These first two are direct watercolor, which means no drawing beforehand. You just dive in with paint. That’s tricky on faces, since I’m still feeling challenged on people in general and faces (and hands) in particular, but it’s a good exercise. I’ve also found that I can sometimes over work a piece if I take too long. I’ve been trying different expressions sometimes as well, and the smile above followed a frustrating 45 minute self portrait that got way too overworked and frozen on me. (See below.) I finally just started over and did the 10 minute version above, using the information I’d gleaned from the long one. It’s my favorite so far.

I’m on a kick of self portraits lately. Partly self portraits are the poor woman’s model session — available at any hour and free. And I’ve been thinking about figures all summer, so these are good practice. They feel a little self indulgent, but last year when I was here there was a David Hockney exhibit up at the Pompidou, and there was an entire room of self portraits. I think I remember that he did one every day for a while. It’s an interesting exercise, and I’ve been doing that lately as well, practicing various techniques in the process.

I’ve also been doing them with drawing first, as I did in the overworked one (where I was also trying to incorporate architecture again). I found a new ink that I’m in love with. It’s by J. Herbin, a company that has been making inks in Paris since the 17th Century. They have small bottles you can try as well as the big ones, and I got a small bottle of amber ink just to test. It’s perfect for figures. It’s light enough that if you mess up the drawing, you can just move the ink around with your paint, but it gives you a nice base to work into. In the places where the line remains, you have a nice texture added to the sketch. Here’s a preliminary drawing in just the ink. I took a shot before moving onto paint.

Here’s the finished piece. And finally one more done with ink first and then paint. I’m realizing that it’s often the eyes that get overworked. I start with a big brush and feel quite happy with how the sketch is going, but then I get persnickety around the eyes and lose all the nice looseness and expression. So today I did the second direct watercolor (with the pony tail) to try to counteract that tendency. Still there, but I’ll keep practicing.

It’s been crazy hot in Paris lately. 98 degrees yesterday, so I decided to go hang out in the Orsay, since they have air conditioning. I did a lot of looking and some sketching and even a little knitting over my lunch break. It’s good to have a pass and be able to go in and out and appreciate a bit at a time. I got there early and really enjoyed the Impressionists before all the crowds got there. Then I headed for some quieter parts of the museum.

I knitted for a while underneath this St. George and the dragon statue and decided to sketch it after I’d looked at it for a while.

I really fell in love with this tiny Vuillard oil study, but I didn’t manage to do the colors justice. There’s a depth and a layering you can get in oils that just aren’t possible in watercolor. I enjoyed looking deeply at it, though, so even if the sketch isn’t right, it was a helpful aid to my seeing more about the original painting.

I’m having a quiet day today. It’s hot, the Orsay is closed, and I’m on vacation. So lots of sewing on my next to last quilt block going on, and a couple of around the house sketches. I found this new teapot at a pop up street flea market yesterday, and careful readers of my blog will know how much I adore drawing teapots. I’m also on a self portrait jag, so here’s one more of those. I was trying to get a little more facial expression. I remember the artist who did pastel portraits of my sister and me as kids alway said that “a portrait is a picture with something funny with the mouth.” Nothing could more encapsulate my attempts to branch out into figurative work.

I am always amazed in the Orsay by the Surrealists. I love their feel of otherworldliness that is so different from my own art. I keep thinking about their distinctive visual vocabulary (Redon with his floating flowers, Van Gogh’s portrait with the stars behind it), and I would love to achieve that feel in my own work without knowing exactly how to do it that doesn’t feel completely derivative. I saw an Andrew Wyeth exhibition recently, and he’s such a hardcore realist, but he had one amazing landscape with feathers floating across the picture plane in the foreground. It was perfect for who he was as a painter. As I’ve been looking at these details, I’m daydreaming about using them in conjunction with figures. I did the first self portrait on the right, and (aside from the deer in the headlights look — faces are still hard for me), it had something of that Medieval sense of pattern and symbolic space that I was hoping for. The second has more realistic space in it, but with the added Art Deco details I sketched on various buildings. I’m going to keep playing with this for a bit and see what happens.

I’ve been out and about sketching in Paris the last few days. I’m not trying to bring home a full show, which frees me up to follow my nose each day and do some experimenting. And also to sketch baked goods for future enjoyment. I’m using my normal 5.5” journal on this trip, but I also brought a larger square watercolor journal with real watercolor paper (above and below), which opens out to a landscape shape. It’s nice to push myself to paint a little larger and let the paint swirl. I’m using a selection of fountain pens with different colored inks on some of these (green above and brown for the pain au chocolat), and I’m also having fun with the brush pens that have two different strengths of sumi ink.

Today I thought back to the direct watercolor challenge of June and decided to paint Luxembourg Palace with no line drawing first (second one below). It’s a brain stretcher but also kind of fun.