Snow Shadows

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snowshadowssketch

Casein and colored pencil on blue paper stock: 5″ x 7″

Breaking out of my shell in terms of subject matter. I love the long shadows in the snow. I am going to work on a little series of these. I tried pastel…again! I want to like it, but I end up unhappy with the result. The casein is a great medium for throwing down a lot of a light color and then drawing on top of. I will try a couple of more of these scenes. I think it will help me understand working with the medium. I need to add in some bold and unexpected color to these.

Sea Turtle

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Casein, colored pencil & graphite: 5″ x 7″ in progress

seaturtle1b

Back to casein! This ground was done by painting the casein over crumpled tissue paper–I waited until it was almost dry and then pulled it up. The effects are really nice and of course random. I did the ground way before I even thought to put this piece together. When I saw the photo and decided to draw the turtle I knew right away I would use this ground. I think I will do a couple of these…turtles are hard! I would like to get a little closer in I think. Also, I think that encaustic with some white encaustic over top would really add to the water feel, I will do a couple with that intention for the summer.

Big Yellow Fish

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bigyellowfish1

5″ x 7″ casein and graphite

This is similar in a way to the hummingbird, and I think that I like the casein layering for this. I like the movement of the fins and the composition here. This is just the underpainting, but I think that I will enjoy working on this one. I love this fish! He was in the aquarium at the vets office when we took our Big dog for surgery in May. They told us that he was something like 20 years old! The fish was very interested in people and seemed to come right up to you when you approached the tank. I did get several really nice photos of him.

Hummingbird

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Final! I am really happy with this little hummingbird. I am going to throw it on the scanner to see if I can get a better representation of it.

finished piece

finished piece

Midway point!

I think that I am about midway here

I think that I am about midway here

Casein, colored pencil and graphite on paper. 3 1/2″ by 4 1/2″

hummingbird2

I am trying out casein for this piece. I have been using casein on the stones with encaustic and I would like to try using it on paper. I love the smell of this paint! And, it is opaque but also transparent. It seems to work well not only under pencil but also seems to work well overtop. The ground for this was created using crumpled tissue over paper and then saturated with the casein paint. Once it was mostly dry I took up the tissue paper and the ground is what was left behind. Of course no white of the paper really was preserved, so the white casein was needed to provide the white. This project is slated to be given away to one of my friends.

Ground, white, pencil outline

Ground, white, pencil outline