#30×30, 2022, Day01: Peak Generation
Have a look at my first experiments! Trying both ends of the control spectrum. That is – Totally out of Control! and Way too Tight! These are the natural extremes of my painting :)
Hey everybody! So it’s starting Today!!
#30x30DirectWatercolor; our online marathon of mutual support, in which we make one painting a day for thirty days. (And then post it to our Facebook group here.) (Or, if you don’t like our lizard overlords, just hashtag it #30x30DirectWatercolor and anyone can follow the tag on your media of choice :)
I personally am doing it a little differently this year.
I’m going to be doing a ‘daily video’ – (I guess that would be a ‘vlog’ right?) showing my work. These are going to be short, and more chatty less teach-y. Also it’s not likely I’ll manage to be daily. So I’ll be doing it as often as I can manage it. Other than this, I hope to be spending as much time as possible in the FB group, talking about *YOUR* paintings! Not mine :)
If anyone is doing an interesting project this year, please drop me a comment, and I’d love to have a look at what you have planned. Especially if you want to be mentioned here on this blog page.
Drop me a note and I’ll keep watch on your stuff this year – and help you spread the word.
I hope some people might take me up on this!
Ok, here’s my ‘explainer video’ about where I’m starting >>>
Painting en plein air, around Bay Saint Paul
It’s been a few weeks since our plein-air painting trip to Bay St. Paul. (Just a bit downstream from Quebec City). Here’s a few of the good ones. This is Grands-Jardins National Park. Painted from, quite literally, the parking lot at the entrance. You can’t be too fussy when driving around looking for views. If you don’t jump out at the first sign, pretty soon the day is gone and all you’ve done is drive around.
This is the mill pond at the Papeterie Saint-Gilles. A beautiful location! Sadly – we were solidly rained out, so I painted this side-view and will get back to the wonderful paper mill another time.
I have to say, as a long time watercolorist – if you choose to stand and paint in the rain, it’s pretty nice to be painting in oils.
This last one is painted from the deck of our B&B, the Auberge Cap-Aux-Corbeaux. This one is my favorite, because of the amazing view. (jk.) It is a nice view, but not that day :)
All these works are 9×12″ Oil and Cold Wax Medium on Panel. This time I used W&N Griffin Alkyd mixing white – which is a fast drying white. When mixed with traditional oils it does a wonderful job of setting up the paintings in a few days (maybe a week). Dry to the touch in any case. Very handy for impasto work like this, which might have taken months to cure.
Want to listen into a chat about Online Art Events?
I little while back I was chatting with Nishant Jain of Sneaky Artist, home of the Sneaky Artist Podcast, in which we talked about his event Thirty Days of Vancouver.
It’s a rambling discussion that touches on my projects #OneWeek100People (which Nishant knocked out of the park this year – doing 100 of his ‘tiny people’ sketches EVERY DAY of the event!) – and of course we talk about the upcoming June event #30x30DirectWatercolor.
If you’re in the mood for a little inspiration, in the form of a fireside chat about online sketching events, the motivation they offer, and our reasons for why we do these public marathons? Click into the audiogram for a twenty minute preview of the upcoming full-length podcast.
#30x30Direct Watercolor – Free Online Event Coming in June!
Hey all! I’m sending you the first reminder about #30x30DirectWatercolor – the annual event where we work together to make thirty paintings in thirty days. < Follow the link for info on how to participate! ]
I hope you guys want to do this again with us!
This year our event co-founder and painting-buddy Uma Kelkar has a special project for us.
Uma says:
“2022 is the fifth year of the #30x30DirectWatercolor Challenge. As always, Marc and I will co-host the event on Facebook. The idea is for all of us who partake to do 30 direct watercolors in 30 days of June. Direct Watercolor’s are paintings without underlying drawing!
Each of us has a different goal for venturing on this journey – for me, it is a study of diminishing light repeatedly over 30 days.
In addition to painting, I also have a research project, that I invite you to participate in.
Everyday, along with a daily painting, I’ll also be sharing a poll with you. Titled, 30×30 2022 Building The Art Habit: One Daily Question.”
I hope you guys will help us out with this!
Uma will be asking you a question that explores your art habit. She’s working on building new tools for artists, and would benefit from your opinions. Each question should take 10 seconds on average and longer if you would like to comment. She’ll sprinkle a few relevant statistics she has come across via her research throughout the month. – I look forward to seeing her infographics!
Sound good?
More on that later! You don’t have to do anything now, just stay tuned and that will just happen along with all the rest of the daily posts.
Ok, thanks :) And I hope to see your paintings pop up in the Facebook group, or, on your media-of-choice using the hashtag #30x30DirectWatercolor.
~marc
#OneWeek100People: Day 02 -The Moving Crew
Here’s another little film for Day Two of #OneWeek100People!
There’s a few neat things I want to show here. The most important is – to be ready to sketch at any time! But also – be on the lookout for things you’ve never drawn before!
It’s very easy to get set in your ways. To end up with an entire book full of ‘people reading on their phones’ or ‘my husband on the couch watching netflix’ because – those are the easy sketches to get.
They’re the ones where the people hold still for you. And – the ones you can get at any time of the day or night.
So when I saw this moving van pull up – I knew I had to sketch these guys – even if the subject is stupid – there’s nothing really all that interesting about guys carrying boxes! BUT – they did give me some postures that I’ve never drawn before.
It’s wild that in 20 years of life drawing class, nobody ever did a session with the model carrying boxes. I suppose that’s too much work for the poor model. But – it gives you weight-bearing poses you really can’t get any other way.
There’s also another neat thing going on – I wanted to put these guys into a kind of composite sketch – so – I went back and drew their van. It doesn’t have to be a great drawing. Just a doodle at the correct scale, (I used two sheets because the van was too large – plus a little scrap for the next car on the street) all so I could put all the figures on top and see how it looked.
Just a little game for myself – so I could see the figures in context.
In this case I took phone snapshots of my best figures, and collaged them in Procreate on the iPad.
It’s the kind of thing I do for fun, but it’s also the way you might do an illustration for some kind of reportage project. Grab all the figures as gestures – and then collage them later into a background that makes a ‘finished piece’ out of it. That’s just one way to make it easier to get people ‘in the moment’.
So I hope you enjoyed watching The Moving Crew – and – I hope you’ll be inspired to find something this week that you’ve never drawn before.
Thanks to everyone posting their #OneWeek100People! I’m going to head over to our Facebook group and see what you guys are up too.
Thanks ~marc
Apologies! Fixed Video Link!
Some people have mentioned a problem with this link so I’m sending you the video again! Sorry for the extra email :) See you next week! Thanks ~marc
It’s Day Five of #OneWeek100People, and, while many of you have hit your 100, I have been swanning about making pretty watercolors.
I wanted to be making 20 paintings a day, to be on track to 100 in five days. In fact, I only hit 20 on day one, then it was 10 a day for two days, then three on my ‘worst’ day!
That’s not not really living up to the challenge is it?
If the goal is learning as much as possible, in a reasonable amount of time – well – you really need to go back to the basics.
Does that really matter? This magic number? Shouldn’t I be trying to make the BEST picture I can every day? What is the point of twenty ‘lesser’ sketches instead of one ‘finished’ drawing?
It comes down to what do you want to be learning I suppose.
I feel like there are things I am training, by doing a lot of work, in a very short time, that I can’t learn any other way.
The hand-eye coordination that is developed by direct pen and ink – this is the same thing as the all-in-one-go approach which we call direct watercolor painting, and those skills in turn absolutely apply to the work I’m doing in oils. I couldn’t create the paintings I’m making today, without ten years of these underlying skills.
So – in the spirit of ‘How to get to 100’ – Here’s a short video demonstration of a pen and ink drawing.
I hope you’ll see what I mean. How a direct ink drawing can be a simplified model for alla prima painting.
It’s all about seeing the edges of shapes, and eye-balling proportions, and the placements of shadows. (Which create the illusion of volume).
Whether you’re drawing a line around a shape, or blocking-in with a broad nib (or marker), or making a watercolor wash – the edge you are observing is the same contour.
Learning to draw these shapes, or learning to fill them with color – these are two sides of the same coin.
So don’t worry if you’re not doing 100 full-color paintings for your marathon!
You’re probably learning more, if you’re doing sketches in ballpoint, fountain pen or markers – because you’re getting more experience with seeing, in less time.
So , thanks one last time to everyone who participated in this year’s #OneWeek100People!
And – maybe I’ll see some of you back for our next big event – #30x30DirectWatercolor – in which we work together to create thirty paintings in thirty days, during the month of June.
Take care, and we’ll see you over in the Facebook group. I’ll be around all day, congratulating people as they cross the finish line!
~marc
Day Four: #OneWeek100People, 2021 – Sketch vs. Painting
Day Four! Today I only did three pieces. Which is a bit anti-marathon-ish.
One was a dud, which I won’t show. The other two – well I like one of them! The other – less so.
I find these art marathons have a natural arc.
I start out sprinting – just having fun with it. Feeling a bit stiff, but enjoying the feeling of warming up. Soon enough you’re watching the images roll out under your brush like magic. You start to say, hey, these are getting pretty good – and gradually – you end up taking things too seriously.
Not just gratefully accepting the good ones as they appear, but straining yourself – trying to make great work ‘on demand’.
Loyal readers will know, I have an aversion to trying too hard.
You can’t make your best work when you’re concerned about success or failure.
The very act of thinking about the outcome creates an anxiety that holds you back from a daring move, that makes you afraid to touch a good-bit, or more likely, unwilling to stop when it’s truly great. You don’t always recognize it immediately. You hope one more (rash) move might make it better – and then – you’ve overworked it. You’re scrubbing-out or scraping-back, trying to save it – and you’ll always know you blew it, even if it looks pretty good in the end, and nobody will ever see what you had – before you lost your nerve.
But that’s the game.
We’re training our hand skills by running this marathon, but – we’re also training our judgement.
The more pieces you do in a row, the more shots-on-goal. The more likely you’ll learn to recognize when it’s time to push something – or – when you need to stop and let something stand as you’ve made it.
[Photo Credits to @uriah_forest and various unknown models]
I’ve used Uriah’s excellent photography as the basis of many of my experiments this year. Without permission admittedly, but – while I hope he and his models don’t mind – on the other hand, I feel a study from other artists’ work is fair game.
This is the nature of artistic practice. We need to look at things, and grow by the gradual process of absorbing what works for us and leaving aside what doesn’t. Any artist that says they’re self taught, or they’ve invented something from nothing is fooling themselves.
Ideally, we’ll find everything we need by working from life. But life today includes the constant stream of images on social media. For many of us, this virtual world is more rich and rewarding than our actual day-to-day existence.
There’s another balancing act there. The basic need to acquire skill – let’s call it your artistic vocabulary, versus later, the point when you should be thinking more about *what* you have to say, than the mechanics of *how* you will say it.
Ultimately – a copy is only a copy. It’s not a work of art. It’s a study.
So, that’s what I’m thinking about today, at the peak of this year’s #OneWeek100People. I think tomorrow I’ll just cool down and finish up the challenge with some pen and ink sketching. Thanks for giving me a soap box for my thoughts! I hope you guys are posting your work. I’ll see you all in the Facebook group!
Thanks, ~ marc
Day Three: #OneWeek100People, 2021 – Hitting Stride
[@lee_r98, Instagram]
Hey everyone! Crossing the half way mark for some of us?
Liz Steel and I like to do #OneWeek100People in five days, rather than the full seven. It’s a thing – she doesn’t work on Sundays. Which, I think is a very good policy for life.
So – this is exciting. I really haven’t done any watercolor [looks back at the blog] since the beginning of September. So that’s six months away from the medium. I have of course been painting in oils, and done some digital work here and there. But still – I always find it takes a few days to get back in tune with water-media.
[Emily Mack, Sktchy]
[Jasper Means, Skchy]
But it hasn’t been hard to jump back in. I have a strict policy to love everything I make.
I mean – I’m very critical of my own work. LIke – I can see why this one isn’t a great painting. But I think it’s crucial that we are 100% impressed with our own efforts. It is exactly as good as I am capable of being at this moment in time. The act of making something from nothing, this is an automatic victory every time.
If we don’t insist on this mode of thinking, how are we supposed to find our own voice? Decide what works for us. What is going to be intentionally imperfect, intentionally unreal – choosing to step away from reality, in favor of creating a new image we might want to live with.
[Photo credit, @uriah_forest. Model, unknown]
[Van Lozito, Sktchy]
This is something that I think can only happen during an art-marathon such as #OneWeek100People.
The process of working every day, for a week straight, (or a month – in the case of #30x30DirectWatercolor) – this does two things. It fine tunes your reflexes. The hand-skills of painting. Much like a musician doing scales. Painting is a physical skill that needs to be kept in tune.
But at the same time, the grind breaks you down. You stop caring quite so much about an individual piece.
If you sit down to make one single masterpiece – I think you can’t avoid freezing up. I get anxious about how it’s going to come out. I can’t be free to create by instinct.
If you’re going to make 100 works, you can’t (or I can’t) force myself to worry about each and every one. In this way, the unconscious is unlocked, and the work rises above the limits of perfectionism, to reach a new level.
I hope this feeling is clicking for some of you? Maybe it will by the end of the week. Let’s keep at it, and keep posting our work to the group. I’m interested to hear from you as you close in on your 100’th person.
How did you feel as you sketched your last figure? Think about it and let me know!
Thanks, ~Marc
Citizen Sketcher 