CrashOctopus Blog

Incredulous Owl by Meg Lyman

Gouache on ACEO

$30 – e-mail to purchase

So apparently owls are now a thing. Not sure how long it will last, but they’ve been all over the stores – as earrings, on shirts, as stuffed animals, on towels, in artwork – you name it. I think it’s partially because the owl shape lends itself to stylization and is still instantly recognizable. Here are a few examples:

There is a brewery in Japan, Hitachino Nest, that has an adorable owl as its mascot. I posted about their Hitachino Stout several years ago, and just recently tried their Sweet Stout, which is a milk stout. Delicious, as milk stouts usually are.

Isn’t it cute?

Because of all this owl hype, I thought now would be a good time to finally do the tribute to the Hitachino owl I’ve been wanting to do. I used the opportunity to try a new color scheme, using flat colors and dry brushing. It was a fun experiement!

Angry Derp  Owl by Meg Lyman

Gouache and ink on ACEO

It’s a bird! But it looks like a pig! SO CONFUSED

Really, this was a color experiment. I got a new tube of cobalt turquoise gouache and now I want to paint everything cyan. The scan sucks; the color looks much better in real life. Slightly greener. Anyway, I experimented with complimentary colors and had a lot of fun with it. I also did a new color chart with some new tubes (trying to fill out my Yurmby palette) and will post the results soon.

Haunted Lantern by Meg Lyman

Around 4×9″gouache and ink.

$60 – e-mail to inquire

I don’t know. Another long cephalopod experiment. This time with gold gouache. Until recently, I didn’t know they made gold gouache. It is awesome. But it does not scan well.

Balloon by Meg Lyman

~6×12″ gouache, ink, and pastel

SOLD

I have this fairly expensive watercolor paper that is an odd size – 10.5×24.5 cm or something inexplicably weird like that. It’s been sitting around for a while, and one day I got a wild hair and sketched out a bunch of elongated cephalopods on them. After I finished the drawings (feeling very pleased with myself for letting my muse vent), I stared at them with the vacancy usually expressed by my dog when I try to teach him a trick. I hadn’t thought these out. I had no idea what colors to use.

So I turned to my friend the Gimp and did some color tests. I’d been meaning to try out this orange/blue/green combo on something, and it looked like it’d work well on this guy. So I tried it out, and it was fun, but didn’t look finished, so I cut a piece of Sennelier La Carte pastel card and made a border for it. Then I glued the paper to it with acrylic gel medium. The piece now feels finished, and I feel like a slightly bewildered collage artist.

I don’t own any tubes of purple gouache. I recently have been using a lot of purple. Having to mix it each time doesn’t bother me, but I never seemed to be able to get the color right. I tried different combinations trying to find a good one, to no avail and much waste of paint. I’m certain I mixed the same shade of purple mud half a dozen times. So I gave up and made a color chart. For the limited audience who is curious about mixing purple gouache, here you go. You’re welcome.

A few notes: all the colors were Holbein, except Ultramarine – that was M Graham. All the paints were single pigment. These are all the reds and all the blues I have. This chart should be just as good for watercolors as for gouache. I have concluded that having both Alizarin Crimson and Pure Red on hand just makes things more confusing. I can tell them apart on the palette only because old Holbein AC crumbles into little bits when it gets dry.

Holy moly, I’ve had some of my gouache tubes for 3 years. No wonder they’re getting crunchy.

Little Crab I by Meg Lyman

Gouache on illustration board ACEO

SOLD

OH THE CUTE

This was a fun color experiment. I have concluded that I love purple.

Stylized Cuttlefish II by Meg Lyman

5×7″ gouache on paper

$45 – e-mail to buy

Been painting little doodles and working on the website. I need to post a WIP of one of these little gouache doodles, but they’re so fast that I usually forget to stop and take photos.

Happy Mother’s Day!

This will be the last of my discussions of warm and cool colors… partially because I ran out of color combinations, and partially because I didn’t learn all that much. But I had to finish the project.

Here are parts 1, 2, and 3.

Purple is today’s mix of choice. Warm red and warm blue (upper left) make a nice warm purple… on the brown side. Cool red and cool blue (upper right) make a cooler, more traditional purple color. Makes sense, right?

But cool red and warm blue (lower right) make a quite vibrant purple. I’m really not sure why, except that warm red is so vibrant on its own. This whole thing makes me wonder if maybe I needed to pick my warm and cool pigments so that they were as equal as possible… But then again, cool red and warm blue (lower right) make a horrible muddy brown, as expected. The dichotomy lends weight to the theory that my single pigment tubes may not, indeed, be only one pigment. Hmm.

The whole thing taught me only ONE thing: premix your color and test it first, because you never know exactly what you’re going to get.

p.s. football started. GO BEARS!

To continue our discussion of warm and cool colors, I present: Green. For those interested, here are Parts 1 and 2.

This one gave some interesting results. The warm blue and warm yellow provided a nice, clear, warm green. It looks like it’d be good for grass that needs watering (a common sight in Atlanta recently). However, the cool blue and cool yellow gave me a brownish mess. Since the cool blue and warm yellow gave a similar shade of mud, I’m guessing it’s the fault of the common element, ultramarine blue, although I’m not sure why. Any suggestions? I’ve only mixed it with browns (to make dark, blackish colors) and reds to make purples.

The warm blue and cool yellow created a surprisingly pleasant mix. It reminds me of what grass is supposed to look like. I’ll actually get to see some of it during my road trip to Iowa next week. Which, by the way, is the reason I won’t be posting for the next week and a half.

In conclusion, I still have no idea what I’m doing with color mixing, and nothing consistent has come out of my experiments yet. Next installation: purple in all its glorious mystery.

First, happy Independence Day! I hope you all have a wonderful holiday. My country isn’t perfect, but I sure am glad to live here and be able to paint cephalopods in my free time. Speaking of which, there’s new content up at MegLyman.com.

Today I’ll explore more warm and cool colors. See this post for the introduction to the experiment. I will attempt to draw conclusions. You are welcome to chime in.

Here’s my first experiment: red and yellow together. Also known as orange: the color of construction, and when put next to navy blue, the colors of the Chicago Bears. GO BEARS! Ahem.

On the left, I mixed oranges with “like” primaries – that is, I mixed warms with warms and cools with cools. On the right, I combined warms and cools.

The orange in the upper left corner is the most vibrant. It’s certainly a warm orange, and has the most life to it. If I wanted to paint a vibrant giant pacific octopus, I’d use that combination.

The orange at the lower left is more muted. It’s definitely more muddy and cool than the warm/warm orange. I think there are two reasons for that: first, orange is generally a warm color, so making a cool orange is a bit difficult. Second, the cool red I used has a lot of blue in it (you know, its being “cadmium red purple” and all) and that means there were really three primaries in the mix, making it more brown and muddy.

The orange on the lower right is an interesting one. It’s fairly vibrant and light; I think it is the most successful cool orange I mixed. Using the warm red instead of the cool one really gets rid of the brown look. It’s sort of pastel orange, almost peachy, and I like it.

The orange in the upper right is the muddiest of all. I think this is because it mixes warm and cool AND it includes all three primaries. But it’s orange mud, for sure. In fact, if it ever rains again in Georgia, this is will be the color of my yard.

In conclusion, the warm/warm mix created the most vibrant orange, and the warm yellow/cool red created the muddiest orange. But the most important conclusion is that you should do your own color tests, because I still have no idea what I’m doing. Check back after a few more posts.