SURFACE     Ink on Paper, 9 x 7"

This was the second in a series of the three small scale drawings I did of my brother Andy's children.  This is my niece Calle at age 7 - photographed by my Uncle Sandy and/or my cousin Cricket (they can't remember who took it) who were in the water with her.  I considered a number of possible scenarios for my drawing of Calle but settled on this one largely because it just instinctively seemed right.  There is a sense of delighted accomplishment, a kind of pride that really appealed to me.  But I was also interested in drawing the water and her wet hair.  I had never really taken on water before and thought that the results would be rewarding.

 

I also thought water might be easy.  No.  I have learned over the years that whenever I think to myself that something will be easy I am always mistaken.  It made me regroup and redefine the way I went about doing my color rough drafts.  Before this I had almost always used Dr. Marten's radiant watercolors in my technical pens.  But I started to feel contrained by  the limited  color choices.  There are many, many Dr. Marten's; but their differences are subtle.  I favor high contrast in these drafts.  So I started to use various brands of thin markers.  The color range was wider, and my ability to define very tight spaces with thin nibs was much increased as well.

 

The results with drawing the water turned out OK; but for me the really interesting parts were the lower and drippier parts of the hair near her shoulders.  The hair has a kind of exaggerated painterliness here too (Her brother Will's hair is even more so in Seat Back)  I originally had wanted to make the stippling dots as large as possible. But in an effort to capture "blonde" I opted for a much, much wider range of dot sizes.  I'm not sure it looks exactly like Calle's hair but I really like the overall results!