Sunday, May 25, 2014

Molasses Cookie

I saw this giant molasses cookie in the store the other day and let out a little gasp. 

When I was a kid, we'd walk over to Heintz Bakery in Country Club Center * to get treats. They had these gigantic cookies (to a kid's eyes, anyway), and it was always exciting to get to choose one from the display case, then the have the nice bakery lady in her bakery lady uniform reach over the counter to hand it to me, wrapped in its little piece of tissue. They had sugar cookies with scalloped edges, peanut butter, chocolate chip, and molasses.
 (* If you remember Country Club Center from 'back in the day', here's another little article about it.)



I just had to draw this. And I decided to make it one of my 'architectural food' pieces since I haven't done one for a while. Its a sort of odd thing to do a side and section view of, but then I thought, why not? The inside has a wonderful rich, dense section where all the molasses kind of gels together. These are sprinkled all over the top with white sugar. They are just sugar bombs, pretty much. But they smell heavenly, and are delicious.



I also scanned it as I went, so you can see how it developed.
The drawing is 8" x 10", on Fabriano Artistico paper. I used almost all Caran d'ache Pablo colored pencils on it, with one layer of Polychromos, and wee bit of white gouache for the sugar at the end.


I like to establish the pattern on something like this, then work into it with more details. 




At this stage it looked like one of those chocolate cookies with the powdered sugar on top.




Here it looks like a toll house, without the chocolate chips.




Here it looks like peanut butter.



Crumbs! There are always crumbs.



This is the layer where I added some Polychromo Bistre.



And here I dabbed some white gouache on for the sugar. All done!


  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~


The yard is in full swing now. I noticed today that all my white flowers are in bloom. Not sure if that means anything, but thought I'd take a few (blurry) pics for posterity.


The magnolia has some new flowers, but they're all so high up, I can't get a good photo. You'll just have to take my word for it that that white bit in there is a lovely magnolia flower.



My little miniature rose struggles valiantly in this heat. It lived in a nice foggy yard in San Francisco for many years, so now I have it nestled in with some other green things to help keep it sheltered, and try to remember to mist it often.



And gardenias! They smell so wonderful. I don't think this little guy bloomed last year, so I was so happy to see flowers on it today.



Phyllo, looking three sheets to the wind, helping me examine a magnolia cone.


These things are so cool, but not so cool to step on on the lawn. Its a wonder I haven't broken an ankle stumbling over these.


I'm itching to get out my watercolors. I think some picture book art is on the horizon next . . .

Tuesday, May 20, 2014

Snickers Bar


Snickers "fun size" bar
6" x 8", colored pencils on paper



Did I tell you my dream about Einstein? A while back I dreamed I called him up, and after introducing myself and telling him I was an illustrator, somehow (through the magic of dreams) we were sitting across a table from each other at a cafe or something. I started showing him my chocolate drawings, and he says to me (in that affable, smiley way, with the goofy hair) "You should do more!". 


And right after that, I had this commission! The client wanted the wrapper torn 'just so', similar to my Heath Bar drawing I did a while back. So I had the arduous task of tearing open wrappers and taking pics to email over, until I got one that was just right. (Of course 'someone' had to eat all those opened Snickers bars - good thing they were 'fun size'.)


I thought it was finished at this stage, below. I even signed it. The client loved it, but wondered very gently if maybe the wrapper could be darker?




She was right. Sometimes when you look at something for too long, you can have trouble really 'seeing it' properly. I went out shopping or something for a while, then came back and added some color to both the wrapper and the chocolate, and voila - perfect!


I used mostly Polychromos on this, except for the red on the wrapper (LOVE Prismacolor's Permanent Red), but then came back in with some Prismacolor chocolatey browns to add a little 'more' to it over all. 

This was done on Stonehenge paper, since all of my other candy drawings have been on that, and I wanted it to look the same (I've been switching over to Fabriano Artistico Hot Press for other work lately.)



I decided to make a swatch chart of all my chocolate colored colored pencils, so I'll really know what I have to work with. Sometimes chocolate is orangey, sometimes purpley, and the shadows can go almost black. The wrappers aren't always chocolate colored, but when they are, the same thing applies.


Terrible scans of how the whole chart looks ...



 And terrible close ups of them (sorry) so you can kind of see what I did.




I did Prismacolors, Pablos, Polychromos, and Luminance.
There are gaps, because at first I was going to try to match colors by name across brands, but that all fell apart pretty fast, and I ended up with a sort of disorganized mess. But it works for me.





(Every time I do swatches I have flashbacks to Illustration 2 class at the Academy of Art, where we had to make watercolor and gouache swatches of all our new paints - and they had to be perfect, an exact size, all lined up in straight rows ... actually I think we did them on watercolor paper, then cut them out and pasted them onto a sheet of illustration board with rubber cement - crazy, but they were beautiful, and I used them for years and years. But I digress ...)




This is what they look like when I just do them for me, and just want to get a splotch of color down so I can see what I have. It still surprises me sometimes when I think a color is going to be one thing, based on the casing or lead, then it looks totally different when it goes down on paper. Luminance are the ones that do that the most I think.





I have Alyona Nickelson's Colored Pencil Painting Bible, and in it she shows how she swatches her pencils. GURL, she be crazy (I mean that in a good way), but very thorough and totally impressive. She does color 'mixes', as well as un-burnished and burnished. I considered doing something like that with these, since its the mixture of colors that will make just the right chocolate color for each drawing, but then couldn't wrap my brain around how to do it without making it my life's work. 

Alyona does have a cool tip about printing your swatches out onto clear paper (like overhead projector transparencies) so you can then lay them over a partially rendered drawing, and see exactly how a new color applied will look. I think that's worth a try.

But I know myself, and figure I'll just do tests as I go along, each time I do a drawing.

For fun, I just googled "drawings of chocolate", and found this Pinterest page which has a lot of cool art (and a few of my pieces too).

I've made prints of this piece available in my etsy shop

Next up is a small architectural food piece . . .





Thursday, May 08, 2014

Skies


I finished this house portrait the other day. What a lovely house.


It got me thinking about skies. I do them all different - depending on the house or building, and I guess what mood I'm in. Sometimes a certain kind of sky just goes with a building - some are light, some strong, some have no clouds, some have lots, some are pretty blah, some more dramatic, etc.


 Take this one for example. The house was white, so I really beefed up the sky. 




But then this was was a white house too, and look what I did here.




This was an all brick building.




Palm trees!




Evidently cookies call for drama.




Moody.




Very ... controlled.





 Washy.




Muted.




There's a storm a comin'. . .





Clouds.



I could do the same thing for grass - sometimes I make it really really green, other times less so. I've never had a client complain - I guess my gut instincts are doing OK. But it has me half thinking that I should offer people options for the 'mood' or feel of their drawing. 

Sky: Happy pretty light blue. Intense blue. Lots of clouds. No clouds. Dramatic clouds. Wistful clouds.
Grass: Astro turf green. Mellow green grass. Needs a little water. We're having a drought, no one has a green lawn anymore. 
(OK that last one would be a little too on the nose for us Californians.) 


Today I'm doing a Snickers bar for a client. Will post that one next.