Visit the colorful world of Leszek Andrzej Kostuj
Grzdyl ksiezycowy VII
In Magical Grove II
Traveler III
Homo Floris XX
Lord of the forgotten ocean
Homo Floris XIX
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Posts tagged as:
color
Geometrical Strcuture
Cave
Nature’s Symphony
Habour Front
Floating World
Sailing Through
More illustrations by Yap Kun Rong
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Sometimes I get reminded of all the stupid things I was taught when I was a child. Things like it’s better to quite an activity then not to finish the project you’re working on right now.
The purpose of this sketch was to find out if it’s possible to get these nice color mixes with color hatching while at the same time retaining some control over the color.
As it turns out, that is possible.
Because it’s easier to color between the lines I had helped myself by drawing some random lines.
But by doing so it felt as though this was supposed to be a real drawing.
So after I had colored a few panels and felt that I had nothing more to learn from this sketch and I wanted to put it on this site and move on.
But then I heard the very angry voice of my mother in my head. “You never finish anything!”. “You should finish what you start!”. “You are always procrastinating”. And drawing lost all of it’s fun.
That was how it used to be some 40 years ago.
At one point I took up dancing. Which was fun apart from the fact that I was the only guy present. (Which is fun when you’re 16 but not when you’re 13 and all the girls are better dancers then you are.)
You wouldn’t believe how mad my mother became when I announced that was going to quit.
After Mr. “nobody’s” comment I started thinking again and remembered that this sketch only has a limited goal.
Thinking about this some more I did realize one thing though. What is missing from my current way of working is speed. Since my best drawings where kind of accidental there is not much purpose to my thinking about what I’m doing on a drawing by drawing base.
I do realize that figurative drawings would sell much better then abstract. Drawing abstract is a way of experimenting with techniques without having the straight jacked of having to draw objects that are prospectively correct. (If nothing else I’ll always be a perfectionist).
I do want to go back to drawing more recognizable shapes. But only if I can find a way to draw the complicated world in which I’m living.
color hatching sketch
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It does seem to be possible to control the colors while I’m color hatching and still get some interesting colors.
Of course this drawing is only a proof of concept. Doesn’t look like much, does it.
Turns out that there is a way to get the colors to interact. I can use either the lightest yellow or the white pencil to blend colors.
If I use yellow to blend blues I get a lot of green colors.
If I use white something happens. Not quite sure what.
I have to do some more experimenting to find out.
Color hatching 1
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My fountain pen is gliding over the paper. Up, down, up, down.
I love to watch while the black is slowly consuming the white paper. I could do this all day.
But I won’t.
If I just paint the whole paper black there isn’t much to look at.
But I would want to…
Then comes the hard part.
Although the colors I get with this color hatching technique are beautiful. They are also completely unpredictable.
I don’t like things that are unpredictable.
The shorter the lines, the more colors I use, the more unpredictable and beautiful the result.
Or I can begin with a layer of some color and then place a few lines on top. That’s far more predictable but not as beautiful.
I’m mostly fearful of my next few drawings.
I want to try to make kind of a landscape using my new color technique. But I’m not sure how.
If I can’t predict the colors how can I get them to interact?
Love and fear
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For the last few years I’ve been playing a kind of game with my self. I look at an object; a tree, car or park bench. And while I’m looking at it I try to imagine it.
Doing that feels as a kind of memory practice.
That is, I’m not sure whether I’m improving my memory. But it feels like that.
The problem until recently was that it also invoked a very strong feeling. So strong that I never knew whether it was a good feeling or not.
But a few weeks ago I noticed that the feeling had changed. It’s still a very strong feeling and I still don’t recognize it. But I’m now sure that’s a good feeling.
So the last few weeks I’ve been looking a lot. At everything around me. At everything I would want to draw.
And I finally realized something that’s probably obvious for people who are not autistic. But I never saw it.
The background of an object is very important.
A tree is nothing without the park or forest it belongs to.
The reflection of an early morning sun in a black wet road is nothing without the trees and the cars that surround it.
So for the last few weeks I’ve been thinking about how to draw background. Specifically about a color pencil drawing technique I read about years ago where you hash colors together.
In this study I’m finding out how you can mix colors.
I’m finding that the nice part of this technique that you can’t actually predict what kind of colors you’ll get after mixing a few colors.
I’m must try this on a somewhat larger scale.
Color islands
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It’s a good thing that keeping a new years resolution is a process and not an act. Otherwise I would have failed it already. Yesterday I did draw for more then an hour but I didn’t come around to writing this article 
Ah well. Here it goes.
As my regular readers will have noticed, I haven’t done anything for some three months.
I had found that I couldn’t make the pictures I wanted with color pencil and had decided that I would start painting.
I had bought oil paints, an easel, a pallet and the lights I needed to photograph my paintings. I had even painted a few test panels.
And then everything halted.
It just stop.
I didn’t feel like painting any more.
I assumed that I would start painting again at some point. So I just waited.
The thing is that I have had this happening before. Often even.
I have had a lot of times that I am in the middle of some activity and for some reason just don’t feel like finishing it.
It used to annoy the hell out of my mother. She thought it meant that I was too lazy to finish my chores. (Although I never quite understood why she thought that joining a tennis club would be considered a chore.)
Over the years I learned that halting some activity for no apparent reason and then picking it up again a few weeks or months later, or figuring out what is wrong with it, is just part of being me.
So I waited.
The only thing that had me slightly worried was this blog.
This blog is linked to drawing and I felt that couldn’t keep all of you just hanging there. Not knowing what had happened.
I hate it when I’ve followed a blog for a few months or even years and it just stops. And I never find out what happened to the author.
Did he move on to other activities? Did he die?
A few weeks ago I started thinking that I should write some kind of brief explanation about why I wasn’t writing anymore. But a funny thing happened.
While I was thinking about how I should explain that this happens to me some times. That I didn’t know why I had stopped and didn’t know whether I would ever continue. I figured out why I had stopped.
Even better.
After I had realized why I had stopped, new ideas started flowing. And before I knew it I was drawing again.
I thought it would be best to first do a few drawing, to see if it would stick, and then tell you about my developments. But the drawing I’m doing right now is taking far too much time to do it that way. Although I drawn for more then an hour a day for the last week. I’m still only at about two thirds.
But still I feel curtain that this direction is so rewarding that I won’t stop after just a few drawings. I don’t feel that I have to test myself by finishing yet an other drawing before talking about it.
Why did I stop painting in September?
When I started thinking about it, it turned out to be fairly obvious.
I had lost my direction. I had lost my purpose.
When I started drawing early 2007 and started with this blog I had a very clear purpose.
I wasn’t trying to produce beautiful drawings. I was trying to find a way to express myself via drawings.
Being autistic and having a visual thinking process I find that I have to work very hard at expressing myself.
Before I can tell anybody anything about the people I meet and the places I go. I have to translate from the pictures and movies in my mind to words I can speak.
Although I’ve become quite good at it over the years, it’s still a lot of work.
Which means that I can write an article like this one, which is perfectly understandable.
But sitting on a stool in a bar I can either relax or talk with people. And since I go there to relax I never talk very much.
Lately a few of the costumers of my favorite bar have figured out that I’m quite knowledgeable on some subjects and they question me about them. And when they do, I answer them.
But it always feels like an interview. Never like a conversation.
To me conversation are just to much like work.
Three years ago I thought that since I have this visual thinking process and a photographic memory, it should be very easy to find a way to draw those people and places that I wanted to show the world.
But it wasn’t.
Using color pencil I quickly found that the pictures I drew never looked like the pictures in my mind.
For two reasons.
One of which turned out to be very obvious, when I finally thought about it. The pictures in my mind are of a photographic quality. Pictures I draw never are. Which, I suppose, is the charm of drawings. But it wasn’t what I had in mind.
The other problem is that I have a field of vision of 180 degrees. Just by the size of the paper that I’m using, a drawing is only about 30 degrees. Which is probably why a guy like Stephen Wiltshire draws such detail on such big canvases. It’s the only way to get the world in your drawing.
When I moved to painting I just assumed that I would solve both problems.
Bigger canvas would mean drawing a bigger part of the world. And since you can layer with oil paint you can indeed get more photo realistic pictures.
The one thing I hadn’t counted on was drying time.
With oil paint you can layer different colors on top of each other. But after each layer you have to wait until it’s dry. Otherwise the different layers will mix and everything will turn a foul color of brown.
Drying time can be as much as two or three days.
So imagine what that means.
No doubt you have seen those beautiful portrait paintings where the artist has put a little dot of white paint in the pupil of the each eye to suggest life.
Those two tiny dots of white paint take three days to paint.
That is a few seconds for every dot. And then three days of drying time before varnish can be applied.
(And after that the painting has to dry out for several months before it can be used.)
There is no way that I can work that way.
Most painters work either from postcards or from sketches they have made.
I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to draw/paint the pictures and movies in my mind.
I started out with the pictures because it seemed easier to learn. But to really show the world what I’m all about I have to draw/paint the movies.
But of course they change over time.
There is no way for me to keep an image in my mind for the several months it would take to finish the painting.
The first painting I wanted to do was a simple one of an apple tree in bloom in an English landscape.
I’ve been wanting to do a picture like that for as long as I’ve been drawing. I could never find a way to do it with color pencils.
But even such a simple idea keeps changing:
Will I put the tree in the foreground or the background. On a hill? Against a blue sky or a stone wall?
And that are only the questions I ask myself.
The color arrangement also changes. But that isn’t something I consciously think about. It’s just the way the world around me changes.
When the sun shines the pictures in my mind have all kinds of bright colors. When it’s an dreary day the pictures in my mind change to low hanging fog. And then at night I “see” a lot of greys and blues.
There is no way I can show my world using paint.
But even if there was. It’s far the much work. I was looking for an easier way to show my world then by translating the pictures in my mind.
This is far to difficult.
So without realizing what was wrong, I had reached the end of this path.
This is turning into a very long article.
Tomorrow I will tell you about this new direction I have found
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A few weeks ago I wrote that I had reached the end of what I could creatively do with color pencils and that I had decided I would try my hand at painting.
I was planning to try to paint with acrylic paint but the guy in the art surplies shop advised me to try oil paint.
According to him with oil paint you have more time to think about your painting while you’re painting it and you have time to correct any mistakes. Both are because the drying time is much longer then with acrylic.
Oddly enough, because of the long drying time, it also has a very strange down side. You have to paint several paintings at ones.
That is you can put several layers of paint on top of each other. With which you can produce very interesting pictures. But before you can put the next layer down you have to wait until the last is dry. Which can take a few days.
You don’t want to spent iternity waiting until you can paint the next layer. So in stead you paint several paintings at one.
I’ve just started my third painting while I still waiting to finish my second painting.
The other problem, of course, is that I can’t put a painting in my scanner. From now on I have to photograph my paintings.
So I’ve bought a little tripod and tried my own digital camera to take the picture. But obvious both need replacing.
The painting is kind of an accident. I wanted to paint the battle between yellows, reds and browns. Which is what I did.
Later when I started reading about oil painting I found that the first oil painting people make usually contains a lot of brown because people mix to many colors.
So I feel kind of saved by the bell 
Color fight
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It used to be that clocks where those big, almost statue like, objects standing in the middle of the room. Heavy weight pulling chains, moving cogs, moving time.
If you stared at them long enough you could see time flow.
Then came the electrical clock,
his minute hand jumping from minute to minute.
Time moving faster and faster.
Now we have digital clocks and time has stopped flowing.
It has become some kind of calculation.
I started this project at 12 noon and finished it at 14.33. So it took me 233 minutes….
233 minutes?
Flow of time
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Color pencils are made by mixing pigments with wax. How much pigment is used and how soft the wax is determents the quality of the pencil.
I have two color pencil sets. One set of 12 pencils are top of the range. With a soft wax and a lot of pigment they float about the paper. Although it’s a joy to use them I have made very many drawing with them.
Only the last few drawings I’ve done and my drawing Christening in which you can see how beautiful the colors are.
Then I have a set of 72 color pencil that are the runner up. They are good pencils but just not as good as my 12 pencil set.
The owner of my art supplies shop advised these when I started drawing two years ago. Mostly because of their price.
The runner up are € 52 for 72 pencils and the top of the range are € 138 for 72 pencils.
So the runner up are a good place to start. And I’ve enjoyed drawing with them for the last two years except for one thing.
Since they are of the same quality and presumably made in the same way you would expect that they all would have the same drawing properties. But they don’t.
Some slide fairly smoothly over the paper and others scrape over the paper in a way that make my toes curl.
I felt that most pencils scraped but I didn’t actually know how many and which pencils.
So in this drawing I examined that. The size of the surface of a color is decided by the feeling I have when I draw with it. The color the slide smoothly over the paper have a large surface. The colors that scrape a smaller surface.
And because I ran out of pencils before I ran out of paper I used a few pencils from my top of the range pencil set for the last part of the drawing.
I’ve found out a few things:
- Firstly, contrary to my expectations, I have far more pencil in the runner up that slide fairly smoothly over the paper then pencils that scrape.
- But the pencils that scrape are all very light colors. Which is a problem because I tend to use more light then dark colors.
- And the way in which the pencils of the top range set float over the paper is truly delightful.
So the conclusion is clear. I should replace my color set with a box of top range pencils. But sadly I don’t have money to do that at this moment. So I’ve started out to replace those few pencils that really make my toes curl.
Scraping, sliding and floating
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