Idle Minutes

Have you ever made a start with unfamiliar art supplies and thought that what you were drawing was horrible? So you just sort of wander away from what you were trying to draw, but you keep doodling at it.

Shapes get out of whack perhaps, maybe a mountain takes on a not so realistic shape. Then you stop, take a look and think to yourself, “This looks really baaaaaad. I wonder what would happen if I used……..”

That’s what this little drawing, or painting, or whatever it is, came from. A drawing gone bad with art supplies I’d never really used before.

I started with Faber-Castel Pitt Art Pens. You know, brush markers.

I thought “Yuk. These markers look horrible on watercolor paper. The colors are all weak and there’s no contrast.”

But I finished the marker drawing anyway and had a value sketch in color if nothing else.

Then I thought, “I’ll go over it with colored pencils.” I dug out my colored pencils but they were watercolor pencils.

I started scratching color over the markers anyway and thought, “Yeee-uk. This is really getting much worse. I’m trashing this one.”

But I kept on scrubbing watercolor pencil layers over the markers anyway. Still, it looked really bad. “Ready for the trash for sure now.” I thought.

Just before I trashed it, I decided to apply water. They were, after all, watercolor pencils.

KABOOM! the whole dang thing came to life. I had put on so much watercolor pencil that it acted like gouache (I think. I’ve never used gouache). It wasn’t transparent color like watercolor. I pushed the color around a bit to mostly cover the marker crap.

Next I added the ink…and I’ll be darned if I didn’t have a sort of cartoony looking landscape on my hands.

Now I wouldn’t begin to know how to apply the technique to a real subject. And honestly, I’m not even sure I like it. But it just goes to show you…don’t give up when you get frustrated. Sometimes the end result is tolerable and in the process you learn something.