New Watercolor Painting

watercolor
copyright
Jan Gibson

I finished this about a week ago but am just now getting around to posting it. The colors look a little washed out but if I try to fix them in my photo software, the painting gets a weird cast to it.

Anyway, this is an Italian Greyhound that I painted as a change of pace from pastel. The photo references were lousy but I'm the photographer so have no one to blame but myself! lol

Changing the subject, we are getting our first snow of the season. It was spitting snow a little bit when I woke up about 3 and when I let the dogs out a few minutes ago, it was coming down pretty good. The temperature is in the mid-thirties though and I know it won't stick.

We rarely get snow but they're (who are "they" anyway?) predicting a colder, perhaps snowier winter than we've had in recent years. Of course they don't know for sure what the weather will do in the next few weeks let alone the rest of the winter! Maybe that's just wishful thinking on my part as snow is a four-letter word in my book! I guess I don't mind it as much as I used to because I don't have to drive in it or be out in it for any extended length of time. It makes the barn chores a little more difficult but otherwise, I can just stay here in the house and ignore it!

More Glassless Framing Experiments

Pastel Experiment

I've played around a bit more with the glassless framing and pretty much combined advice from several sources to try to find a method that would suit me and my way of working.

I like the idea of using the Golden materials as suggested by Gary Ruuska but dragging out all the air brush paraphernalia and the air compressor (which is actually my husbands and is noisy and bigger than I like) just isn't my idea of fun. The Golden products have UV protectants in them though and I do like that so I used the Preval sprayer per the directions in the email from Bob Palmerton. That sprayer is the cat's pajamas for the small amount of spraying that I'm doing. It's easily found in automotive parts or hardware stores or can be ordered online. It's not expensive at all and a canister of propellant seems to last and last. The spray is fine enough to give a nice finish to the art work too.

Since I have messed up so many Ampersand Pastelbord panels (and Ampersand isn't backing my experiments!), I decided to do my experimenting on regular matboard pieces and that seems to be working out well. The flower above is on a dark green matboard and I want to try a light color just to see if the colors darken as much when sprayed. BTW, the colors shown are pretty much the colors I ended up with after spraying. They darkened considerably and I did use progressively lighter colors but ran out of lighter colors that would work.

Teresa Mallen left a comment on my last post here and I wanted to reassure her about the Lascaux fixative and suggest she talk to Nicole Caulfield about it on colored pencil. I use pastel pencils for the most part which are water soluable to begin with. Colored pencil has wax or oil which would resist moisture plus, I read that Nicole uses a blender on top of colors that tend to change color or melt which preserves the color when sprayed. I may try that on top of my pastels just to see if it helps.

But, actually, right now, I think the process is much too long and too much trouble to make it worthwhile for pastels. Maybe in the future some product will come along that doesn't darken the pastel but will still seal it so that the art can be varnished and framed without glass.

As it is, I'm doing a pastel painting, spraying it with the diluted Golden Soft Gel as an isolation barrier, letting that dry then going back over the darkened areas with a lighter color (if I have one), respraying, letting that layer dry & on & on until I have a painting I'm satisfied with. Perhaps a landscape would be different as color changes maybe wouldn't be as obvious, but people expect their pet to have the correct color. Maybe at some point, I'll automatically know the light color with which to replace the color that darkens and avoid the back and forth of using progressively lighter colors. But, I wonder too if the build up is necessary to end up with the right color?

I'm not giving up entirely. I'll continue to experiment since I have all the necessary mediums to do so but I'm just not holding my breath that there will be a huge break-through in this area anytime soon.

Again, if anyone has any information about varnishing pastels, please feel free to contact me!

More on Glassless Framing

Well, I apologize for being a little slack posting here but I've been trying to find more information on framing pastels without glass. It's become rather an obsession in a way, but I just know in my innermost being that it can be done.

One of the questions I get from other pastel artists is "should it be done?" "Why cover pastel with a protective finish?" "Why isn't glass good enough any more?" "What about tradition?"

First, let me say that I love the look of a traditional pastel. It's one of the reasons I took up pastel in the first place.

However I don't like that pastel is so delicate nor the fact that great care has to be taken to frame and protect it. It doesn't ship well, especially to countries overseas. If there's a way to overcome these negative points of pastel and still retain the beauty of it, I'd really like to know about it.

As for tradition, well - what good is a traditional pastel if it accidentally gets bumped and all the pastel falls off? Doesn't using fixative to prevent this falling off make the painting less traditional anyway? Glassless framing basically just increases the amount of fixative so that the pastel dust is completely covered.

There's lots to explore here. I paint pet portraits mainly. I doubt very seriously if I'll ever be hailed as the next Rembrandt or anything close for that matter. The average person who commissions a pet portrait from me has a lot going on in their homes. If you've ever seen a cat high on cat nip, then you might be able to see the wisdom of a pastel painting with a glassless finish!

But, I'm getting off track here. My original purpose for this post was to publicly thank all the artists who have responded to my requests for information on this subject or who have piqued my curiosity to begin with. The generosity of artists in general never ceases to amaze me.

Nicole Caulfield got the wheels turning for me when she posted about the glassless framing of colored pencil at an art forum I belong to. Of course there's a difference in pastel and colored pencil but she had some of the same issues as I've experienced - namely color shifts/darkening of the pigment and the pigment just melting away. Her posts sent me in search of other pastel artists who may have been experimenting with this process to see if glassless framing could actually work with pastel.

Gary Ruuska, a contemporary of Nicole Caulfield, and an exquisitely talented colored pencil artist himself, was the first to respond to an email from me asking about his method of sealing and varnishing colored pencil. He began with Nicole's method but eventually developed a method of his own that didn't use the smelly aerosol sprays.

I found Sandra K. Jackoboice, a pastel artist, by searching for glassless framing of pastels. She was generous enough that her process was posted on her website for download. It was her article that gave me real hope that glassless pastel framing could actually work.

Bob Palmerton is the latest artist to respond to my request for more information on his process. Because his method is specific to pastels, his very generous reply was very helpful.

William Ross with the Pastel Society of the Ozarks also responded to an email from me with information.

I just want to thank all of them for the help they've given me. Thank you all!

Into the Light

"Into the Light"

Pastel on Pastelbord
copyright
Jan Gibson

This was done for a challenge at Let's Make Art and it was a challenge for me. It was a challenge because I haven't painted that many cats and this is another painting on Pastelbord by Ampersand which is a fairly new support for me. It was also a challenge because of the cat's face emerging out of the dark and into the light. I wasn't sure that I could get that effect right.

But, I'm fairly pleased with this painting. I'm not so pleased with the darkening of the pastel when I spray it with fixative. You may remember the little bunny that I did. I sprayed it with a common, rather cheap fixative and it also turned very dark.

This time I used the expensive Lascaux fixative because I'd heard that it didn't change the color of the art. I followed the advice of many artists who have said to use very light layers of spray and not to saturate the painting with the fixative. Unfortunately, even with that advice, the pastel still darkened quite a bit and also left my dark background very flat looking.

The pastel pencils I use are water soluble and I'm beginning to think that any moisture whatsoever is going to melt the pastel enough to darken it. This would render glassless framing pretty much out of the question unless I can find some pastel pencils that won't melt with moisture.


So, this little kitty will get framed the old-fashioned way and I'll continue the search for a way to frame pastel without glass!

Spirit Horse?

"Back to the Wind"
pastel on black stock
copyright Jan Gibson

I seem to have done several things in the past few days that are pretty much out of the norm for me. The first is the pastel painting of the horse shown above which just about painted itself. It also broke the artistic slump I've been in for some time for which I'm very grateful!

I posted this painting at one of my art forums and one responder said that it made her feel slightly disturbed because it looked ghost-like. I guess the translucent quality of the painting might give that impression but it was never intended to do so.

I think it came out this way because I'd been looking at photos trying to spark an interest in painting again and had found a bunch of carousel horse photos. None really moved me to paint them though.

Then, I've been spending a lot of time with my own horse as she evidently got tangled in a fence as her front legs are cut just above the hooves. She also was limping slightly on a rear leg probably as the result of the same incident. So, she's been receiving treatments to the cuts several times a day and I've also had to give her "horse aspirin" and a powdered antibiotic both of which she hates and refuses to take no matter how well hidden they are. As you can imagine, she's been on my mind a lot.

I think the carousel horse photos plus being with Bonnie so much merged in my mind to become the above painting. A blend of reality and fantasy. It's also similar to the painting of the dog, Lucky, that I posted here some time ago. Maybe that's the direction my art is supposed to take as both paintings came quickly and naturally to me. However, only certain subjects lend themselves well to this style and I think I'd get bored very quickly if it's all I ever painted!

Oh, well, enjoy the horse - perhaps there will be more in this style in the future (or maybe there won't)!

Finally!

Bindweed Blossom
copyright
Jan Gibson

Well, I've finally done something with the new Open acrylics by Golden I bought. It's not a masterpiece by any means but just a sort of doodle to see how the paints handle. I have a lot more practice to do to learn how to make smoother transitions and blend better but I'm very pleased with these paints and hope to do a lot more with them.

I'm working on a couple of paintings with these paints right now and I hope to learn more with each one I do. I was getting a little frustrated because I couldn't get the smoothness I wanted with them so mixed in a little of the acrylic inks that I have and that seemed to help a lot. I've used the thinner and the medium that I bought with the paints, but neither gave me the results I wanted. The inks seemed to thin the paint without thinning the color along with it thus making the paint more manageable without the streaky look that the regular thinner gives.

The drying time for the paints is perfect for me. They've lasted a very long time on my plastic palette - some about nine days, covered, although I've mixed more paint into those original globs and also have very lightly misted the paints on some days. As far as drying time on a painting, it has ranged from just a relatively short time to overnight for a thicker application and depending on the support used.

Speaking of supports, my favorite is the gessobord so far. I've also used paper and canvas and would use those again depending on what kind of texture I wanted for my painting.

All in all, I heartily recommend these paints and that's something from someone who never liked to use acrylics in the past. These are so much easier to use and are a perfect solution for those who like the blendability of oils but want a shorter drying time.

I'll post more acrylic paintings as I do them. I'm moving slowly (and am fairly slow at painting anyway) but hope to eventually do many paintings in this medium.

A Painting Slump and Arugula

I've been in a real painting slump here lately and can't seem to get the creative juices going. Part of that may stem from the fact that I ruined the little bunny painting by trying to finish it for glassless framing. It got so dark that it looks like one of those dirty, old masters paintings only without that old masters touch! I knew I should have left well enough alone with it but I was in too big a hurry to figure out the process to do away with mats and glass for pastels! I haven't had the heart so far, but I'm going to see if I can salvage it by painting over it. Since it has several layers of Kamar varnish on it, I don't know if I should work over the top of it. Maybe the best thing would be to just re-paint the piece from scratch!

That's the bad news but I also have a couple of pieces of good news.

First of all, the arugula is up in the garden and we had arugula in our salads the other evening! I also had a sandwich with arugula on it. I got hooked on arugula long before it became an "in" green. The owners of the place where I worked in the late 80's took a trip to Italy and brought some seeds back with them (I don't know how they got them through customs). They didn't know exactly what arugula was but knew we liked to garden so gave those seeds to us. My husband hated it but I was enraptured by that nutty flavor that turned slightly hot in some of the plants as they aged. I didn't think to save the seeds but later ordered more from a specialty seed company and now the seeds are even available at a local garden center so we can plant it just about any time we want. Even my husband has grown to like it.

The second piece of news is that I ordered the (fairly) new "Open" acrylics by Golden and they should arrive on Monday. I'm excited about them because they're supposed to behave more like oil paints and not dry as quickly as regular acrylics do. I gave up on oils a long time ago because of the smell but it was the first medium I ever learned and I always enjoyed the oil painting process.

I also ordered the Golden mediums suggested by Gary Ruuska for sealing and varnishing colored pencil paintings. I'm hoping they will also work with pastel. With the cost of art supplies skyrocketing (like everything else), it would be nice to be able to frame without glass and save a little in that department. The main thing is the time savings though. It's just quicker to frame when you don't have to cut a mat and backing board or glass and assemble all of that together. I've just got to work out the best method for sealing the pastel art so that it doesn't darken. There are new products on the market all the time and I'm sure something will eventually work.

Anyway, if you don't see me here for a while, you'll know I'm holed up in the studio playing with the Open acrylics! Maybe they'll be the push I need to get painting again!