Studio blog of Julie Galante – painting ridiculous things in Scotland
A work in progress for you today, the very last day of Art Every Day Month. Today my expressive drawing course is tackling architecture, which is a different challenge than we’ve had so far. Mostly we’ve been looking at organic shapes until now. How to maintain expressiveness while communicating straight lines and right angles? I … Read more
The end of the month is sneaking up on us, I fear. Today I took an unsuccessful piece from earlier in the month and worked a portrait on top of it. I enjoyed the process but I think I took it a little too far – it was more interesting when more of the earlier … Read more
Today’s assignment was to draw a series of Muybridge poses using layers of gesso and marks-all pencil. I tried it twice, but I’m still disappointed with the results. Both would have been better if I had overlapped the figures more, been more forceful with the pencil marks, and been more expressive with my mark-making. Probably … Read more
OK, I don’t really know what’s going on here. There are bits I like, here and there, so overall I’m going to consider it a successful experiment with a new technique. This week my online course is all about pushing things further by building up layers. This piece has many layers of inks and ink … Read more
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! I baked a pumpkin pie this morning and now the whole house smells like pie and I’m wondering how I’m going to keep myself from eating the pie before dinner tonight. This was an exercise in discipline, in a way. The idea was to build up the image using only ink wash … Read more
This was an exercise in adding and taking away using pencils, graphite powder, and erasers, leaving a history of mark-making on the page. I think I could have pushed it further, but I started to run out of daylight. I’ve found that I can work comfortably after dark with bolder materials such as ink and … Read more
For this one I used the exact same reference photos in the same configuration as my piece from two days ago. I almost ever do this, but I figure there’s probably a lot to be learned from repeating an exercise so closely. For this one I wasn’t happy with how faint the white ink was, … Read more
More experimenting with my new white ink today. As suspected, it’s not as obvious on white paper, even when layered into dark areas. It does add some nice subtle tonal variations in some spots, however. I should try it on a flat surface, where it will have the chance to pool instead of just dripping … Read more
Yay, new art supplies arrived today. I had made an order a while ago, but there were a couple things out of stock that finally got here. One of them was white ink, which I have never worked with before. To test it out, I decided to try the three faces exercise again. I used … Read more
Experiments in expressive portraiture today. I was especially trying to not make the two halves of the face symmetrical. I probably could have pushed it further – will work on this one some more and see what happens.