbed or didn't cover or just generally made a mess. Why do I do this? Every time? We shall see--in the next installment.

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