FRENCHMAN: JOURNAL ENTRY W/ COLLAGE PAPERS

I awoke this morning and looked at my little paintings from yesterday. Surprise! The color had faded over night sitting on my desk. I guess the watercolor pen set will be relegated to journal and sketch books. Quite awhile ago I had glued some scraps of my hand painted collage papers randomly in a sketch book. I decided to try my little Frenchman drawn over the collage papers and then try painting the image with my new watercolor brush pens. It's amazing how simplifying the image makes it so easy to quickly draw the shapes. Here is the result of my experiment. I rather like it. I think I might like to do something like this on a larger sheet of paper with lightfast paints.

NEW MONTH...NEW ELEMENT!

During the month of October, we are going to do our Frenchman focusing on the element of SHAPE. If some of you are just joining us, you can find the photo in my blog archives. I think I should have started with Shape instead of Line but now is a good time to introduce this element. After taking Donna Zagotta's workshop, I am much more impressed with the importance of shape. It is the structure of the composition. You will notice that line and shape can go hand in hand as the edge of a shape by it's nature becomes a line, even if only implied. For week one work with the Frenchman and break up the image into as many shapes as suits you. Then, consider simplifying the image into fewer shapes. Do this a number of times continuing to reduce the image to it's minimalist essence.

The above Frenchman was done on my 9 x 12 YUPO paper. I had ordered a set of SAI Japanese watercolor brush pens from JetPens the other day and was surprised to have them delivered today. Turns out they were sent from Mountain View which is less than 20 miles from my house! I had seen these pens recommended on a Watercolor Journaling blog and this company is the only one who carries them. I had a drawing from the Sunday Marathon on a sheet of YUPO that needed some color and then I decided to do one of the Frenchman, as well. I had such a good time trying lots of techniques and seeing what I could do with this new tool. I used the wire sculpture drawing of the Frenchman as my base. This was already a simplification of the shapes. I think the end result has the strongest element being texture but shape was the starting point.