Descending Ashtray

As I mentioned in the last post, you couldn’t really see the lines over the black areas. I tried using a chalk pencil in my compass, but the line was a little too thick for my liking, though it is a nice contrast.

My next trick will be gouache on wood. I’ve been admiring some NW Native sculptures in a gallery near my office, and really like the flatness and graphic quality of the painting on the sculptures.

Image rotated 90 degrees clockwise for size. The watercolor paper curled up a bit, hence the odd distortion.

One of the most interesting things about gouache is its opacity, which allows you to paint white on dark ground, in this case, cardboard. I’ve always saved the last page of sketchbooks, but not done much with them. Now I know what to do!

One interesting note - I used pencil to draw the concentric circles on top of the gouache. It’s visible mainly in the white areas, but the flash on my camera really picked it up on the black areas as well. Image rotated 90 degrees clockwise for clarity, meant to be horizontal.

Just a little doodle. It did give me the idea of a 5×5 windmill, though.

Here is the drawing that I did of Shawn Hart, the descending ashtray somehow made it in the picture. This was drawn in December of 1998.