2016년 12월 3일 토요일

11.14.'16 Sunset over the hills



Materials: Conte crayons and Rembrandt pastels on Mi-Teintes Touch sanded pastel paper
I painted this from a photograph my departmental colleague took at her research site. Sunsets really are my favourite, it is difficult to choose anything else that captures nature's grandeur in such flamboyant colours.

12.01.'16 The bay at dusk



Material: Saunders watercolour postcard paper, Mission Gold/Cotman/Daniel Smith watercolour paints, white Graphitint pencil, Derwent Inktense pencil in Indian Ink, Raphael watercolour brush
This was painted from my photograph of the golden gate bridge at dusk. I cannot say that I am especially fond of that structure, but it sure does have some poetic appeal when the sun is setting over SF.

2016년 10월 23일 일요일

9. 26. '16. A lakeshore view



Painted with Conte crayons on Mi-Teintes Touch paper.
Hard pastels are not as versatile as soft pastels for finished pieces, I find, especially if you do not have enough colours and must rely on layering. The colour selection of the particular set that I used(the 12 piece landscape set) was perfect for the subject, however.

Review: Mungyo gallery watercolor crayons (set of 24)

Watercolour crayons are not as popular as watercolour pencils, maybe because they are less controllable, more opaque and more liftable than watercolour pencils; they sure do require different techniques to work with. Watercolour pencils handle like watercolour, but the crayons handle more like... well, crayons that can be blended with water. The popular Neocolor crayons are smoother and can be laid down almost like a less messy version of oil pastel. Cheaper brands are somewhat different than that, and it is one of those cheaper brands that I am reviewing today.



This set contains the Mungyo gallery watercolor crayons. Pastellists might be familiar with the brand; the company is located in South Korea, named so after an old name for the Korean Ministry of Education. As can be expected, the brand contains mostly educational supplies for children and young art students, including the popular cheap sketching pastel set of 64. Like most Korean art supply brands, it pays more attention to handling characteristics than to being lightfast. Due to that, I expected the crayons to be good sketching tools, maybe not suitable for finished works but sufficiently versatile for sketchbook entries.



When opened, the box contains 24 crayons that are longer and fatter than Neocolors. The colour variety is probably not very versatile(the yellows are not well-balanced, and the ultramarine blue is not warm enough to be useful, and there is no good cold red), but as it is a good-sized set of 24, it is much less of a problem.



Each crayon wrapper bears the description "finest water soluble crayon pastel" and the colour name, in three languages(English, French and German). I do not really understand the choice of languages, as the packaging is for the Korean market, and some of the colour names do not make very much sense(you can glean them from the picture of the box). It is likely, however, that they re-package and re-sell these crayons to some other companies for the scholastic/student market; in that case, they may as well need the colour names in French and German. I did not want to pay an extravagant amount of money to unpack and examine all those products overseas, however.



I tried to lay down each of the colour and give them washes to see how they washed. The colours are not very smooth; they feel somewhat like dry wax, similar to Artbars but much harder. They handle almost like the Daniel Smith watercolour sticks, but these can be used for sketching unlike those sticks that only work on very rough watercolour papers. With a wet waterbrush, some colours dissolve easily and wash well but others still leave chunky residues on the paper, especially some of the lighter colours. Incidentially, those lighter colours were the ones I saw the most problem with when I attempted to lay them down.

The colour selection looked as if they were intended for brighter subjects, so I attempted to sketch a Sun Conure using them.



The crayons do not dissolve very well and also do not layer very well, which was problematic when trying to sketch out the darker parts of the bird. The greens did not blend well with browns, and after two or three layers they refused to layer or blend anymore, and instead formed uneven chunks that cannot easily be moved around with water. When layered sparingly, however, they are not unusable. They are less liftable than Artbars, which is quite useful for artists going after techniques that rely heavily upon glazing.



I magnified the tail feathers to demonstrate the difficulty with layering.


Overall, these are perfectly satisfactory for the price point(6~8 dollars depending on the retailer), but are not very useful for an artist not skilled enough to deal with all the quarks of using lower quality watercolour crayons. If you are working on a relatively rough paper, however, many of these issues are less problematic - but again, I would not use high-end rough watercolour papers with $7-a-set crayons with low lightfastness.

2016년 9월 22일 목요일

Sept 15. 'And serenity could have been bought'


Reference is from a picture I took in Palo Alto, while on a trip with family.
The hillside overlooking the city was almost strangely serene and quiet - a peace only money can buy, I would have to add as a snide remark.

Drawn with a 0.6mm gel pen and painted with Mungyo Gallery water-soluble wax crayons, on a 5cm x 7cm ATC sized Strathmore Bristol paper. The paper is good for pen and pencil drawing and for working with brushes, but not ideal for wax crayons or oil pastels. With wet media, however, it can achieve a smooth and somewhat ink-like visual effect.

2016년 9월 21일 수요일

Starting my own blog out of frustration

I am just another dabbling writer and art hobbyist starting a blog.

Why am I doing that?

First, there are nowadays much fewer blogs using photographs and text to review art supplies instead of videos. I see the merit of videotaping the performance of art supplies, but it is much harder to skim through or to load on low speed Internet connections.

Also, I am just tired of seeing hackneyed, polarised political expressions rampant among the art and fountain pen hobbyists. I have an opinion of mine as well, and an opinion that is not compatible with many of those people, but I do not feel a need to automatically incorporate that into all my hobbies, either explicitly or implicitly by consuming products from certain companies that have made a certain kind of politics a part of their marketing.

So there it is; I am reviewing various colourful things; fountain pens and inks, art supplies and sometimes makeup products. Nothing more, nothing less. I have a politics blog, but it's not here.