This Looked Really Good Until ...

I took it to Rusty's office for help.

So it turns out skipping class on the day the demo is done is not the best idea in the world. Apparently.

But regardless, we are now experimenting with the technique of "pick out gouache".

Frustrations with this whole deal:

1. This technique requires patience. I'm not really the best with patience. After perfecting the ratio of gesso to matte medium to water (perfecting = squirting/pouring a bunch of each into a tupperware container and hoping for some kind of balance), I had to wait for it to try before I could lay down any pigment. So there's that. And then once the solution was dry, I had to wait for the gouache to dry. Also, I'm really proud of myself for being able to spell gouache correctly without spellcheck. #smallvictories. Anyway, just getting to what seems like square 1 took a lot longer than I had anticipated. So ... I guess a lesson in patience wouldn't be the worst thing in the world.

2. I followed the directions on the blog in order to learn how to do this technique (and took a little bit of direction from Rusty when I went into his office to whine after I had skipped class) and may have a slight different interpretation of what a "fairly thick" layer of gouache is. Meaning, overall, that my pencil lines didn't show through, and I was kind of just guessing. Which actually turned out kind of cool, because I wasn't bound to that initial framework. But lesson learned: make sure the pencil lines show through. If you're into that sort of thing.

3. I got stuck. Like, really stuck. Like I did the eyes about seven times before giving up and asking for help from Rusty. And this looked really cool before I took it to Rusty's office. Like, really cool. And then I mean I guess it looks okay now and I guess I didn't ignore a crucial component of this illustration. So that's not really a complaint but rather just a PSA that this looked good at one point.

Small (and possibly insignificant) triumphs:

1. I actually kind of liked this. Have you ever had dinosaur egg oatmeal? It was my staple from about grades 1-3 in the morning. Well the cool thing about dinosaur egg oatmeal was that there were these little eggs of brown sugar and when they dissolved in the hot oatmeal, there were little dinosaur sprinkles inside. And that's how I felt doing this assignment ... that I dissolved the gouache with water and a brush and the dinosaur was revealed. Or, in this case, a nose, teeth, some eyebrows ... you get the gist of it.

2. This forced me to look at shadows and highlights in a different way. I looked at the forms in the face in regards to highlights and lowlights and shadows instead of features, and I picked them out as shapes.

3. I did two of these in the event that one turned out horribly wrong. One is definitely preferable to the other. But it's okay.

4. This was overall a cool technique. I suppose. As much as I complained about it, it's cool.


I guess I could now actually show what I was referencing above:

This one here is a picture I took of one of my grandfather's friends. I actually have no idea who this is but I took a picture of him at some point so hopefully he's one of Grandpa Dave's friends otherwise that's real weird.

And my second attempt, a picture I had taken of my brother a few years ago. We don't need to acknowledge that this exists.