Acuarela

The masters of watercolour

2012-06-03T17:12:00.002+02:00

This is an invite only group on Flickr that is in essence what we feel is the best of the best within the chosen fields of Watercolour,wether is is loose,modern, traditional, impressionistic or vibrant.
Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

A papercut world

2011-10-30T10:51:00.000+01:00

I have to keep this video by Béatrice Coron. I’m so impressed by her papercut work—

With scissors and paper, artist Béatrice Coron creates intricate worlds, cities and countries, heavens and hells. Striding onstage in a glorious cape cut from Tyvek, she describes her creative process and the way her stories develop from snips and slices.

Madame Coron is a very special character, too. After briefly studying art at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts of Lyon, and Mandarin Chinese at the Université of Lyon III, Coron experienced life with a series of odd jobs. She has been, among others, a shepherdess, truck driver, factory worker, cleaning lady and New York City tour guide! She has lived in France (her native country) , Egypt and Mexico for one year each, and China for two years. She moved to New York in 1985, where she reinvented herself as an artist.

Woodcuts with the iPhone

2011-09-16T07:46:00.000+02:00

Here is an amazing app for the iPhone / iPod / iPad: ukiyo-e. It is a digital, portable, woodcut studio!
The application mimics the woodcutting process, in the sense that you must actually carve out what will become the blank parts of your print, and then “ink” and “print” it. Of course, you get it reversed from the original. Funny and creative.

The welcome screen of the application:

Mark the area you want to cut. You have several types of carving tools with the toolbox:

The wood plate, once you have carved it out:

And your fresh woodcut print!! As usual, you then share it online, save it, send it over email or whatever you wish to do, it’s a digital file:

Make sure you visit the developer’s site, Phyzios software— they have some other interesting programs to sculpt, paint, create and have fun.

A visual chronicle of the new Spanish Revolution

2011-05-20T13:56:00.002+02:00

The economic depression is hitting Spain very, very hard, and the spanish youth is one of the main victims, with nearly 50% of unemployment among young people. After a relative calm period since the big crisis first broke out, thousands of spaniards are now demonstrating and camping in public squares in the main cities of Spain.

Many spanish citizens are fed up with the corruption of the political elites and their lack of concern with the real problems of people.

Starting as a social networks campaign that gathered protesters in the Puerta del Sol central square in Madrid on the 15th of may, the movement has quickly gained momentum and it is now challenging the political statu quo in Spain. That it was a cover story in yesterday's Washington Post shows the dimension of the protest.

Enrique Flores chronicles this peaceful uprising in his sketchbooks, reporting from ground zero of the so-called Spanish Revolution (just check these hasthags on twitter: #spanishrevolution, #15m,#nolesvotes, #acampadasol, #notenemosmiedo, #yeswecamp).

Barcelona sketches, april

2011-04-21T10:31:00.003+02:00

These are a few sketches made in Barcelona the last weekend. On the last couple of pages or so there are some pasted portraits I made in an education convention in Zaragoza a few days earlier.
Halfway the pages you’ll see a drawing of a man reading a comic which is not mine, but drawn by Bartomeu Seguí (an illustrator and comics artist from Mallorca who won the first National Comic Prize of Spain).

Comics in Barcelona

2011-04-19T18:36:00.003+02:00

This weekend I've been in Barcelona, enjoying a perfect spring weekend, and the comics festival, El (29è) Saló del còmic.

There, between buying, bargain-hunting and chatting, I've enjoyed watching some great and diverse comic book artists draw: Edmund Baudoin, Eddie Campbell, Javier Mariscal, Max, Pierre Alary, Miguel Gallardo, Bartomeu Seguí, Alfons López, Juan Berrio, José Luis Ágreda, Fermín Solís, Manel Fontdevila, just to name a few.

It is also worth mentioning that two of the awarded artists at the latest Angoulême Festival, Brecht Evens and Manuele Fior were there. Both use watercolour as their primary technique, and actually Fior won the first prize, Le Fauve d'Or, with his Cinq mille kilomètres par seconde created entirely in watercolour.

I've had some dédicaces by quite a few artists. This is Manuele Fior's illustration for the aforementioned Cinq mille...

Challenging preconceptions: Watercolour

2011-04-19T12:37:00.001+02:00

If you plan to visit London this spring or summer, you might be interested in Watercolour, a special exhibition at Tate Britain (until August 21) that invites you to challenge your preconceptions of what watercolour is. “The most ambitious exhibition about watercolour ever to be staged.”

Admission to Tate Britain is free, but special exhibitions like this have an admission fee (£12.70, certainly not cheap.)

The exhibition presents a full and fresh assessment on the history and future of watercolour painting. It aims to question our thoughts on what watercolour stands for, presenting famous and lesser-known works side by side and bringing this popular, universal and enduring medium back to the centre of our cultural heritage.

A 228-page book - catalogue with 170 colour illustrations has also been published especially for the occasion.

Imaginary trip (with watercolours)

2011-03-27T12:29:00.001+02:00

Le voyage imaginaire d'Hugo Pratt et Corto Maltese is an exhibition at the Pinacothèque de Paris that I'd like to see. It will remain open until August, 21, 2011.

I have never been a big fan of Hugo Pratt's Corto Maltese and his drawing style, but I really find his watercolour work quite appealing.

Flickr light tables

2011-03-18T19:31:00.000+01:00

Inspired by the real-world analog, this viewer lets you explore flickr photostreams in an expansive grid. Drag to pan. Click on a photo to enlarge it, or click its permalink (∞) to view it directly on flickr. Use the input to load another light table. And it works great on the iPad.

ArtRage Studio Pro

2011-03-01T11:36:00.003+01:00

Recently I have been playing a bit with natural media applications, and I am especially fond of Artrage and its nice balance of power and simplicity.

Artrage studio Pro is a much improved version of the Artrage standard application (or its advanced version Artrage Studio). Of course there are quite a few differences between these three options. You can check out which is best for you with the comparison chart provided by the developer (pdf).

Artrage is very powerful and sophisticated, but not overwhelming. Its interface is welcoming and intuitive, yet it offers as much control and power as you need to create artwork that makes you think you are using real paints, pencils or ink —without the mess on your drawing table or studio! (> Read the whole review)

I like to see many new options and power at hand without cluttering the elegant and clean interface of the program. If you are using any drawing or painting tool and you reach the edges of the screen, where the Artrage palettes are, they temporally disappear, so you still see what you are drawing. Release the button of your mouse or stylus, or paint away from the menu, and the toolbox will reappear back in position.

This version includes selection, transform, eyedropper, paint bucket, and text tools in the left corner toolbox.

Each group of tools in Artrage offers a variety of presets to mimic different techniques of traditional drawing and painting. The improved toolset includes a variety of brushes, including the so-called gloop pen —a tool that lets you quicky spread expanding, wet strokes not unlike pools of ink, or watercolour—and a sticker spray.

Some of the gloop pen types are ideal to add some realistic watercolour-like highlights in your illustration. The rather humorous names are actually very descriptive, with names like “pseudo water blob” or “instant shaded pipe”.

The new ArtRage for iPad app

The program is fairly sophisticated in its management of paint, brush tips and the wetness of the surface -digitally speaking, of course. It succesfully mimics the effect of dragging a brush still with some paint on it over a pre-applied brushstroke. The effects are a bit unpredictable, just as natural media are. Of course, if more control is necessary, it is possible to turn on an automatic cleaning setting, or even better, you can use a clean water jar to wash your utensil!

There is a way to paint in Artrage for every artist. For instance, if you like using the painting knife to spread and mix paint, you can just put some paint blobs with the paint tube tool, and then use the painting knife to drag the paint around, much like you would do with the real stuff. As you would expect, you run out of paint once you have spread away from the blobs.

Layers are a pretty much standard feature in painting and drawing programs, and Artrage provides the expected power of layers to organize your painting. Layers, together with the blending modes you find in high-end painting programs, are extremely useful not just to keep your workspace tidy and organised, but also let you apply different effects selectively. For example, you can non-destructively texturize an illustration, or part of if, by adding a layer with the desired texture on top and playing with the blend modes. Usually the overlay mode gives good results for this effect, with a lower opacity (20% or so).

Another way of achieving the desired natural paper or canvas look is by selecting the surface properties: type of material and roughness. The properties of the surface instantly modify the way your brushstrokes look once you paint on Artrage, but if necessary you can turn off the material to export a flat version of the artwork, with all the necessary transparency masks.

Stickers and stencils are another way to build up your illustration from preexisting references and clipart. The sticker spray is a very convenient way to fill sections of your work with repeating elements: very handy to create forests, grass, a village, footseps, leaves, crowds, skies just by repeating some individual elements. You can easily create new presets or import ready-made presets to your installation of Artrage. Presets can also be neatly grouped into preset groups for an easier and more logical access, for example by categories or by project. Creating new items for your stencil and sticker galleries are as easy as saving any picture in png format and putting it into the stencil or sticker presets folder.

You can easily use drawing helpers like reference materials, which you can spread on your virtual illustration board, pin in position, move around or rotate.Tracing materials are equally easy to use. Just import any image and it is automatically dimmed so you can begin using it as a reference to draw on top.

A good painting application needs an intuitive and easy way to pick colours and store swatches. The bottom-right colour picker is a rgb or hsv circle quarter in which you easily select the desired combination. For more control a tint picker is also available, so you can finely tune the amount of the chosen hue, by choosing from pure white to the pure colour. In the colour swatches, the new metallic settings gives a configurable shiny look to the material of the paint. The swatch sample book provides convenient storage of particular colours to reuse.

Many other options to further process your image and export it to a number of standard formats are available via the program menus. The studio pro home page gives comprehensive details about the program features.

If you want to see for yourself what you can do with Artrage, nothing better than a visit to the galleries in the community pages. A very active forum is also available, where you find useful advice, tips and tricks. The digital magazine ArtRageUs is also recommended.

ArtRage is an inexpensive program ($63 for the higher-end version, Studio Pro, $32 for the intermediate (Studio) and only $16 for the basic version, all of them available both for Windows and Mac OS X. A newer iPad version is also available to carry your studio wherever you go and paint with your finger! I have also succesfully tested it on Linux Ubuntu using Wine (a free Linux program that lets you run Windows programs right inside Linux, with no need of a separate Windows installation or licence). Most versions of ArtRage get the gold rating, meaning they work just fine in Linux through Wine.

The jazz singer - a pseudo Arroyo

2011-02-28T23:34:00.002+01:00

A page from my sketchbook in the style of Eduardo Arroyo. Moreover, the pieces of paper used in this collage come from a leaflet of his current exhibition, Painting literature.

Spiegelman's sketchbooks

2011-02-26T18:35:00.000+01:00

Art Spiegelman:

“On scraps of paper the pressure to perform is gone and the results throb with a life I just can’t hold on to in my ‘finished’ art.”

Spiegelman shares three of his sketchbooks in a nice edition called Be a nose!. It includes proper journals-sketchbooks, and scattered drawings dutifully collected, dated and archived by his wife.

The book of dreams

2011-02-26T18:34:00.002+01:00

Federico Fellini (photographed by Tazio Secchiaroli)

Today I have enjoyed an exhibition dedicated to Federico Fellini:The circus of illusions.

A nice rememoration of the man and his work: his obsessions, influences, his style, and the way he gathered ideas from multiple sources. The exhibition is open in Palma (Fundació La Caixa) until the 22nd of may.

A singular part of the exhibition is his Book of dreams. Actually they are two large books where he collected his dreams in annotations and sketches from 1960 to 1990.

The Academy of motion picture arts and sciences organized an exhibition a couple years ago. You can see some samples of Fellini's books of dreams in the exhibition website.

“The so-called Book of Dreams is really two ledgers, in which Federico Fellini, urged by the Jungian analyst Ernst Bernhard, jotted down and illustrated his own nocturnal fantasies over the space of thirty years. The first volume (approximately 245 pages) goes from November 30, 1960 to August 2, 1968, while the second (154 pages) goes from February 1973 until the end of 1982: a span of 22 years, which is supplemented by other scattered pages and several notes dated 1990. Long before he ventured into the oneiric universe with the cognitive tools recommended by Bernhard, however, Fellini was well aware of the importance of dreams. Indeed, he often asked his friends to tell him their dreams and urged them not to waste what he called “the night work,” at least as important, if not more so, than the thoughts and activities of one’s waking hours. Having seen for himself that a dream could only be remembered for a few minutes upon awakening, the director kept a notebook on his bedside table where he jotted down his visions and feelings as soon as he opened his eyes.”

A facsimile compilation of these very special journal, Il livro dei sogni has been published by Rizzoli:

How to make a magazine

2011-02-15T14:46:00.000+01:00

This compressed-action video shows the development of a Little white lies magazine issue.

Besides the curiosity of the video, it is interesting to see the gestation of a creative project and how a team of graphic designers and illustrators puts it together. The video is also available on HD chez Youtube.

Vandalised calendar

2011-01-29T20:02:00.000+01:00

I have the nasty habit of doodling, sketching, pasting on, scribbling and doing other improvements in my calendars and agendas. Stuff that really should go to the sketchbooks, but it's something one can’t help doing, isn’t it?

Anyway, before throwing away these past years agendas I rescue some of the pages I like, at least digitally.

Let the ink run wild

2011-01-13T08:44:00.001+01:00

Sometimes you just have to:

This is a video posted by Graffica on their video account, and the moleskine sketchbook is by Juan Martínez. They have some other nice shorts, like their homage to the illustrator and designer Javier Jaén:

Wilde Dieren

2011-01-12T18:34:00.001+01:00

That's Dutch for "Wild animals". The snake rattles, Lion yawns, and the man makes a book. The man in question is Rop van Mierlo.

Herry Arifin

2011-01-04T17:44:00.000+01:00

I find the freestyle watercolors by Herry Arifin (aka mypaintings4sale on Flickr) very enjoyable:

I paint with watercolor. Sometimes I add ink, gouache or oil pastel, depends on the mood I'd like to convey. What inspires me most to paint is the possibility to design using exciting compositions. In most cases I build my works with value contrast, although I also use color contrasts once in a while. My ultimate goal with watercolor is to keep exploring its virtues, i.e. its spontaneity and the liquid quality in it. A never ending discovery.

His work can also be found on his personal website, herryarifin.com.

Yupo

2010-12-29T23:18:00.002+01:00

Yupo sheets are definitely a surface I’d like to try, especially when you see the wonderful results in these examples by loveitaly. In them, the pigment moves freely on the painted areas creating wonderful effects:

What is Yupo in more detail?

This special material, rather than a traditional paper sheet is a durable stain-resistant non-absorbent synthetic (polypropilene) material that holds ink and watercolor with precision. Its smooth surface also resists tearing and buckling and it remains perfectly flat.

Colors applied on Yupo paper are brilliant and they lift off completely. It is an extremely forgiving sheet! As a watercolor paper it has the advantage of being non-absorbent so colors lie on top of its surface producing brilliant vibrant effects. Colors retain their true clarity and brilliance. Yupo requires no soaking stretching or taping flat. Best of all it allows you to wipe off unwanted sections of your painting and start again with a fresh surface, without damaging the surface, as it is often the case with the coating of watercolor paper.

2011 greetings

2010-12-28T18:33:00.002+01:00

This is my digital postcard for the soon-to-come 2011. My best wishes for everybody!

Seasons

2010-12-28T18:29:00.001+01:00

These are four pencil sketches salvaged from this year's agenda. A year that's (nearly) flown away, again! One for each season. A man with a hat in each picture.

These drawings and many more are on my Flickr page!

Animated organization

2010-12-17T18:26:00.002+01:00

This imaginative ad in stop-motion animation, for Moleskine organizers made me smile:

Mail

2010-12-17T16:29:00.001+01:00

This is the theme for the current week @ Illustration friday, and it has reminded me of this sketch in my agenda. This is a contrasted version of a pencil sketch (click to see it larger).

Charles Ritchie

2010-12-12T16:36:00.001+01:00

Charles Ritchie (born in Kentucky, USA in 1954) shares some of his huge collection of journals, sketchbooks and diverse art creations. Finding inspiration in the artist’s home, using watercolor and graphite to investigate images in series, Ritchie’s journals have tracked his dreams and creative process steadily since 1977.

On close inspection, I doubt that the writing in some of the works (for example, do check out the drawings section, which can be enlarged to a comfortable size) can actually be re-read, but they are a part of the overall effect anyway.

Hippolyte's watercolor comics

2010-12-08T21:33:00.000+01:00

In these days of completely digital workflows, it's rather uncommon to find comic books with their artwork drawn in watercolor. In one of these few examples, I have enjoyed the adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's The master of Ballantrae by Hippolyte (sometimes known as Frank Meynet).

A portrait of Stevenson is included:

And here is a photo of the scottish writer with His Majesty King Kalakaua of Hawaii: