Portraits At The Pub 28: Lily and Ivy

Never work with children and animals they say; well after the kids from the previous portraits session, now we have Lily with Ivy the dog posing for us! Ivy was actually a really good model, very chill and didn’t move much at all, and very disinterested in the artists painting her! (I only managed to get a drawing of her looking at us as the end) As many times before, the final tempera paint stick piece was the star, this time using the end of the paint stick to make O shapes. They are too much fun to give to kids.

I didn’t actually get to do a watercolour this week, mostly because I had a few ink explosions from my vintage fountain pens – like above, where taking the lid off the pen it just dumped ink on the page. I should have learned by now….so hence bringing out the white roTring pump marker I made. I think Ivy really came out well from that, Lily less so because I was correcting some accidental double chins. A very loose drawing…

Portraits At The Pub 28 - Lily and Ivy, Inktense and Fountain Pen, A4 Flat White Sketchbook. — Portraits At The Pub 28 – Lily and Ivy, Inktense and Fountain Pen, A4 Flat White Sketchbook.

Portraits At The Pub 28 - Lily, Fountain Pen and wash, A4 Artway 35% Cotton Sketchbook. — Portraits At The Pub 28 – Lily and Ivy, Inktense and Fountain Pen, A4 Flat White Sketchbook.

Talking of loose, I like the colours of the Inktense piece – the only other colour piece of this session – but yeah those wonky proportions of the eyes!.] It does actually work better than the sketch next to it, a better likeness but was supposed to be another watercolour piece that was abandoned by accidental ink spots.

Portraits At The Pub 28 - Lily and Ivy, Fountain Pen and wash, A4 Artway Flat White Sketchbook. — Portraits At The Pub 28 – Lily and Ivy, Fountain Pen and wash, A4 Artway Flat White Sketchbook.

I did next to try and get a better likeness after those which was the drawing above, which of course now feels a bit stilted! Can’t win. Technically better but less life to it…talking of life, the Tempera Paint Stick has loads of that, energy, colour, dots and lines. It is less accurate – well the large paint sticks are hard to do close detail – but it has something missing in the other pieces.

I have ordered some other paint sticks, and going to test the lightfastness of them all, cos firstly I cannot afford the shipping of expensive US ones, and I suspect the ‘posh’ Kingart ones are actually the same as some of the other brands, they look identical and in the States they aren’t that expensive so it’s not like they use some special expensive material. Also they are suspiciously vague about lightfastness when I asked them directly – pointing to their reviews which don’t mention that at all!

We shall see.

Talking of lightfastness tests – remember my extended colour tests I mentioned previously? Been in the window since June last year, and will dig them out soon and do a blog post about how Posca, FW Inks, Molotow, Markal etc have survived at some point as well. There’s even some of my frequently used watercolours in there.

Looking at them without directly comparing with the control half (that has lived in a closed envelope in a dark drawer) it seems most things have fared really well – the Markals have faded but that’s expected, but not as much as I expected (I had heard that the red or pink one can fade completely to white).