State Fair 2017!

A great, and this time rainy, sketch day at the MN State Fair.  This is my 5th year in a row!

With the rain and humidity my paintings took longer to dry so that changed up my strategy a bit.

These images are in the rough order of execcution with the exception of the pig. I put my favorite first!

This is mostly from my new paint kit based on Liz Steele's 2017 water color set up.

The book is 8 1/2" x 11" water color paper. Most of these take me between 25 -45 minutes.

Dreaming Pig

This was my 3rd or 4th drawing in. This was fun because two of the kids who show the pigs had questions while I did the piece. This is my favorite of the bunch and was featured on an MPR post with other beautiful work from sketchers from the same day. How cool is that?

I always start with a Twisted Sister Sausage for my warm up sketch. It was really raining here. Not my favorite sketch (past years were better) but I really learned how the paper and paints were acting will all of rain and humidity. So...it is probably the most valuable sketch of the day.  Certainly the tastiest.

The rain dictated indoor sketches, so this year is animal heavy.  This first sketch was fun because the kid who owned the turkey talked to me a little.  The bird was fun to draw but he wasn't really crazy about me standing there.

This Rooster most certainly was not crazy about me painting him.  I think that is why is looking a little like an aggressive eagle.  Such a beautiful bird. I was trying to stay loose and capture some of the beautiful colors in the black feathers.  It is always interesting to paint in a high traffic area.  You can see people wanting to ask but not ask.  I always talk to anyone who engages me. I imagine if I wasn't 6'-5", 270# and bald I might get more takers. Despite that I generally wind up having several dozen conversations about the paintings during the day. 

I needed to walk around and let these dry. I finally found an open table mostly out of  the rain and did a quick sketch of this musician as the other two dried and received a few touch ups.

Where the rooster did not want to be painted, these two sheep didn't mind being painted at all.  If you look close you can see rain drops in the pre mixed grey while I walked around waiting for them to dry.

The pig was next. I have drawn a pig every year. I guess it is a thing now.

These last two sketches were my wrap up.  It was half an hour before we met as a group and I finally found a covered place to sit.  I typically wrap up with people sketches. This was done sitting with a nice couple who had family showing animals.  I was explaining my kit and sketching nearby people. My favorite was the guy holding the wooden staff in a clear rain coat holding court with a huge corn dog in his hand. So I labeled him "The Corn Dog Messiah"

Thanks to Marty Harris and Roz Stendahl and the Metro Sketchers for organizing!

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed these!

Hindsight is so very 20-20!
Our little sketch group met at Oak Park Mall to sketch and I've always wanted to draw the carousel.  Never mind that it's so often in motion and never stops in the same place.  The perspective was totally sadistic!  I gamely painted away, then searched for other things to fill the page.  Keeping to the pink and yellow carousel, I found the perfect shoe, the kind I can't walk in but love to see.

That's when hindsight kicked in:  I went up to the floor above to find a perfume bottle and realized that the perfect painting view of the carousel occurs from above - simplified perspective!  And I suddenly realized that the best way to paint the moving object is from the carousel itself!  Seated on a bench or horse! So I need to make another trip, and this time I'm going to ride! Don't say you can't teach an old dog new tricks....it just takes a little longer.

Saturday Morning in St Paul

My favorite way to start a Saturday. Sketching with my Son with good coffee. I am using a very non waterproof and overpowering red ink here with watercolor. 

I am allowing looseness...which is harder than it sounds...yet freeing. 

I am loving this current watercolor setup. I set this up almost two years ago and have been using Jane Blumenthals "ultimate mixing palette" for Daniel Smith. 

- James Nutt

Kirkwood Amtrak Station

Kirkwood Amtrak Station
©2015 Steve Penberthy
Watercolor in Strathmore Visual Journal (140-lb CP paper)
5" x 7" (13 x 18 cm)

I met up with the St. Louis Drawing & Painting Meetup Group at this month's Urban Sketching outing.  We sketched the historic and picturesque Amtrak train station in Kirkwood, Missouri.  There were so many people out on this beautiful early fall morning; people walking dogs, shopping, and attending a nearby farmer's market across the street.  Several trains (both freight and passenger) moved through the station area while we sketched; the freight trains operated at deafening levels and seemed to take forever to pass by.  But very cool nonetheless.

I had intended to substitute out a few paints in my kit (Quin Gold & Hematite Burnt Scarlet) before heading out to the event, but forgot in my haste to get out the door on time.  Both of these pigments work well on my larger palette, but I feel that I like the weak opacity of a true raw sienna when I'm sketching on location, as I use it a lot for rendering stone, masonry, etc.  I have been experimenting with Quin Gold as a substitute for Raw Sienna, but again, seem to be preferring the Raw Sienna.

Notan sketches, St. Louis

Belleville Exchange Club sketch, 3" x 5". The sketch is post dated to coincide with a fund raising auction to benefit  the Belleville(IL) Historical Society.  I will not be able to attend the event but organizers requested all donated works bear the date of the auction. They are after all historians!

Recently I have been reading about what artists refer to as the art of Notan. It is the practice of establishing relationships of light and dark patterns used by master Japanese & Chinese brush artists. There is a great explanation of the method in a USK Singapore Symposium class hand-out by Urban Sketcher Virginia Hein just published and made available in the most recent edition of Drawing Attention. The USK newsletter also provided links to several several class handouts. They are all free and are a great resource for sketchers.

I have been attempting to use Notan sketching as a preliminary step in my plein air painting efforts and have found it to be a great help. The sketches here are done in a small Strathmore spiral bound sketch book of recycled paper with a set of 6 Pitt shades of grey artist pens by Faber Castell. The sketches are quickly composed layers of tones that are begun by laying down the lightest areas first followed by the darkest shapes in the scene. I keep the sketch book on my easel and refer to it like a road map of pattern and value throughout the painting process. I sometimes add the color relationships I am going for such as the triad of Red Orange/Blue Violet/Yellow Green or record the pigments I used in my palette.

Urban sketching is really an art & method unto itself to be sure but the same techniques practiced by sketch artists are useful in other fields including painting, design and architecture. The ability to sketch and the portability of a sketch book makes it possible to design anywhere at anytime.
                                                                     

Snapshots of my easel with sketch book.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CoffeeShop#2

This is a quick sketch while waiting for a friend at one of the nearby coffee shops. The sketchbook is a nice little Strathmore book that I got from Hobby Lobby. I wasn't looking for a new sketchbook, but when I saw that the paper was 100% cotton rag I just couldn't pass it up. I used a run of the mill roller ball pen...nothing special.

Lawrence Sketch Crawl

I heard about a sketch crawl in Lawrence so this morning we drove over. We met at the Visitor's Center, which was an old train station before being refurbished. I always like trains and the facilities that support them. Union Pacific freight trains and coal trains still roll by.

The Spirit of Urban Sketching

This is from Gabi Campanario's blog--Gabi is sort of the founder of our Urban Sketching concept. I thought it was a good clarification, if such is needed.

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Thursday, March 14, 2013

The spirit of urban sketching

The way I see it, being an urban sketcher isn't merely about drawing cities, big or small, urban or rural, with a pen or with your fingers on an digital tablet. It's about drawing places that can be put on a map, and everything that happens in those places. It's about showing the world with drawings, taking people to locations they may never go through artwork only you can create. You were there, you saw it, you sketched it, you told us what happened with your hand drawn art, sketched in the moment but perhaps touched up later because you ran out of time or can't resist the urge to fix something up. What matters is that you "draw what you witness," as my fellow sketchers in Indonesia like to say.

Those beautiful vases of flowers or the bowls of fruit on your kitchen table are sure great subjects to draw, but do they tell me something about a place I can put on a map? There are countless of beautiful sketching subjects to be drawn from observation that don't quite fit the spirit of urban sketching: an out-of-context portrait of my friend or her cat or her baby or her baby's shoes, for example.

But there's no point in making lists to define what urban sketching is or is not. You know what it is already, you've probably been an urban sketcher for a long time!

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From Minneapolis to  Excelsior Springs, Mo

On a trip to drop my son off with his grandparents in Arkansas I had a two day trip back to do as I pleased. I had always thought of stopping by Excelsior Springs to visit Cathy Johnson. Cathy is an artist I greatly admire and helped me with advice and encouragement and a great example of living by art.

These are roughly in the order I sketched them. 90% on site work.  The last 10% was line weight ramp up and some color touchup.  It was getting dark, and I will admit a little creepy being the only one walking around downtown once it got dark.

Cathy and her husband Joseph graciously welcomed me in.  I had no idea if they only had time for a quick visit but it turns out we all went to dinner together at a beautiful hotel downtown.  The restaurant at The Elms is quite beautiful and food was great.  As soon as the food was done the sketchbooks came out!

Neat little building corner.  I think it was the Mill Inn. I need to go back and put the lettering in.

It was starting to get dark and the color got away from me. This building isn't really green, but now that I have some distance on my frustration that it turned green I really like it. Always be careful with mixing yellow at night. You really can't see it so use about 1/3 as much yellow as you think. Or just go for it and have bright interesting colors the next day.  Either works!

This was just a neat building corner.

Such a wonderful evening.  After they left I had about 45 minutes to an hour of daylight and made a quick walking tour grabbing what sketches the light allowed.  I think I may have been one of 5 people out and about downtown.

The night before I loaded up two pages with color for some yet unknown project the next day.  Over breakfast I did these two drawings.  The family in front of me turned out to be an art teacher from Omaha that I wound up showing my sketches and paint kits to.  It is always fun to meet people.

Such a nice morning and beautiful patio to have breakfast at. I should have drawn the biscuits and gravy but they somehow went away to quickly!

James Nutt

www.nuttdraws.blogspot.com

Traveling with Art Supplies

My necessities...believe it or not they just weigh in at a bit over 2 lbs...

I always SEEM to carry more than I need when I travel, but the variety of mediums you see here sort of puts paid to that idea!  You can see what I used and why I needed everything I packed here: http://artistsjournalworkshop.blogspot.com/2014/06/and-this-is-why-i-need-to-carry-more.html

Tucker Blvd. View, St. Louis

Finally a mild day! For the first time this year temperatures climbed above 70 degrees on Friday afternoon. Warm enough to break out the watercolors for some urban sketching. I "discovered" a park on Tucker Blvd. with a different view of the Civil Courts building  & several other sketchworthy views as well. Around me workers were completing street repairs and preparing for today's St. Patrick's Day parade.
Tucker Blvd. View, 03/15/13; Michael Anderson, waterbrush, watercolor on Canson 140lb cold press, 7" h x 9" w.