Alishan Maple - Art Within Limitations 八色挑戰

We've been working on learning to live well, whatever our current conditions may be. I [Mark] have been learning to work with fewer tools. I'm used to having a "studio" with a nice, big easel, and many colors of soft pastels at my fingertips. Most of those things are still packed in boxes, and I no longer have a dedicated room for a studio. (Plus, why should I have lights on in another room when there's plenty of room where Ping's already sitting with the lights on? Hmmm....not very "green.")



Over the last few days, I've been working with oil pastels which are not dusty at all, so cleanup isn't such an issue. I've considered teaching the new medium, but I wondered what it would be like for students who don't have money for art supplies. How much do you have to spend before you can make good art? So we bought a set of Pentel oil pastels, the same 12 color set anyone can buy at the stationery store here for NT$25 or so (less than a buck). My first attempt at using just the 12 colors was a success! In fact, I used only 10. Not too shabby. So I decided to push it even further...

How about a slightly larger painting (8x10"/20x26cm) with a more complicated, challenging image and more detail? Here's the step by step process of painting "Alishan Maple."

Here are the materials I'm using.

Pentel's box of 12 oil pastels costs about NT$30 and is available everywhere around here. We've seen it as cheap as NT$25.

The paper I chose (for good or ill!) is a deep blue with little white dots in it. I picked it up in a paper store in the States some years ago and could never figure out what to do with it.

The tape is sort of like the local version of duct tape. It's readily available and used for everything. We've found it very handy. I can tear it into strips no wider than my finger.

My "studio." I brought the Windsor-Newton folding easel and the sheet of masonite with me. The chairs from YuChi and Alice serve as my "taboret." That REI t-shirt has been with me for about 15 years. It is now the floor protection. Linoleum actually doesn't need much protection from oil pastel. With just my fingertip, I can wipe off anything that falls from the pastel stick.

Here's the starting point. Okay...I'm gonna put THIS image on THAT paper? Hmmm....

The printout to the left is from a photo I took during our visit to Alishan National Park last year. It was a foggy, rainy day, very low light, with just a hint of Fall color. The printout is a bit more green than the original image, but what the heck. Run with it.

I blocked out the basic shapes with white, gray, green and red. By this time, I've already made some drawing errors. Oh well. At least I know where everything goes!

Now I go for the dark side. Black is pretty much the only real dark you have in the 12-color set. I'm used to using deep blues, greens or purples at this stage, saving the black for the very darkest, but with this palette, there's no other deep shadow.

I used gray to make more definition in a few places.

Now to lighten up the mid-tones. Actually, this entire painting was about compensating for the really dark paper. I think I would choose something more neutral next time. I'm using the bright spring green here.

More white and gray here.

 Red and pink are added to define the Fall color of the maple tree. I wasn't particularly happy with the way the pink made it look a bit heavy and greasy. Now what? I don't know. Better keep going.

The whole painting was starting to look a little heavy and there was none of the misty atmosphere from the original image, so I smudged all the background areas with my fingertip. I added some gray and a bit of white while I was at it.

Hoping to open up the painting even more, I started doing what I think of as "negative painting" or "hole painting." This is taking a lighter color and working the negative spaces so they open up. Often you get a neat transitional color between the light and dark that looks like the hazy edge your eye sees when something is back lit. I'm just using white here. Unfortunately, it just turns some of the red to pink. Ugh!

I smeared it again. This has several effects: it mutes and blends the colors that have been laid down already, softening the edges between them, and it thins the surface a bit as some of the pastel comes off on your fingertip. This allows you to add more pastel later. If it's laid on too thickly, oil pastel just smears and new color can't be added.

Here I add more spring green to lighten up the mid-tones again. I also add some pink, still trying to lighten up the Fall foliage.

More smearing and more white "hole painting." At this point, I departed from the original image and started to make this painting "whatever it's going to be." There always seems to be a point in the process where this happens.

I redefined the railing and stairs at the far left, made some decisions about the slender maple trunks, added in some smaller trunks that weren't in the original scene, reshaped the foliage in the upper left, and generally mucked with everything!

The big surprise at this final step was the orange...it worked! Suddenly, the maple's bright foliage stands out against the rest. Plus, it's not too heavy. Up till then, I had used only seven of the twelve colors I had available. The orange made it eight, total. The blue of the paper made up for the lack of other hues. I didn't use brown, light blue, dark blue, or yellow in this painting.

I'll probably mess with this one a bit more after I've let it sit for a few days. For me, this was a good experiment in using a limited palette with locally available materials (okay, other than the paper) in an attempt to do a challenging piece.

I can see a few things I want to correct already, but our IKEA order arrives today, or so we hope! Sometimes deliveries don't arrive when you expect them to. Ping and I will be building storage for a few days after this. Yay!