Spotlight — “Snowdrop”

Ahhh, the beautiful Snowdrop.  I ought to just rename the drawing, “The Beautiful Snowdrop”, for that is how I think of it.

Snowdrop is a purebred ragdoll cat owned by Louise Marie Stevenson in Britain.  Before I drew that piece, I hadn’t drawn a cat for a while, and I was thinking it was about time I did.  I knew just what I wanted…  a white cat looking up and into the distance, 3/4 view, big eyes with reflections for me to draw.  I searched through the photos in all the copyright free photo groups I belong to, but nothing was what I wanted.  I found white cats, but nothing that particularly struck me.  I may have found cats in the pose I wanted, but if I did, they didn’t capture my attention, because I was on a mission to draw a white cat.  So week after week, for two or four months, I drew other things.

One of the Facebook groups I belong to is called “Artists and Cats”.  It’s a group for cat lovers to post cat photos or art to share with other cat lovers.  It was started by a Facebook friend of mine, Carol Foerster, and I enjoyed looking at the photos people would post.  Imagine my surprise when someone posted a photo exactly as I had pictured it, along with PERMISSION for any artists who cared to draw or paint it!!!  I couldn’t believe my luck!

Of course, I got right on that.  But when I was faced with the prospect of actually drawing, I realized I didn’t want to draw it.  Even though it was the perfect photo, I found I was bored with half of it before I even started.  The more I contemplated drawing it, the more I inwardly groaned at the concept.  But it was the perfect photo for what I wanted.  What was the problem?  It was then that I asked myself a question I’d never asked myself before.

“What is important?”

The photo was of only the front half  of the cat.  It included her head, chest, and one front leg stretched out in front of her.  I realized I didn’t care about her chest or leg.  I wanted the whole cat or, really, just the head.  So I began cropping.  By the time I was done, I found that Snowdrop had lost the top of one ear and the majority of the other.  Even her chin was cut off a bit.  For perhaps the first time in my adult life, I seriously cropped a photo before drawing it.  I zoomed in on the features which had attracted me to the photo in the first place.  I’m sure this is something most artists do all the time, but I have always been a slave to the photograph, reproducing it  as faithfully as I could (except perhaps for simplifying backgrounds).

Snowdrop’s eyes really are blue.  I realized they needed to be toned down a little, and I tried, but my pencils really wanted her eyes to be the deep blue they ended up being on my paper.  So I gave up when I realized I just kept making them bluer again.  So when people ask, “Are her eyes really that blue?” the answer is, “Not quite, but in my mind they are.”  Also, I see I focused on the one part of her body with the most non-white color.  Oh well.  The point was, she appeared at a time when I needed her, and she was perfect for my needs.  To this day, of all my drawings, Snowdrop gets the most attention.

The photograph got a lot of attention when it was posted.  I saw two other versions of it that other artists had painted.  Maybe I’m biased, but I like mine best.  😉

Prints are available for purchase.

Just Add Water

Recently I began experimenting with water and pastels.  This is a huge step for me, because I do NOT like to experiment.  I like to know what my materials are going to do, and then I can try to make them do it.  Flat out experimentation uses up paper and pastels and may result in something I don’t like!  But I recently became intrigued with the idea of using water in a pastel drawing.

In July of 2014, my father and I took a trip to Alaska.  It is a trip I’d been wanting to make for over 20 years, and for my father, it was the fiftieth state he’d visited.  We had a great time.

My father brought home a large, poster-sized photographic print of Mt. McKinley in a glorious pink and purple sunset.  He had it professionally framed, and it was stunning on his wall.  But one day in September of 2015, it accidentally got smashed.  Although the wooden frame remained largely unscathed, the glass shattered, and the shards scratched and even gouged the print.  He was not in a position to replace it, so he asked me to repair it.  The plan was to buy some cheap paint and have me touch it up.  Since my preferred medium is pastels, I wasn’t entirely sure how I felt about that, but he was in earnest, so I agreed to try.

When I went to visit him in January 2016, I had not yet invested in the paints, but I had brought along my pastel pencils in anticipation of working on the cat drawing above.  Sadly, I got exactly zero work done on the cat, but it occurred to me that I might be able to use the pastel pencils to repair his photo.  After all, I had a wide range of colors to work with.  If I could get the pastels to adhere to the photo paper, I might just be able to pull it off!

Guess what.  Pastels don’t stick to poster sized photographic prints except where the print is so deeply gouged as to reveal the foam board underneath, and even then, the color still won’t carry all the way to the edge of the gouge.

But I remembered on my first set of pastels I ever bought, the Stabilo Carbothellos, it says on the pencil tin that they are water soluble.  Well, it says they’re “Aquarelle”, and I don’t speak French, but I had always wondered how one went about using water with pastels.  It doesn’t make sense to me.  So my father and I decided I would try using water with the pencils somehow in order to repair his photo.  After a little experimentation, I learned that by soaking the pencil tips in a little cup of water for a few seconds, it was possible to soften the “lead” of the pencil and get it wet enough to use as a sort of paintbrush to apply the color as necessary.

It worked!

I was able to fill in all the scratches, and even the gouge looks pretty good.  Well, you can definitely see some of the larger repairs if you walk up to the piece, but my dad is colorblind, so he can’t see the difference.  🙂

After that, I became very curious about using water with pastels and how I might go about it.  This drawing of Phantom (my cat, now passed on) was the first experiment I did with water and pastels.  I used a natural sponge to create the mottled background, and it turned out exactly the way I wanted.  I couldn’t have been more pleased!  Okay, so Phantom isn’t my best pet portrait, but you gotta cut me some slack.  It was drawn from an old grainy snapshot in which the cat is only about two inches high, and the drawing is 11 x 17″.  That’s okay.  I think it turned out well considering the shortcomings of the reference, and the background was a great learning experience.

The piece I am currently working on uses water much more extensively.  I have ideas now, and I’m curious to see how water can expand my horizons.

Copyright Laws

Where does an artist’s subject material come from?  You just google for an image you like, right?

Wrong.

Many people think that once something is on the internet, it’s up for grabs, but that’s not true.  In fact, any image is automatically protected by copyright as soon as it is created.  That means that that snapshot of your granny sitting in her recliner eating supper on the TV tray is already copyrighted without your having to take any action, though you can still register your copyright.  Although it’s a good idea to mark an image with a copyright notice, it is not necessary.  So when you do an internet search for an image, chances are it is illegal to use it for your own stuff.

So does this mean you have to to take all your photos yourself?  Thankfully, no.  You can purchase images from sites such as Shutterstock, but that can add up over time.  There are, however, other sites, such as Morguefile, which offer images for free to do with as you wish.  You can also do advanced searches on sites like Flickr or even Google to filter only images with specific usage licenses which allow you to commercially use or even modify the piece to suit your own needs.  In addition to resources like these, there are also a number of websites and Facebook groups dedicated to offering free photos for artists to use.  Once in a while, you can get really lucky, and a photographer will give you permission to use a particular image s/he has taken.  So when people find amazing images they want me to draw, this is often why I reject the idea.  Well, that and the fact that I have a long list of projects that I’ll never finish!

Okay, so what does the law really say?  If you want to read about American copyright law, this government site is written in language which is easy to understand.  In the meantime, it’s best to stick with references you’ve taken yourself or have written permission to use!