Daily Sketch Reprise: Magic Carpet, 2014
Giuseppe gives Mr. Sunshine a brotherly bath in a warm and cozy bathroom.
I loved the way they looked on that red rug and visualized a simple line sketch with the brush pen, but with color added. Although the bathroom is white and mint green I still pictured a warm yellow gold background around the red carpet, and keeping with the warm earth tones, the boys in brown. I wanted pretty nearly flat colors, just a little bit of intentional shading and variation, influenced, I think, by some art I’d been recently browsing, traditional, ancient art using natural colors, and modern homage to this style. This is pretty much what I visualized.
N.B.: Scanning and presenting digital art being what it is, I had to manipulate the red so much that I lost a few of the gentler details of texture and shading. It scanned as a bright, lighter, warm red, which was nice and initially I let it be, but decided it was the darker, cooler red that made the boys stand out more against the color. I wanted it to be really representative of the color I mixed and layered which as a deep but bright red, a little on the purple side. With rested eyes this morning and daylight, I tweaked the red a little more, and now on most screens it should resemble the original a little more closely.
Mr. Sunshine says, “You used that yellow because it matches my eyes.” Okay, Sunshine, maybe I did choose that sunshiny yellow because it’s darned close to the color of your eyes. But we didn’t notice that until this morning.
I like this style, the black outlines, the yellow background, lots of red, so much I’ve used it a couple of other times since this sketch, as in “The Zen of Basket, After Toulouse-Lautrec”, and even “Listening to Granados, de Falla and Rodrigo“.
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What was I sketching on this date?
Cat on a Wooden Floor
Giuseppe enjoys a bit of sun on the upstairs landing where each individual board has a unique pattern of woodgrain and grooves. It made for an interesting contrast in shapes and Giuseppe held still long enough for me to draw most of him before he got up to go and have a real nap, as opposed to just a rest, in the bathroom. I thought he was nearly symmetrical when I first looked at him, but very quickly into the sketch it was clear he was not! This is pastel pencil on mid-range color Pastello paper.
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To look at “Magic Carpet” is to relax. Thank you.