I feel like all that time I’ve been practicing shading is starting to pay off.
Sitting atop a fractal surface of black holes, Tribert tries to make Adenine, one of the molecules in DNA, but he didn’t get it quite right, probably because he got distracted by the cats. Maybe next time, Tribert.
Tribert Tries to Make Life
Doodle No. 140
8” square
Ink, highly lightfast (fade resistant) watercolor pencils and paint, and mica paint on Arches 300 GSM 100% cotton paper
It’s been a challenging month, and I haven’t had a lot of success with my gouache painting lately. So I decided to go back to my old style of doodling cats and aliens on black holes with ink and colored pencils, where life makes sense and I know what I’m doing.
Infinite Holes with Two Cats
Doodle No. 139
Watercolor pencils, ink, mica paint on 6” square cotton paper.
I realized that I haven’t showed you all of my black hole doodles yet! This is probably the most recent one. I can tell because the shading makes the holes look more convincing, and that took me a lot of practice to figure out how to do that. Can you find the waterbear?
I call this piece… Cosmic Ooze Doodle No. 108 Watercolor, ink, colored pencil on 8” square cotton paper #art#MathArt#BlackHole#surface#watercolor#painting#astronomy#microbes
I have an interactive art piece I sometimes bring with me when I go to festivals called “Math Anxiety Camp.” The project consists of a little math book I wrote, more of a pamphlet, full of funny, weird, and famous math problems that are designed to elicit both laughter and anxiety. Problem number 1 is “Name a number that is 3.” Problem 18 asks you to count backwards from 100 by 7s and state the last positive number you count. This problem is known as “serial sevens,” and even has its own Wikipedia page because it is used by psychologists to elicit anxiety in experimental subjects. When I give problems, I try to rush my subjects, and I make buzzing noises when they get wrong answers. I say things math teacher should never say like “You should have learned this last year.”
Good art elicits emoitions, and I know of no other art piece that is designed to elicit the emotion of math anxiety. As a math teacher, math anxiety is an emotion I deal with regularly. Manifesting it at a festival where this emotion is out of context and the stakes are low gives me a novel way to interact with people around their math anxiety, and I’ve learned a lot from adults about their experiences learning mathematics as children.
Anyone who achieves anxiety from my art project wins an a achievement award, namely a yellow sticker. Interestingly, I’m not able to make everyone anxious with my little book of math problems because a lot of people enjoy math. I still give them a sticker if they want one.
This painting went through a lot of moods with me before I could call it finished. I’ve been studying perspective, light, and shadow, and it’s fun to try to use them to make things look real enough so that you know what you’re looking at, but not so real that you ever forget you’re looking at art.
The Big Fruit Tree
Gouache on cotton paper
7” by 10” on 8.5” by 11” paper
As one who studied Euclidean #geometry in college, I sometimes have trouble engaging too deeply sacred geometry, but that star figure on the top left actually has some really nice properties around basic fractions. At a party, I once had someone ask me if sacred geometry was a non-Euclidean geometry. Fair question. I wonder what the cat thinks.
This piece is #watercolor, ink, and mica watercolor on paper. The bronze knot shimmers on the light. #MathArt
The tiniest of sculptures, a beaded bead made with 270 seed beads all stitched into one hollow dodecahedron. I call this a Conway Bead because it’s based upon a portion of a 4D object composed of tetrahedrons and prisms that I read about in his book “The Symmetry of Things.” Like many 4D polytopes, we can build a part of them in 3D without too much distortion. I wrote a tutorial on how to make Conway Beads if you’d like to learn to make your own, including 2 sizes larger than this one. #mathart
Happy Sunday! I’m very excited about this new direction in #landscape#painting that #gouache has opened up for me. I painted these all in the last month or so. They’re each on a 6” square piece of Arches hot pressed cotton paper. The bottom right one is still available in my Etsy shop, gwenbeads.
The flexibility of #painting landscapes is quite freeing. I’ve always been challenged by drawing proportions just right, but with a landscape, it doesn’t matter if things are off by a little. So here is another #landscape, number 8, this one with a dog and a patch of snap dragons. The large plant at the right front is an homage to Dr. Seuss, truly an artistic genius. I’m also influenced by Klimt and Van Gogh.
If you’ve been following me for a while, you know I used to have a mild obsession with drawing black holes. I drew this one the day my friend brought over an inexpensive set of alcohol markers. The ruler on the right explains how big everything is. It’s worth noting that it’s in logarithmic base four because: aliens. #doodle#markers#BlackHole#MathArt
Happy Color Wheel Wednesday to all who celebrate! This is my second color wheel in #gouache. This one features vanadium yellow, which is the most expensive gouache color I own. Vanadium is one of the elements in the periodic table. It’s super lightfast, very opaque lemon yellow. This is the first time I have tried it. I’m a fan. Also, if you rotate the image, the illusion might flip from an innie to an outie.
This is my first color wheel in #gouache. It feels quite different from all the ones I painted in watercolor. The colors are so flat. I used a basic mixing set of five tubes to mix all of these colors. It’s so satisfying to mix all the different colors, and then put them all in order, like solving a puzzle with color. #painting#ColorWheelWednesday
I’ve been #painting with #gouache for over two months, and I realized I hadn’t used it to paint a color wheel yet! This shows the range of colors you can make with red, yellow, black, and white. Adding a tube of blue will be enough to finish the rest of it. #ColorWheelWednesday
@mrcompletely that’s wonderful. Thank you. I find that working with a limited palette of pigments helps to keep the colors harmonious no matter how much mixing you do. It also keeps me from collecting every possible color they make. I mostly just buy primaries, and black and white. Saves money too.
It took me almost 5 years of regular practice to find the painting style I was looking for. I had a fuzzy vision of what I wanted but I had to improve my skills to meet it. So I did lots of practice drawing and #painting. Part of my path was to paint lots of color wheels and color studies of all different sorts. I read books on drawing and practiced perspective and shading. I did botanicals and portraits from photos. I never thought I’d land on landscapes as my subject. #gouache#watercolor
Lately I’ve been #painting#landscapes with #gouache paint, which is another name for opaque #watercolor. Someone asked me what style this is. I guessed that it’s in the style of folk art, but then I suppose that makes me folksy, which feels weird as a California woman living in the Silicon Valley suburbs.
I painted this one a couple years ago when I was learning about light, shadow and reflection. Notice the green reflected light on her wooden body. I was also studying how to draw the human form, which I found a lot easier to render in cylinders and spheres, and I finally understood how basic mathematical forms, like cylinders, spheres, were the basis of drawing in 3D.
I recently drew this piece without a reference. Just over two years ago, I bought a book, “How to Render” by Scott Robertson. I read almost every word, studied all the images, and did many of the excercises. It’s a lot of 3D #geometry. Now I can see and draw shadows and light in a way I couldn’t before. One of the side effects of learning to draw is it teaches you to see things you might never have noticed otherwise. I suppose most education is like that. #drawing
We haven’t had a Color Wheel Wednesday in a while! Oh happy day! Even though these five color wheels look similar, I used different combinations of pigments to paint them. It demonstrates how some pure pigments are brighter than what you can mix from other pigments, but you can also get very similar results from different pigments. Our perception of color is relative, and you probably wouldn’t notice the difference if they weren’t right next to each other. #color#watercolor#painting#mathart
When I was a kid, I liked math and art. (I still do.) The adults told me that I should be an architect. Instead I became a math teacher who makes art with all of my free time. I’m pretty sure if I had become an architect, all the buildings I would have designed would have been crooked.
This is my first #painting with reflected pink light. That’s what helps make the buildings look 3D.
Amalfi Coast
Royal Talens #gouache
on Stonehenge cotton paper
8.5” by 11” paper including white border
I recently switched from transparent watercolor paint to gouache (opaque watercolor) and it’s been a big leap towards helping me find my painting style. For years, my style has been dictated by what I am able to paint, which is one reason I painted so many color wheels. But with this piece, I’m getting much closer to painting how I want to paint, which is amazing.
Houses on a Hill
Gouache on Stonehenge cotton paper, 9” by 12” paper including 3/4 in white border #painting#watercolor#landscape
@mrcompletely you might love gouache. The big difference from acrylic is with gouache, you can’t keep adding layers forever. If it gets too thick, that’s bad because it will crack. If you use thin layers mixed with water, they will reactivate the under layers. So you still need more of a plan than with acrylic, but less of a plan than with watercolor. It behaves a little like something in between.
