On October 17th 2024, I'm running a Watercolor session at Oh! Canary art studio called "Portraits of the dead". Here’s a demo:

Instead of the cute birds & cats & things I do, they wanted to go for something a bit more seasonally creepy. I pitched "Portraits of the Dead", where we have fun and paint terrible looking humans and excuse our inept portraiture as "zombies". Then i had them change the name of the place to "OoOoOoOh Canary" because obviously. I also came up with “Bring your own spirits” get it? Pretty sure nobody has come up with that line before.

This session is supposed to be fun, above all else. Will you learn a lot of techniques about watercolor & drawing? Absolutely. The most important lesson is going to be this one: don’t worry about “doing it right”. This is intended to look bad. It’s a monster! It’s eyeballs are falling out of it’s sockets! It’s half dead! Mostly dead? Undead? Who really knows. Point is, go bananas. Draw something gross and ridiculous. Paint outside the lines. It doesn’t matter. I talk a lot about this in the full video, which I don’t know how to make a transcript of (yet) but you are more than welcome to improvise every step of the way here. That’s basically how life goes anyway.

Back in the earlier days of my art life, I used to make warped, weird looking figures all the time. It was kind of my thing. I’ve got boxes of paintings of them in my basement. Come by for the Studio Tour (Nov 2) and maybe I’ll show some of them to you. I would fill up sketchbooks of highly detailed, really weird looking people. Then I’d transfer those drawings onto a canvas. First, I’d photocopy the drawings, then use a colorless blender marker totransfer the drawing over exactly. It was a process. Was it a good process? I’m not sure. I probably could’ve just drawn on the canvas in the first place, but the point was I could cram 50 drawings into a sketchbook. I couldn’t cram 50 canvases into a bag I’d bike around town with.

These portraits were sometimes of real people. Sometimes imaginary. Always a bit of a self portrait, even if they didn’t look like me at all. They were a way for me to illustrate some brooding, metastisizing dread and despair, without outwardly feeling that way. That’s what I’d tell a therapist at least. At some point, that phase faded away, and I didn’t feel like I needed to get that out anymore. Now I paint cute dogs and birds and local coffeeshops, which I love. But in October, I paint zombies. LFG.

Speaking of October and creepy stuff, I’m posting my inktober stuff (along with anything that doesn’t fit the cheerfully happy studionumbernine aesthetic) over at https://www.instagram.com/darkstanek. Give it a follow.

Materials used

Rembrandt Watercolor Paper - https://amzn.to/3Nlfo8s

Sailor Fude de Mannen Fountain Pen - https://amzn.to/4fg9Isj

Van Gogh Watercolors - https://amzn.to/403oNcl

Princeton Brushes - https://amzn.to/4eXMIxT

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