Ad-Free Blog
Mixed Media Flora Studies with Joy Ting Chardre
Sketchbook Revival BingeFest 2025...this is an online signup free for access to some older tutorials by different artists. A month worth of projects and over 5 years. So that is 131 tutorials to choose from to do in a limited amount of time.
I loved working with Joy, and I really worked on this for maybe 1hour and 45 minutes. The tutorial was roughly a bit under an hour. Joy is lovely and so expressive in speaking about her art and taking some of the fear away. Using sketchbooks as a stepping stone and a license to experiment on techniques and materials.
This was the perfect though complex first project for me in this series. I'm too cheap to enroll in the 2025 month...but they offered free access to 5 years worth of old tutorials. So I'm picking and choosing which instructors and projects I'm going to work on, emphasizing mixed media as well as watercolor...and maybe just something different.
The project focus was to work from a clipping/photo or old artwork, and do a couple of quick studies for colors.
I chose a 1/2 page scrap clipping from a Fructose Magazine. I don't have the name of the original artist. I love the dark and bright of the colors in this photo of artwork.
Drawing some small rectangles on my sketchbook, leaving an area open to the side for color ID and color mixing. I experimented with the colors I had on my palette.
These three palettes were all loaded with the same 3 colors...a crimson, a yellow and a cerulean blue from a watercolor play session with my grandgirl and d-in-love.
These watercolor tubes were from an inexpensive set from Michael's in an art kit that included an easel, watercolors set, acrylic set, brushes, palette, drawing pencils, paper, and a portfolio. It was one of those Christmas specials...that went on super sale right after the holidays. Basically the cost of the Large portfolio alone.
In one of the three palettes I had originally added some burnt umber. Everything else was mixed from these basic colors. It's surprising how many colors you can get doing it this way.
After about 20 minutes of mixing and playing with some of the flowers,
we were encouraged to do a full size page of some detail from our source photo.
I lightly sketched with water color pencils. After the sketch was laid out, I used alcohol markers in Dark Gray and Dark Blue to do the background before I painted. One of the things I couldn't do with the limited palette.
On this version I also added the small pans of color. I used the upper left blue, a dark teal green and some of the dark browns. This was a inexpensive kit from Walmart, I think.
The multimedia came in with the colored pencils worked here and there, a charcohl pencil, and I tried several different white pencils, along with some greens and yellows for highlighting.
Pencils are charcohl, Prismacolor soft, and watercolor pencils by Artist Loft, Michael's store student brand.
I was intrigued with the Eucalyptus that was lavender in the scrap photo, but it morphed into greens to balance out the cabbage leaves. The grays in the thistle were balanced out in the dark foreground. Making a large scale subject matter in a small space is always tricky. Composition has to include positive and negative space. I chose the elements I was interested in working on and tried to place them in a cohesive compostion.
Total working time about 1 hour and 40 minutes for the quick color sketches, the tutorial, and working through the tutorial on the larger page. I did a bit of pencils at the end...the soft Prismacolors work well on top of alcohol ink as well as watercolors.
I'm going to make sure I look for any other tutorials Joy did over the last 5-7 years.
Please ask any questions...as it's really hard to do photos when you are working from a tutorial.
But Remember, first of all,
Most of all------HAVE FUN!!!
Thanks always for visiting,
Join me at these fine blog parties:
All the opinions and photographs in this blog are my own, I have not been paid or reimbursed in anyway for my opinions, posts or any products shown.
Thank you for your cooperation,
Sandi
