Final, Frederick Douglass

It's hard to believe that nearly a month has passed since I last posted. I guess there's been a lot going on: The Civil War Collectors Show in Mansfield, OH, then back-to-back Saturdays of teaching a class on colored pencil techniques for the Botanical Art and Illustration program at Phipps Conservatory in Pittsburgh, followed by a workshop on paper and other surfaces for use with colored pencil in North Canton, OH and finally a one-Saturday class for a drawing group in Sewickley, PA about using solvents with colored pencil. A lot of teaching can add up to not much time for creating! But the teaching has been a very enriching experience so I don't believe I'll stop teaching anytime soon.

I was pleased to learn that a colored pencil drawing from my Gettysburg Today series -- entitled Ever-Vigilant -- was accepted into the Adams County Arts Council's 7th Annual Juried Exhibition, which will be on display at Schmucker Art Gallery on the campus of Gettysburg College, June 18 - 27. (To view the drawing now, please visit www.CivilWarFineArt.com/GettysburgToday.htm. )

Next Friday, May 28, marks the opening of my seventh season in Gettysburg at my gallery, Civil War Fine Art, located at 333 Baltimore St. I'm anxious to get back into the gallery and hope to see you there!

Next month, from June 18 - 27, I'll be participating in the Gettysburg Fringe Festival with the Debut of my Civil War 150 Project (see sidebar for explanation). I'll also be involved with the Plein Air Paint Out during the Festival, along with many of my friends from the Daily Painters of Pennsylvania blog (www.dailypaintersofpennsylvania.blogspot.com). The Festival is a wonderful cultural event; I strongly encourage you to take a look at all it has to offer at www.gettysburgfestival.org.

As you can see above, I've finished my 24" x 24" colored pencil painting of Frederick Douglass. I am now working toward having limited edition reproductions made. I'm pleased with how this piece turned out; I like the looseness and energy of the strokes, the range of color, and the expression of the eyes. So now it looks like I'd better get back to considering the next edition of "Sarah".

Step 4, Frederick Douglass

Starting to get into some detail now, and this is where I want to be VERY careful: I like the intensity of the expression and the looseness of technique, and I don't want to dilute the effect by over-detailing the portrait. So far I've only added detail using the Artstix: Tuscan Red, Terra Cotta, Dark Umber, Black, Indigo Blue, Dark Green, Peach and Ultramarine. Right now I'm thinking I may not get into using any regular colored pencil at all. I also have lifted out some areas with a battery-powered eraser -- the Gessobord takes this type of eraser very effectively.

Frederick Douglass, Step 2

I've started to add more tonal areas now. The figure has been laid in so far with a Tuscan Red Artstix. The background is Derwent Inktense pencils, "liquefied" and applied with a two-inch brush, then allowed to run. At 24" x 24", he's a fairly imposing figure in my studio!

Sarah Emma Edmonds I: Departure, final (really!)

(A professional photograph makes a huge difference, in my opinion! Many thanks to my photographer, Emily Puls.) This colored pencil/mixed media (powdered graphite, Lasertran waterslide decal) painting on Gessobord measures 18" x 24". I will be displaying it for the first time in the "Palm Sunday through Resurrection" exhibition, March 26 - April 24 at Art & Soul Gallery, 900 Market St., Lemoyne, PA. How does this piece fit that theme? I have indicated in earlier posts that my goal is to have several layers of meaning in my work. When displayed in non-Civil War venues, this painting will simply carry the title, Departure. There are several biblical passages that come to mind for me with this piece, and the Resurrection would be one of them. Also, Sarah Emma's mother was a devout Christian and Emma embraced her faith wholeheartedly. Gallery owner/director Lyn O'Neal graciously invited me to participate, and I am excited to have this as my first opportunity to display this new painting.

Taking a break from Sarah

After many days of feeling that I was finished with my most recent piece, this morning I hit upon an addition I wanted to make -- and now it really does feel finished. So it's off to the photographer's, and once I get the professional digital image I'll post the actual, final version. (As a result, I renamed my last post "Stage Seven", rather than "Final".

For Sarah Emma Edmonds II, I will be working with the stage of her life where she creates and adopts her new, male identity. I have a visual image of a shady pine forest that I think will play a strong role as a setting for this piece, since Sarah Emma travelled by night and hid in the woods by day, until she had grown accustomed to her new identity. Beyond that, I have some research and brainstorming to do. So in the meantime, I've begun a large -- 24" x 24" -- close-up portrait of Frederick Douglass. I've already completed portraits of Harriet Beecher Stowe and John Brown, two key players in the anti-slavery movement; they may be viewed on my website at http://www.civilwarfineart.com/. But as passionate as they were for the abolitionist cause, their experiences would have been very different from those of a man who had been born into slavery and managed to escape its bonds to become a dynamic and eloquent abolitionist speaker.

There are many photographic images of Frederick Douglass, and I am nearly finished with a small piece depicting him in his later years. But for my large portrait I wanted to focus on a much earlier image, taken in the 1850's, at about the same time he would have met with John Brown in Chambersburg, PA, to discuss Brown's plan of an attack on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry. This image shows a much more intense, almost fiery expression in Douglass' eyes, and it is the eyes that I believe will be key to the success of this portrait.

I am working on Gessobord again, and began by doing an underpainting of watercolor pencil sprayed with water and allowed to drip. The basic drawing has been laid over top using a Tuscan Red Prismacolor Artstix.

Stage Five, Sarah Emma Edmonds: Departure

With the help of my computer scanner and printer and a product called Lazertran (waterslide decal paper), I made and applied a custom "decal" of an open book to the composition. In Stage Four, I had tried to represent an open book through drawing, but I quickly saw that it wasn't having the graphic impact I wanted. On the other hand, as it currently appears, I'm much happier with the book image but I truly believe it's too strong at the moment. I will study it some more but currently plan to use drawing techniques to tone it down, make it flow into the rest of the composition a little more. It is definitely too much of a focal point at this stage.

Stage Three, Sarah Emma Edmonds: Departure

This image was shot earlier today. I have made a fair amount of progress on the water imagery since the last image posted, and have now begun to include some of the other elements; most notably, the suggestion of birds flying up out of the water and to the top and right sections of the format. As the birds are meant to be symbolic, my intention is to keep them minimally described, but I'm not yet convinced that they're as developed as I'd like them to be. Part of what I like about posting things online is that it enables me to look at the composition in a slightly different way than when I'm looking at the actual work-in-progress. So I'll study it a while and contemplate my next move.

Stage Two, Sarah Emma Edmonds: Departure

This view is from October 10, 2009. Progress has been slow, for several reasons. First, I'm experimenting by using a different type of surface -- a product called Gessobord -- for this piece, which measures 18" x 24". It's a very rough, hard surface, much different from the paper surfaces I normally use, and requires a lot of pencil pressure and many layers for the pigment to really stick to the surface. Second, while I know that I want the format to be dominated by this view of choppy water -- symbolic of Magaguadavic Lake -- on whose shores Sarah Emma grew up and whose waters and character, I feel strongly, greatly impacted her, I am uncertain of the best approach to take to convey the mood I'm hoping for. Also, there are other elements which I want to incorporate into the composition and am struggling with how best to do that. So there are a lot of unanswered questions, for me, and I have a strong tendency to let it sit and focus on other things -- commission work, new images for my Christmas card series, local Gettysburg scenes. Those things don't seem quite so demanding.