Jeff Watts on the Reilly Method, Gouache painting and Tiling to transition to oils

I just discovered Jeff Watts' Youtube channel, where he posts some freebies called the Friday Night and Wednesday Night Workshops. They're basically 3 hour demos showing the kind of stuff he teaches at the atelier,  just not going into as much detail. This guy can really yak it up, even while he's drawing. Which is a good thing for a teacher actually.

I wanted to jot a quick note about this - he talks about "Tiling", which is painting in flat shapes to be blended later, which in the Reilly method is called the Poster. What I didn't realize is that there's a definite progression to learning this stuff - you start by doing what Watts called Quicksketch drawing (apparently similar to Vilppu's quicksketch as well as the Reilly figure drawing method, but modified further) then you transition through gouache painting, using the tiling method, and when you can do that in the more forgiving water based medium of gouache then you're ready for oil.

Guardians

Really drawing chunky now. Using the oil brush big - like drawing with fat charcoal.

Note - I'm using the high flow, dry edges oil brush (derp!) but increased to 55 pixels. Once I do that for some reason I can get really thin lines with it using low pressure, can't seem to do that @ 48 pixels, which is the default size. Weird but cool.

Gestures + new basement easel (the Leaner)

 

I found a half-sized pad of rough newsprint, so I did these using some compressed charcoal. I really like using it, though I need to learn to control my shading. The one above was the last, the 5 minute pose (Croquis Cafe) (and I was going by their timing today). It's my favorite, you can see I drew a rough triangular bounding box first and took a few moments to think about what I wanted to exaggerate and how.

And I went back and reworked these a bit after taking the original pics (didn't post all the originals - if it isn't posted it didn't look good):

Oh, almost forgot - here's one I did yesterday (yeah, another one-drawing-day lol) with a chisel point sharpie.

Some pics showing the building of the new easel - it's just a flat frame that leans against the board I clamp to the table.

Got it all glued and screwed up now and it's solid as a rock. Though at first it was a swiveling parallelogram - it could lean one way or the other with the horizontal planks remaining level lol! Had to attach a big rectangular piece of thin masonite to the back with several screws to keep it all squared up. And now I need to take the end of one leg to the belt sander to get it perfectly level. Need to get a pic of the finished thing.

It's made from some old canvas stretcher bars from the art school days I never ended up using. 

Secret cache of long lost drawings!!!

I was looking around for materials for cobbling together a new easel and saw a big envelope from Allen Spiegel Fine Arts (undoubtedly had a Kent Williams book in it at one time) and I wondered what the heck was in it. Turned out to be a bunch of drawings from 99 and 2000 - a really good period for me when I was heavily comic book inspired and buying them all the time. I was also drawing exclusively with the Derwent water-soluable sketch pencils, which I used to love to death. I declared them my favorite pencils and used them for everything - the  lead is so rich and dark and goes on so smooth. I didn't like actually wetting them though - just drew dry with them. Get them wet and the graphite turns way way darker - couldn't control it.

Anyway, here they are - featuring a couple of very familiar characters:

Lol! When I first tried to draw this I couldn't handle the perspective and foreshortening at one go, so I had to first draw him front-on, then I was able to do this. --That's front on to his chest - side view on his face.

This period ended for me shortly after - everything changed in 2001. My sister gave me her old computer when she got a new one and I entered the internet age. I discovered a site dedicated to stopmotion animation, my great obsession, and I decided that was what I was going to do, and that I couldn't have 2 time consuming hobbies, so drawing/painting had to go.

This was when I actually came up with the idea to do a series of paintings of Fafhrd and the Mouser and use them to push my skills, to leane how to design characters and create a portfolio of paintings that would hopefully see me through to pro quality. Unfortunately as I say, it all ended very soon after, until October of 2012 when I decided it was time to get back into art and started this blog.

Force-tural drawing #1 - ordered a new easel, and busting out the compressed charcoal sticks

I was dismayed to discover I had exactly one more sheet of newsprint left! I ordered more, in fact after ordering 2 more pads, I decided to get serious and order a shitload of loose sheets - buying in bulk FTW!! So much cheaper that way. I guess I'll find a box to keep the drawings in.

Anyway, I'm really stoked at how well this 1st attempt went!! I had the video freeze-framed @ Croquis Cafe and didn't time myself - I'm trying to learn how to do something new here, not set speed records. That needs to be done slowly and deliberately, with Deliberation Aforethought (close relative to Malice). So I looked at the image for a while, deciding how to exaggerate, thinking about bent triangles and curves etc, and decided to exaggerate the teardrop/pear shape of the torso and the size of the hips. Sketched in some light lines first as guides, then drew slowly and deliberately, but fast enough to get that nice loose line quality. I guess I just took the time to decide exactly where I wanted each line to start and stop, and were it needed to visit along the journey. Then I committed and scribed my line (old Architectural Rendering term from high school). Really surprised how well it went - probably beginners' luck.

I considered flipping the pad over and drawing on the backs of all the sheets, but that would result in charcoal from old drawings transferring onto new ones and vise verse. Screw it - I'll wait till the new paper comes in. Meanwhile I need to get back to my Bridgeman studies and regular figure drawing, which can be on smaller paper. It sucks though, right when I'm super-stoked to do this!! Aint that the way it goes?

I also decided I need a good freestanding easel for the upstairs studio so I ordered one off Amazon - I'll post a link to it later.

Aaaannnd - I got tired of all the problems I've been having with these damn charcoal pencils - using a 2B today and it was too hard to draw with. So I dug out an old General's box I had got my last set of charcoal pencils in - it has a section with compressed charcoal sticks that were starting to look pretty damn good to me. When you're drawing as big as I am now (one sketch per sheet @ 18x24) the sticks work a lot better than scrawny little pencils, no need to sharpen them up and get wood shavings all over the floor.

The Clampeasel

Made from stuff I had laying around (you can NEVER have too many clamps, in fact you can never have enough) and pronounced clam-PEEZ-ul, all one word. Here it's in standby position. tucked away under the table until I need it.

1st position, for a small drawing board and sketchpad, or the tablet if I choose to do that (I never do, it's always in the lap)

2nd position, for the big newsprint pad, with its same-size drawing board that lives inside it.

For that purpose I needed to modify it (I've had the basic clampeasel configuration in use for some time now). I keep the right clamp always attached to the 2x4, which is propped close at hand. The other clamp stays hanging on the edge of the table, off to the left there out of the way until I need it. 

The clamps form a framework that holds the board securely and won't let it wobble. They're angled slightly outward so it's easy to drop the board in between them, and to lift it forward when I need to flip quickly to the next sheet. This setup finally lets me sit well back and draw with my entire arm - hell, my whole Body if I want!! It really frees me up from having it sitting on my knees and having to keep my drawing arm bent and draw too close to the chest.

At last- the Mouser