Adding Color to the Wasps! I DID IT!

I am now officially past my "artist's block," 
thanks to you. 

I expect to be adding more entries from time to time, so if you want to know about it, put your email over there in that box to the right so you will be notified. Just in case you didn't do it before, you may have missed the second entry I made, a couple of weeks ago (this is the third one).  If so, just scroll down.

Here's the wasp drawing with color added.  It's a lot easier to understand what's happening, isn't it?

Check below in the previous entry to see what this drawing looked like before color was added.  I also wrote in that entry about how I painted the mural on my house walls -- lots of pictures.

Macal in May. Now it's 8' tall.
That's Nacho's thatched hut where
he stays when we go out to El Rancho.

Stay tuned. I'll be adding color to the cecropia drawing (my first one), and also to a drawing I just finished this week out at Micasa, my little house in the jungle at El Rancho.  I finally was able to get there after seven weeks of the road resembling a turtle pond (complete with turtles) and pretty much impassable. When at last I arrived, I fulfilled my vow to make at least one sketch during each visit. (Hint: this latest one is a fungus).  

And they're improving the road -- there's a crop of macal out there that's due to be harvested in January!  

Hasta mas tarde!  

Mural Painting Tutorial (and Sketch #2)

Onward with my quest to restart my sketch journaling while balanced daintily on a 6’ ladder. 

Where am I on my journey to Restart My Journaling? Well....I have actually gotten out my watercolor pencil box. It is lying on the desk. 

A ladder got me really close

nice, calm wasps

I have not opened it yet, but I will, because this sketch is a little confusing in black and white.

But color will improve it, and what better way to jog my hand to apply the color than to tell you about my intentions? 

I’ll scan in the colored drawing when I get it done.  Hold my feet to the fire, my friends!!!!!

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a panorama photo of my house mural about half-way
done,before the house was re-painted cream.

Okay, now, I promised in my November 11 blog that I would do  step-by-step tutorial on how I painted the murals on my house walls. 
If you aren’t into details, this one may be a bit “much" and you can stop here. But if you’ve ever wondered how the heck one gets that art from a  sketchpad up onto the wall, read on.

  

I’d gotten a little experience at mural painting on the walls of the North Mountain Park Nature Center in Ashland, Oregon a few years back, so I was intrigued by the invitingly blank walls of my new Belize house. 

a Mayan ball player

My earthbag house, which I have cunningly named Casa de la Tierra (House of Earth)  is actually built on an old Mayan terrace, next to a completely buried (it is said) Mayan temple ruin, so obviously the most appropriate decorations would be Mayan in nature. I wanted them to look authentic, so I nosed around on the internet to see if I could find some good subjects. 

 

Chilam Balam texts of Chumayel

Chilam Balam texts of Chumayel

My research turned up ancient figurines, hieroglyphs, wall paintings bas-reliefs carved into stone stelae (like this one of Lady Wac-chanil-ahau standing atop a bound captive warrior), plus painted or inked codices – bark-paper books the Mayans created around the 1100s. Some were pretty gruesome, so I avoided those. Others, like this winsome little jaguar tickled my funny-bone.

With lots of subjects to choose from, I picked out several for my mural, looking for drama and detail and avoiding modern interpretations (as far as I could tell) with which the internet is flooded. I decided to copy them almost exactly to keep them authentic-looking.   

feathered serpent god and supplicant

I originally planned to make the serpent god, a really stupendously magnificent being, the first thing you see as you come up the walk to the house. I even had it all graphed out and ready to transfer.  But after a few months of thought (you shouldn’t rush such things) a benign realistic jaguar began to manifest itself, because really, the jaguars have a wonderfully strong presence here, they, and the other wildlife, are some of the main reason I chose to live here. I wanted to honor that. 

Ready to begin muraling, I took photos of my house walls (not so easy on a round house!).  I joined them together in Photoshop and created a flat view to use as a template with correct proportions (I could have just sketched out the plan, but I was having fun in Photoshop).

this plan is called a "cartoon" by muralists

On the house, I measured and recorded every wall space, the distance between windows, and the distance from the floor to what would be the bottom of every image. Then, in Photoshop, I superimposed a transparent grid sheet over the plan, sizing it so that each square represented one inch. Then I “pasted” a mural image into each spot onscreen.

my 8½x11" working cartoon

Now, with subject choices made, I created a fresh 8½” x 11” .jpg file for each image and superimposed a transparent grid on THAT so that every inch grid line on the house wall plan corresponded with the inch markings on my printed-out paper grid.

On the paper grid (my "cartoon"), I counted squares and wrote down measurements (in red on the ballplayer figure here) to correspond to measurements of the actual wall. That done I slipped the gridded diagram into a plastic sheet protector to keep it from getting wet or dirty – I didn’t want to have to re-count all those measurements.   

Time to transfer!  Using a #2 pencil, a yardstick, and a kneaded eraser, I measured the wall up from the floor and in from the window to find the outermost point of the ballplayer's toe (27” up and 4” in from the door frame – see the red arrow on the cartoon) and made a dot there.  Then I located a distinctive spot a few inches up, at the edge of his anklet (34” up and 7” in) and put a dot there.  I kept working, finding important points on the drawing, measuring VERY carefully.

the ballplayers feet, pencil outline

Finally, I had a dot-to-dot outline.  I went back and added some dots. Then checking back and forth frequently, I sketched the outline, erasing when I goofed, redrawing again, and re-checking measurements if something looked off. It is much easier to draw the outline with all the dots to aim for (I’ve enlarged the dots on the ballplayer grid so you can see them) than to try to do it freehand.

I didn’t put all the details in this pencil outline on the wall. I added those later when I was actually painting it.

the ballplayer, checking out my cleavage

At first, I thought I would color the figures, but after looking at the black outlines awhile, I realized that the simple black outlines looked elegant and that adding all the colors might make the mural too overpowering.

But it did need some color, so studying Mayan drawings online I found a motif called a skyband, a horizontal element which supposedly was used as a division between the natural and the supernatural worlds in Mayan mythology. It’s usually brightly colored in Mayan paintings, and I used it to connect all the murals into one continuous design.  

A short section of Mayan skyband

With the ballplayer outlined in black paint, I penciled in then painted a section of skyband in the colors that seemed typical to many Mayan paintings: teal green, cinnamon, a darker red-brown, light yellow, and yellow ochre (back to the paint store in San Ignacio!). Just for the record, the mural paint I’m using is Comex Vinimex, pintura vinil-acrilica premium, interiores/exteriores, satinado, which is pretty easy to translate: Interior/exterior vinyl-acrylic, satin finish house paint.

glyphs

Ix Chel, holding Moon Rabbit

Over a period of several months, I penciled in, then painted outlines for the rest of the figures, plus some fascinating glyphs like these at left (I’ve no idea what this one  means.  Maybe “Your grandma was a howler monkey!”?  Fortunately, few other people can read them either, so I’m probably safe.) I continued the skyband as I worked my way around the house toward the entry, completing Ix Chel, the moon goddess holding the moon rabbit (did you know many people don’t see a Man In The Moon? They see a Rabbit!). 

Then I added that whimsical jaguar with a lotus on its head (jaguars often swim, coming up draped with pond -- or lotus -- weeds). 

Lady Wac-chanil-ahau

jaguar figure

Lady Wac-chanil-ahau with her basket of offerings (but without her doomed captive!) came next. 

One other thing happened before the mural was done. When I’d finished with the Mayan parts, I saw that I was having a problem with the natural red clay wall surface crumbling off, sand-grain by sand-grain. 

I realized that my murals were destined for a short life unless I took measures.  So I painted cream-colored house paint carefully around each figure while Freddy, who has been working at my house to pay off the price of items brought to him from the US, painted the rest of the house. 

house-painting in progress

That stabilized the walls around the figures, and I then varnished the figures themselves to glue all their little sand grains to the wall.

Only then did I paint the jaguar on the cream-colored wall, using the same grid and dot technique. Jaguar spots were applied free-hand. Here’s my feline friend, the life-size jaguar in full color, who now greets visitors with his inquisitive and riveting gaze. I still need to paint the rock he is perched on. The skyband will continue around the rock to be covered by his front paws. 

The jaguar is a powerful god in Mayan mythology, so to my mind, he guards the entrance and graciously protects all within.

SO!  Now to show you the whole series, finished (including the guardian jaguar above) in the order in which they appear from the front door to the entrance,  where the guardian jaguar dwells:

So there you have it -- "How I Painted My House Murals." 

That’s my story, and I’m stickin’ to it
Hasta mas tarde - until later!

Nature Journaling in Belize 3

I tried out two cabanas while at Macaw Bank Jungle Lodge. This one is Butterfly, and it had a desk that would make a better drawing table than the one I was using in Macaw Cabana. Henri graciously helped me move, about halfway through my stay.

Mostly I only used the desk in the evenings, to add color to my drawings. If it rained during the daytime ~ and it did occasionally rain, 'cause this is the jungle and rain (and heat) are what MAKE it a jungle ~ I sometimes sat in my open doorway and drew from there. For the most part, though, the warm, mostly misty rain was nice to be out in and I just hooked an umbrella to my belt with a carabiner if rain looked eminent.

[BTW: I was using watercolor pencils to add color to my drawings, and discovered, on about the fifth day in the jungle with 100% humidity, that when I'd try to make a mark with the pencil the the pigment point would BEND! As a workaround, I dabbed color off the end of the pencil with the paintbrush ~ this works fine, by the way, but it's not how one expects to use watercolor pencils. As they absorbed moisture, the "leads" got limper daily, soon becoming about the consistency of lipstick. Then, to my dismay, the softening, swelling pigments actually split their wooden pencil casings!

Since my return to Oregon (and, roughly, 30-45% humidity), they've returned to their former hardness and the split pencils have regained their usual shape. So be forewarned ~ if you plan to use watercolor pencils in a humid place, either store them in a drybag or use regular watercolor pigments instead.]

Sketching en pleine air, a fancy way of saying "outdoors," isn't always feasible, and sometimes I took photos with the intent of drawing from the camera later. This is really easy with the newer digital cameras with large viewing screens.

For instance, Tallulah, the resident coati, moved like quicksilver as she zipped up and down trees searching for insects under loose bark or attached to the undersides of leaves and stems. Even the camera sometimes only caught a blur. So sketching would have been a losing prospect as I scrambled through tangled undergrowth trying to keep her in sight. But I did manage to get a couple of photos from which I could make this sketch.

Other subjects also posed difficulty. Butterflies, of course, would NEVER alight long enough for a good sketch, the cinnamon-red bracket fungus was on a steep hillside in a pile of branches and sticks, and the wasp nest attached to the underside of a thorny palm really didn't lend itself to a close inspection, much less a lengthy drawing session! Frequently, bullhorn acacias, inhabited by nasty, hot-headed ants which apparently craved an armed encounter with me, kept me from getting close to some other subjects. No, sometimes drawing conditions were not ideal, by any means.

Other times I got lucky. One day I discovered huge, 5" tall contribo flowers, with their 12" tails, hanging over a trail. I found this spent flower lying in the path, so I carried it along and sat on the riverbank for a couple of hours sketching and coloring it. Despite its lovely aspect, the contribo is a really smelly carnivorous plant, and uses a pitfall system similar to that of pitcher plants, trapping and disassembling insects in a pool of digestive fluid. But it was great fun to draw. Its specific name is Aristolochia trilobata.

Since I had a new camera, I spent some time playing with one of the really neat features, the panorama button.

On the bank overlooking the river was an ancient Ceiba tree which was estimated by a visiting botanist to have been a sapling when the Mayans were building their temples. It was fun trying to encompass its entire height in one picture, but even so I couldn't back up far enough to include the amazing width of the buttresses in their totality.

Buttresses (long, skinny above-ground root-like fins) prop up many species of really old jungle trees. Jungle soil gets so much rain that it washes away and never builds up a deep loam on the ground. Trees are consequently anchored in a thin layer of soil and could be easily blown down in a hurricane without their buttresses.

I sketched this magnificent 20' buttress that anchors one of the other old trees near the river.

Alas, my eleven days at Macaw River Jungle Lodge were nearly ended. One warm, humid day I carried a big black innertube upriver, passing through a wide savannah to put in upstream of the lodge. Then I spent a couple of dreamy hours slip-sliding down the Macal River past huge trees draped with hanging lianas and decorated with hanging ant nests.

A couple of rapids added excitement ~ but not too much, since I was on my own and not really seeking high adventure ~ and several huge orange iguanas sneered down at me from their high roosts above the water as I passed beneath.

On my last afternoon, walking in a melancholy Eeorish manner along a river path, ("Oh dear, my last day. I'll probably never see this tree again. I'll never walk this path again. Oh dear!!") I was rewarded with the appearance of this delicate lacy-skirted mushroom called a Veiled Lady. Definitely cheered up, I drew it on the last page of my journal.

So. We have traveled together, dear friend, through the seventeen days of my sojourn on Belizean beach and in Belizean jungle.

There are 24 pages in my sketch journal, and I invite you ~ in a couple of months ~ to visit my website to download a copy if you are still interested.

Thanks for coming by! Leave a message if you have enjoyed this, so I'll know whether I should bother to blog the next journey I make. I'm considering one to South Africa........