Portraits in Oil January 2024

Lately I’ve been working on painting portraits in oil, and it’s been a fun journey so far.

Every now and there there are old cigar boxes for purchase at the creative re-use center in Boulder, Art Parts. I usually buy a few of them if I see them so I can put my paint tubes in it. I suppose cigars and paint tubes are roughly the same size, so these kinds of boxes work really well for table-top organization. They wouldn’t be terrible for plein air painting either,

The other thing I often get at Art parts are sheets of acrylic plexiglass. These are great to get from the creative re-use center because they don’t have to be any special size or even clarity, and they are usually a dollar or less. I usually either turn the acrylic plexiglass into paintings themselves, or I place white paper/cardboard underneath them and use them as palettes, like below. My palette for portraits is as follows:

Here we have 3 daubs of white and a series of mostly-warmer colors on the left, followed by cool and dark tones on the right. The jelly-like substance that you see in the upper right is gamblin solvent-free gel. It’s the only medium I utilized for these portraits, and I use it pretty sparingly. It helps brushes glide more easily across the canvas, while extending the paint throughout. Just about every paint stroke eventually has a little bit of medium, unless I am working on details where I don’t want the brush to slip or glide too much.

What I found out while working on these portraits of myself is… I am very pink. My face is almost pink everywhere in fact and seems to be either pink or yellow when I really look at it. I didn’t have any cool tones except in my neck and in my eyes. My ears took up a bunch of cadmium-red hue colors and they seemed to be either red or orange.

I also don’t seem to be green, at all, I seem to only have pinks, oranges, or yellows. I looked hard and couldn’t find any usage for green in the original photographs that I utilized to paint these portraits.

After making each painting, I loaded the above photo into Clip Studio Paint and took several eyedropper-tool pulls from it. The colors seemed to stay in the carnelian-orange-red area.

I thought maybe if I kept eye-droppering the photo, eventually I would find some sort of surprising color, like green or purple, but I tried it maybe a few dozen times in promising areas and it seemed to be red/orange each time. I guess maybe one surprise is that my skin in the photo never registered as actual pink, it only ever registered as light red or light orange. So I suppose what I said a few paragraphs above isn’t true at all, I’m not pink in any way, I’m simply very orange-red with different levels of white.

To get the dark tones of each portrait, the color I utilized was Payne’s Gray. To me, Payne’s Gray appears like more of a mid-tone gray when printed on the tube, but in reality, it is quite dark compared to the printing. It made a good default unmixed color for deep hair shadows and pupils, and mixed with red it was a good hair-shadow color.

Once a good mix of colors is on my palette, it looks a lot like the photo above. You can see the heavy use of Payne’s Gray (dark blob on the right) and the somewhat more sparing use of the three white daubs. I guess in working these paintings, I wanted different whites so I used different daubs of white for different mixes.

The second photo I worked from I liked a bit more because I could see different colors in my face, like purples.

Overall I made six portraits of myself, three from the 3/4ths angle and 3 from the front-ish angle. I liked all of these for different reasons. In some situations I think I nailed down certain areas better than others.

Sketchbook Confessional April 2023

Welcome to April 2023’s Sketchbook Confessional - the Sketchbook Confessional is a blog where I review all of the art that I made in a month. Rather than a ‘to-do’ list, the Sketchbook Confessional is a ‘done’ list, where I can objectively see what I made without forgetting or getting too grandiose about it.

In April I started something a bit new - painting in oil on glass. I found some small palm-sized glass samples and thought they would be wonderful to paint on.

Luckily I was right. Funnily enough, some blogs on the internet would have one think that painting oil on glass is a doomed mistake. It worked just fine in my case with these glass samples. I decided with some of the glass samples to make paintings of old mining structures around Leadville.

It always awes me when I am running or skiing up high in Leadville and I happen across some kind of old mining relic. It reminds me how crazed yet methodical people were about mining the earth. First of all, they were at anywhere from 10,000 to 13,000 feet, in the 1800s, digging and exploding and sluicing the earth around. I imagine how hard it is to walk around at 12000 feet and then imagine swinging a sledgehammer or moving rocks around. It’s not exactly the mining scene in Zoolander that plays in my head but, almost? haha.

Anyways, I think all of the wonderful nature aspects of Leadville get a lot of credit and I’ve personally done a lot to credit those wonderful aspects with the mountains in my paintings. Mt. Elbert, waterfalls, animal life, and Leadville flowers are usually my subjects so I figured, why not talk about mining history in my art? It’s not as glamorous a subject and the pollution in Leadville is seen as one of the negative parts of it, but I think it’s better to talk about the whole picture than to pretend the mining aspects of the town and pollution do not exist. After all the entire town probably would not be there without mining - nobody opens an opera house at 10,000 feet for no reason for no customers.

I made around 12 mines total.

I made a few paintings in my Space Cowboy series. Eventually I want to do a bigger one, for now I made a small 4 x 4 inch painting and 3 x 5 inch painting.

I also made it out several times in April for plein air painting, as it’s finally getting a bit nicer out, and there’s this thing called #Pleinairpril that I was able to get excited about.

I’ve been trying out a new rig with a lighter easel and also using a cigar box as a palette. The cigar box works well because it contains the paint and it doesn’t slide around.

It was truly fun and challenging to get out a few times with my baby as well. Plein air with a baby, for me, involves double the planning and gear. It’s really fun and luckily we don’t have to walk too far to find something cool to paint in Boulder.

In April I also tried out using photos of myself as starters for the AI app Prequel. I saw Prequel in an ad and thought it looked interesting, so, I gave it a try.

I gave the ai a few photos of me and used what is called the “Watercolor” AI on the app. I thought this was fascinating as an exercise. I learned a lot about how this particular AI and AI style handles faces or what it thinks is pretty - it definitely grabs highlights on my face and makes them brighter, and makes my eyebrows thicker, darker, and more rounded. Which I don’t think is a bad look, only different. I think the AI’s faces can lean towards looking a bit uncanny or ‘overdone’ in some instances, but not all.

What these remind me of are covers of photoshop and illustrator magazines from about 2009 - present, many of them feature realistic face-bust portraits with, reductively, lines and flowers coming out of people’s heads. Which I don’t think is a bad look. I can’t help but think the AI has trained on covers or illustrations like this. I had a lot of fun with this and it’s something I can do while I’m rocking my baby and I have only one hand free or even 0 hands free at times. It’s more fun - way more fun - than scrolling news sites.

More on my foray into ai swimsuit photos here.

For fun, I made a book of the swimsuit photos and AI photos side by side.

At the end of April, I worked on a bit of paper art involving dragons! It’s been very fun to do this:

Playing:

I took a bit of a break from Gene Wolfe books this month and instead, in my late night hours after my baby goes to sleep, I play Octopath Traveler on Switch. Even before I saw that a sequel was coming out, I was playing it, and then I saw that the sequel was coming out and I figured I should finish and enjoy the first one if I ever got the second one. I also have that thing happening with Gene Wolfe that happened when I played Breath of the Wild - I don’t want it to end, so I stop powering through everything, afraid the thing I love will be over somehow. Of course this is silly and I could just re-read or replay, but that’s how I am, I guess. I leave things that I really love somewhat unfinished.

Octopath and Gene Wolfe are aligned for me because I started both in 2019, put them both down for a long time, then finally got going again. I guess it was hard for me to focus on things like this in 2020 and 2021.

As far as Octopath, I really love this game, it’s pretty to look at and the concept art is cool. I started playing it as Primrose, the dancer, and I empathize with this character quite a bit. I personally think the Allure ability is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen in a game, and it’s more than funny because the power of seduction is such a real one. Mostly what each character says after Primrose Allures them is the funny part to me.

I thought the final boss for Primrose was truly scary, along with the finals for H’aanit and Ophelia. I won’t spoil it even though the game is like four years old at this time, haha. I ended up playing most of the game with the four women characters as a party. I like them the most, though I also think the scholar character is really funny and pure.

I also love the merchant, Tressa. Everything she says brings me joy, especially when I charge her up to her ultimate and she says “Welcome Back” and when she finishes a battle “Time to close up shop!” idk why this is so funny and perfect to me but it is. I think Tressa’s story was the first one I finished in the game. The part with the travel journal was so pure to me. There’s a lot of purity in her storyline which is a bit hard to find in stories about money and trade.

My other, unposted silly photos of the game don’t do it much justice. Since I played the original Game Boy growing up and I still remember gray and yellow screens, everything on the Switch looks like some kind of holy relic to me, light and color pouring out of it. Every moment in Octopath is so pretty it’s hard for me to get over. I could really go on and on about this game. I finished the main story and hope to play the sequel soon.

Running:

In April I got a few big run expeditions in. The biggest run I got in was 9 miles, and I started stroller running quite a bit more too. It was exciting to do as we move towards summer. I’m still training for the Leadville Heavy Half but the runs are fun to go on regardless of any goal. It’s fun to see everything around Colorado greening up a bit for spring.

Plein Air Painting at Harper's Ferry

This Jullian easel has been with me for almost 15 years as it was a high school graduation present from my dad to me. It’s heavy, but it carries everything. Whenever anyone asks me how I became so fit, sometimes I want to answer “Painting” but I know they wouldn’t take me seriously, so I usually tell them I am just genetically blessed. There’s a part in van Gogh’s letters to Theo where Vincent is basically beaming at the fact that his doctor mistakes him for an iron worker. It’s something no one would believe after years of being pummeled by ‘art is weak, math is strong’ pop culture. Painters have to be incredibly strong.

Painting itself is an effort to understand the world, space and time, and to interpret it in a way that is interesting to others, or interesting to you. Sometimes, the only goal is to just try, and to accept that nothing is perfect, no art happens in a vacuum, flies will get in the painting, people will say it’s an ugly painting, but it’s still important to try.

At the top of a small hill in Harper’s Ferry there is a monument to John Brown, but the whole town is a monument to him, with a structure at the bottom of the hill being dedicated as John Brown’s Fort. Almost every building has a placard and a historical marker. After a while you realize how well-preserved the town is despite seeing what must be millions of visitors each year.

The coffeeshops and the restaurants of the town were packed with visitors from across the USA and international visitors alike.

Viewing the local stonework is also worth a visit at Harper’s Ferry. The fact that people used to make structures this way absolutely blew me away. Where did they find all of this flat stone? Was it chipped out of the mountainsides? Hauled out of rivers? Both? Each stone is like it’s own story - imagine someone laying mortar and applying these stones, layer after layer, hour after hour. In many cases, it would have been an effort of several months or years of piecemeal expansions.

I found myself staring into the details of each wall, and each one was unique, and built up over years with different mortars, different composites of stones.

Harper’s Ferry is a place which rewards a slower, more careful eye - which is easy to have given the sheer ancient feeling of the place. Aside from cliffdwelling ruins and other Native American structures, and there aren’t many old places in America left.

Wandering between the old rail tracks and the river, you can find this fenced-off garden. It isn’t clear what grows here. I struggled to understand why it was there - it was one of the few structures in Harper’s Ferry without an explanatory placard. I liked this - I’m one to go to the museum and not take the audio tour and I never read artist statements. With historical structures, since they aren’t exactly art, it’s probably better to try to read up and understand what a structure was, but I liked the mystery of this garden. Who knows what someone was trying to do with it? It’s fun to think about.

A few years ago I read a book on pictographs and pictoglyphs in the American West, and one photograph showed a man standing next a boulder with a drawing of a human figure on it. The rock was at the site which would become Lake Powell. The man was standing on ground which would be covered in hundreds of feet of water soon. I was floored at the injustice of it all - some artist had carved the rock probably 5,000 years ago, and here we were, burying the pictoglyph in water.

But then again, what else could be done? The artist’s rock was in a remote place - you couldn’t exactly haul it in a truck bed to the nearest art museum. You couldn’t even chip the rock into pieces safely and take just the slab. So, the pictoglyph stayed, and now it’s still at the bottom of Lake Powell.

It’s not hard to imagine someone in an impossible future diving into Powell and looking at the pictoglyph at the bottom of the man-made lake, or someone in an even further future walking up to it after Lake Powell has dried. Harper’s Ferry feels like that pictoglyph at the bottom of a lake - it’s a part of the past where people tried, it’s in an inconvenient place, a man-made thing which can’t be moved into a museum.

Related Blogs:

Plein Air Painting in Washington DC

Plein Air Painting in Leadville

Van Gogh’s The Rocks

Who wrote this:

I’m a painter and I make comics, I also travel! I live in Maryland-shy-of-DC. Catch you next time …

-Becky Jewell

Medium Moment: Oil on Yupo

On a total lark, I bought a sheaf of Yupo paper from the DickBlick store in Washington D.C. last spring. The ‘paper’ was unlike anything I’d ever seen.

Placing colors on Yupo is like putting the color in a vacuum - a color’s unfiltered brightness and truest essences emerge when on Yupo.

After working with Yupo for a while, you realize that it definitely isn’t paper in any sense - made of recycled plastic, it rebuffs water like a duck’s feathers. Colors don’t sink into it, they float on top of it, roiling softly, blending like a dream. It’s more like working on glass than paper or canvas. Think Bristol board but not made of trees. Like painting or drawing on Mylar, Yupo is extremely mutable. You can make a mistake in ink, and remove the mistake with a bit of rubbing alcohol.

Given all of this, I could see no reason why oils wouldn’t work on Yupo, where oil is like ink and turpentine works to erase like rubbing alcohol. That said, oil isn’t exactly advertised to work on Yupo - the Yupo pad itself states that the surface is great for watercolor, alcohol inks, and acrylics. No mention of oil paint anywhere.

I gave it a try, and spoiler, it’s amazing.

To get started with oils on Yupo I used Yupo Heavy (purple packaging) instead of the Yupo standard (orange packaging) paper. I tend to paint with heavy layers of thick oil paint and painting on anything less sturdy than card seemed unfair, or like it would end in disaster.

I hadn’t seen Yupo Heavy in stores until lately. (Sidenote our local art store in Hyattsville, Maryland is probably the most intimately-stocked store I’ve ever seen. I feel like this store knows my deepest desires, like it knows artists better than they know themselves. More on them soon)

To get oil to flow smoothly over Yupo, I wouldn’t recommend using anything heavy like linseed oil or stand oil. Winsor and Newton Liquin is the key:

Winsor and Newton Liquin medium

The painting above doesn’t even look like an oil painting, it’s more like a watercolor or acrylic ink at this point. Liquin makes layering easy and provides the mutability needed to make oil on Yupo work.

One part Liquin gives oil on Yupo a glassy, alcohol-ink-like feel, with all of the benefits of blending in oil. While Liquin makes oil paints a bit more like acrylics in that it speeds up drying time, it doesn’t dry so fast that you can’t go back and rework within 2 hours.

Without Liquin, oil paint can kind of get stuck on Yupo. It goes onto the Yupo and your brush just kind of sticks there - controlling it isn’t as easy.

I did not use Liquin in bulk on these paintings:

The first challenge is getting the Yupo paper onto an easel-like surface - since it is a sheet rather than a board, it’s a good idea to put the paper on a board or something like it. I used this wooden canvas backing as a support for the Yupo.

Without a decent amount of Liquin I had to keep brushstrokes shorter, and the model looks more like she was cut like a stone rather than flowing.

(Sidenote: the Android Google Pixel 2 camera is dope AF for taking photos of paintings and artwork. If things look a bit clearer above, this is why.)

I did like painting on smaller pieces of Yupo but for range, larger pieces (around 8 x 12 or so) work much better. It turns out you can get huge rolls of Yupo, similar to rolls of mylar, for larger work.

More oil on Yupo discoveries:

Will oil paint crack or split on Yupo once dry?

No, it bends as easily as the plastic it’s sitting on. Freezing weather would likely cause cracks, but that’s all I could think of. It’s been a few weeks since making my first painting on Yupo and it’s holding up beautifully.

Since plastic has extreme longevity (think of all the pictures of plastic in the ocean and its tendency to never biodegrade) oil paintings on Yupo could last for a long time. I don’t see yellowing as a problem, as long as the paint utilized is pretty good. I’ll get back to you in a couple years.

Does Yupo work for thick, heavy layers of paint?

The answer is YES, it works just fine and can support quite a lot of paint and impasto medium, up to about half a centimeter at highest. I’d recommend the Yupo heavy version for painting with thick paint.

The smaller Yupo surface worked well for experiments and compact painting, so I decided to branch out and try a larger size.

What else works on Yupo?

To be honest, just about anything. Watercolor pencil looks great, acrylic ink pours on and Yupo holds the color brilliantly. Copic markers work and since they are alcohol-based and the paper is smooth, they blend even more fluidly.

Related blogs:

First Yupo tries! https://www.beckyjewellart.com/blog/2018/1/6/medium-moment-yupo-paper

Paintings and Drawings of Cats

Real Cats: Bitty

The painting above I made from a photo of cat on a rock in a pond - it was such a cool photo, I had to ask - how did the cat get there? And, why would she ever leave the rock? The rock seemed like such a cool place to be, surrounded by water and flower petals. 

Real Cats: Marl

I wanted to make a painting of my cousin's cat, Marl, who is a striped cat with beautiful markings. It was fun to paint Marl basking in the sun on a checkered carpet, it was especially fun to paint Marl's little footpads. 

^ Here is Marley Cat hanging out at my cousin's place. 

Real Cats: Flash

One day in Houston at my grandpa's house, a mostly white kitten appeared and stopped by to eat the kibbles of grandpa's much older cat, Xena. Fairly common in Houston, stray cats tend to come and go -  everyone in the family was expecting the wayward white kitten to move on to another house, but the kitten decided to stay. The kitten would appear intermittently and would race about the yard, and so the family named the kitten "Flash." He was fully adopted and now has his shots/tags and is overall here to stay. I made the above drawing of Flash in the garden, and the below drawing of Flash in Clip Studio Paint. Flash is white, but I reimagined him as a cat in the shade. 

Imaginary Cats

I started out this series of colorful cats in oil with a sort of "Wayne Thiebaud Cakes, but with Cats" kind of take. The thick oil paint makes the bright colors stand out quite a bit. I'd love to do more in this sereis with non-pale backgrounds, maybe more with leaves/foliage or household surroundings. Overall these were just fun to make. 

Painting this cat's feet was fun. ^ At this level of thickness in paint, the paint takes on a sculptural quality, and I'm not even painting so much as sculpting or building dimensional form. I often start out paintings like this with a small undersketch in orange (so that it is easy to see) and then I fill out the full-bodied paint forms from there. It's interesting how no matter what kind of paintings you make, it all starts with the foundation of drawing. 

Cats but with watercolor or acrylic ink. 

For Inktober 2017 I made the cat above, what's interesting is people see a lot of different shapes in this cat. It's a bit like a cloud in this way.

Several cats also make an appearance in Tilted Sun, a sci-fi fantasy comic that you can check out on TiltedSun.com. 

October - November 2017 Studio Update: A bit of everything

This month I began working in a new format - miniature paintings!

A miniature of Mt. Elbert in Leadville, Colorado

Another miniature of Mt. Elbert - about 3 x 3 inches

Myst!

These mini paintings take about as much concentration or more as a larger painting, say an 8 x 10. Decisions just have to be better and more precise. 

I'm still working through painting my memories, many of which involve video games from the 1990s - up next is a painting of an Arcology from Sim City 2000. Here is the underpainting and the original Arcology: 

On the other side of the studio I have been finally working on something that has been in my to-do pile for months - lettering my comic, Tilted Sun. 

I'm accomplishing the lettering project in Clip Studio Paint (Formerly known as Manga Studio). Although learning Clip Studio Paint took a few painful failures for me and several Googlings of how to get text to work the way I wanted, it's been worth it. (I might try illustrator for this too, soon?) 

All in all lettering has made the comic more real. I've set up about 60 pages of the comic so far without any words, just scribbles of notes of the words that I wanted to use. Ironically this has worked to make the images more expressive - the images were working almost like a silent film until now. 

The font I am using for the comic, Sequentialist, which is a pretty rad font! 

The first part of the comic also took different turns than I expected - I had most of it written out but then decided to discard a lot of the first, second, x drafts, in favor of what felt better, or indulging "what the comic really wanted to say". 

It continues to take me a long time to work on this comic because writing and doing art for and lettering a full color comic takes many hours of thought at different levels. Oil painting feels like a break compared to it. It works for me to spend time on both, especially since paintings emerge into the world as physical objects, and the comic just lives in screens (for now).  So, painting is the day-by-day mini reward that helps me keep going through the comic. 

All in all October was a solid month and November is off to a great start! Thanks for stopping by on the blog, and catch you soon!