Monday, October 28, 2019

The Red Eye from Newark

Sunset at Newark airport. Our red-eye flight has boarded. Floodlights shine on the fuselages of the airliners.


The painting is just 2 x 3.5 inches, the size of a business card. I like that size for a quick color thumbnail study.


Some questions from Instagram:
sarahstergiotis I‘m wondering how much time you had to complete the painting before the plane took off?
I had about 20 minutes before pushback, when I had to fold up the tray table. I painted a little more on it later from memory.

annscottpaintings What the heck is that pen you are using? I want some!
It's a gel pen: Gelly Roll Sakura Number 10

hermiispainting Which colours do you use? How are they packed to manage them while travelling? I pulled out five colors. I keep them in a little sandwich bag inside my carry-on belt pouch.
1. Prussian blue (gouache)
2. Titanium white (gouache)
3. Yellow ochre (watercolor)
4. Pyrrol red (gouache)
5. Alizarin crimson (watercolor)

scottzan@jamesgurneyart What kind of brushes do you use for sketching?
These are synthetic round brushes—the Jack Richeson Series 7130 #8 and #4, which are part of a travel set that works for gouache, watercolor, and casein. I also sometimes use really cheap brushes from big-box craft stores.

nmsgwatercolors Would you mind saying what kind of paper are you using?
It's a Pentalic watercolor sketchbook, which has "European milled, 140 lb. (300 gsm) acid free paper" sized for watercolor.
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There's a link-filled list of all of my sketching materials at this Google Doc.
 

2 comments:

Rich said...

Nice work! Guess the green underpainting helped in evoking this particular flood-lighting effect. You just got it.

As to lighting effects; it just occured to me that ancient painters had a somewhat limited palette regarding this: There was no flood-lighting, neither neon or LED lamps.

Bevan said...

I love the business card 2*3.5 up to 3*5 size watercolour for quick memories. The lighting, the colors, the basic shapes. These small sketches are perfect for preserving the memory. Sometimes I use those quick sketches to draw larger pieces later, but most of the time they are just part of my daily journaling.
In high school (25 years ago) I started writing daily in a journal. For the last two years those entries often include small business card sketches on watercolor paper taped into the journal. Pictures of people and places that touched my life that day. You would be surprised how much fun it is to look through a journal filled with small watercolours of your memories along with your written memories! My children love to see sketches of them taped into the journal, or places we have been.