Category: Caran d’ache

Day 281 – The Wild Plum Tea Room

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Lunch on a deck over a streams surrounded by flowering trees. Spring at its best in Gatlinburg. 
 

 Great charming ambience, terrific food on assorted old china plates. Wait staff is fabulous. 

 

  

 

This place won a well deserved Trip Advisor award of excellence in 2014. We will go back maybe even tomorrow!! 

I need to draw their lobster pie. Mike high lobster pie!! 

 

Desert was a gooey brownie sundae with chocolate chip ice cream with a wedge of pineapple.  I still have to paint it.  

This is colored with caran d’ache crayons over a watercolor base done with the crayons. Inked with my trusty Kuretake brush pen filled with Carbon Platinum black ink. 

Wish I had a few more things flowing over the border. Maybe I will cut something out and stick a few leaves on it?! Probably not.  On to the next picture. 

Thanks for looking. 

Day 278 – The Flying Biscuit

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Staying in Gatlinbirg with no wifi. Should be interesting. Going to see if this will post. I can see a wifi tower so maybe it will go. 

This is my breakfast at the world famous Flying Biscuit home of the creamy dreamy grits and mile high biscuits. Also as my friend Marsha says a vehicle to put butter in your mouth. 

I drew the sketch with a Kuretake brush pen loaded with Carbon Platinum black. Love that pen. Think refillable Pentel brush pen.  Heaven right.

 I colored it with the Caran d’ache  watercolor crayons. The bases are washes of watercolor using the caran d’ache crayons. Layers of color were  scribbled on the base watercolors with any color that I thought would look good aka show up. After I was done painting I reapplied lots of ink including cross hatching. 

The section where the name Flying Biscuit is written was a problem.  The name didn’t show on the red background. So I scribbled a lot of lighter colors over the dark red and rewrote the words. Now they show up well. 

Thanks for looking. 

Day 277- Earls

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finishing up Atlanta sketches. As usual we hit the restaurants. 

 

Earls on Flat Shoals Road in East Atlanta Village was the perfect spot for an outside lunch on a gorgeous spring day.

 Hamburgers were cooked to order and delicious. Sweet potatoes fried were perfect and the Dijon cranberry dipping sauce was some kind of heaven.  Tasted like it had a bit of horseradish sauce it it too. Yumm. The tea was just the way I like it. Lots of ice too. 

I drew the sketch with a Kuretake brush pen loaded with Carbon Platinum black. Love that pen. Think refillable Pentel brush pen.  Heaven right. I colored it with the Caran d’ache  watercolor crayons. The bases are washes of watercolor using the caran d’ache crayons. Layers of color were  scribbled on the base watercolors with any color that I thought would look good. After I was done painting i reapplied lots of ink including cross hatching. 

The pale blue background was made by using a water  brush on the flat end of the crayon. Fun stuff!! 

  

I already filled up ️my Sennelier accordion book. No bleed thru so far.   The paper is lovely heavy stuff. Will be posting as soon as I do an accordion book tutorial and color the Sennelier.  

Thanks for looking!! 

Day 276 – Michonne

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 WIP -Michonne-

 Walking Dead star. 

Caran d’ache in stillman&birn zeta. 

Odd how u look at sketches the next day and think they need more tweaking. I think she could use more red here and there. And oops her left eye is not done. Wonder how I did that!? Will I finish her? Probably. Have the urge to draw Darryl and Maybe Carol so I better finish Michonne. 

 

Made 5 accordion books today. This is two of them. Hope to do a how to make them this weekend.  Check back. 

Thanks for looking! 

Day 275 – Rick Misbehaving

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I started drawing Rick when my son and I were binge watching Walking Dead. 

  

It was the episode that they are arriving in Alexandria  and he was sitting still being interviewed. So I thought draw Rick!! 

OOPPPPSSS 

Of course as soon as I started to draw him he was done and the next interview began.  I kept trying to draw him. Oh what a mess he was. Just a little off here and there.  

This started out as an ink sketch. I didn’t like that at all so I added some caran d’ache like it was pastels. Scribbling it here and there. Adding odd ball colors like yellows,  red, light blue, and light purple. 

There are lots of things I liked about him and some not so much. I rewound and paused.  Slapped some flesh gouache to straighten out the hair line, erase bags, lengthen the cheek, sort the nose and hmm what else? Widen the brow, and get rid of a few stray ink marks. 

After the flesh colored gouache dried I added the same colors back again. Added some more black ink. I think I need to fix his neck. But otherwise he’s done. 

Thanks for looking. 

Day 274 – The Tale of the $43 Chicken Salad

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 A little Journaling about my very expensive chicken salad at Whole Foods. They ended up giving it to me because it rang up for $43.50!!! I have decided to try journaling a little on the sketches I have been doing in my new Stillman and Birn Zeta. What do you think?! 

 

This sketch was really bad for a while because of lack of good colors of Tombows. All I have with me are oddball colors to fill in the ones I already have. Then I remembered I had my box of Neocolor ii caran d’ache. I also hauled out the tube of flesh colored gouache that I bought. Caran d’ache can maximize coloring fun. 

 The mess – I had tried coloring their faces and the ink smeared. Why it does it sometimes and not others I will never know. I think a mess can be good because you no longer care if you mess up. Fun effects can happen then. 

How I cured it. Painted a couple of layers of gouache letting each layer dry. Then I played with the caran d’ache.  Last I Reinked their faces. 

Thanks for looking. 

Day 259 – Life Model time 

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WIP caran d’ache on kilimanjaro half sheet 

This Is the first standing pose I have ever drawn so I was thrilled to get her in proportion.  I have to give ilanya kudos for holding a rock steady pose for two hours. Not easy to do. 

Today I started drawing her with a light grey crayon. Next came flesh color.  That went well. 

Then I went for burnt sienna instead of yellow ochre and it was just too dark. When I added cobalt well. That was trouble.  I almost destroyed her with burnt sienna and cobalt blue.  Made an icky green. But when you think it’s ruined it can be a good thing. You don’t care what you do with it and experiment. 

I got out an ultramarine blue crayon burnt umber and the black. I never use the black. And I try not to use the dark colors on a young life model. Today I didn’t care. Anything was better than the ick blue and burnt sienna. 

I like the fake blues and Browns I used in her.  Anyway thanks for looking!!!

267 – Dog of the Day 

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The Dog of the Day – my nieces lab Reagan with his birthday hat on. Happy Birthday Reagan!! Did I say a yellow lab is much harder to paint than a black one. Especially with a limited gouache palette.

 All you need for a black lab is a dark indigo blue for the  black with a touch of the English red and a lighter blue and a bit of red for the collar and you gue.



 The yellow lab? 😳 So many shades of cream, buff, peach, Browns, purples, greys and white. Red for the tongue and a bit of dark purple. 

And ps Azo yellow is NOT a good color for a yellow lab. It’s too lemony and turns him green when mixed with white and painted over the colors I was using. Any blue remotely near it turned it green. 😜 Not so with the Indian yellow which is very strange. 

I did use a lot of light purples for the greys. 

Background is watered down turquoise.  

Thanks for looking!  

Day 255 – Dinosaur time

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It’s a lot of fun to draw dinosaurs. I bought this one recently at Target but I hear I need to start checking goodwill and you consignments for them. I now have four of them as well as a few other animals. 

My grandson loves dinosaurs and trucks. This is a postcard on watercolor paper for him. Next time I think I will let him paint it after I give him some paints. In the meantime I painted it with my caran d’ache since I didn’t feel like getting out the watercolors. 

Added bonus I found two contests to enter it in on Instagram. Who knew they have dino drawing contests on IG?!





Here it is just done with my Noodler Creaper Ahab with carbon Platinum black ink.   It’s about 6×8 on #140 kilimanjaro from cheap joes. 

Thanks for looking. 

Day 253 – It’s Saturday

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so it’s time to go to life modeling. Erica was our model and she always does a great job. She’s a lovely girl who is great fun. I had to bake her some cheese crackers because she missed them last time I made some a few weeks ago. So the rest of the group all got some too.  Anyway I used the caran d’ache and kilimanjaro paper and a lot of paper.

I blocked her in with the yellow ochre crayon. Then I checked her measurements.  They were right!  Sometimes things just work. Sometimes they don’t. This time they did.

I used the plumb lines like Roz Stendahl talked about in Sketchbookskool to check hand and arm placement as well as her ear. Only her ear was off.  Miracles do happen – or maybe it’s practice.

And I had great fun laying on the colors and then spraying them with a very fine mister. Love to let the caran d’ache drip. I am finally learning to control the dripping somewhat. To keep it from running so much. There are two things you can do.  Lay the board down and it will not run as much OR mop it up before it runs. Once it starts running it usually stains the paper and you loose your whites.  I also like rubbing it out with either a damp bounty paper towel or my dads  old hog bristle grumbacher filbert.

If I remember next time I think I will draw her with the flesh colored crayon because I do not like the way the yellow ochre shows thru the background blue and makes an icky green.   Of course I will probably forget  I like that yellow ochre crayon!

I think her head went well. It looks like Erica. It’s very hard to get detailed with the caran d’ache which gives it a dreamy look. It also causes you to loose the whites easily like between  her hands.

I had intended to finish her hands at home because I knew she would move them when she got back into her pose after the first break. Models always do.  Instead I ran a few errands and came home and took a good long nap.

Hopefully I will finish her tonite or tomorrow.

Thanks for looking!