Intro Materials

Hello, my name is Stuart Lockridge. I'm a full time artist and my basic methodology is to go out and about and develop small sketches in water color and develop these sketches into larger paintings. These are often landscapes and they're quick sketches. An example of one is the moon rise just the other night. I went out and did a quick sketch of this moon rise over the river valley and I like these ideas.

I like how loose they are. Here's an example of one looking out over some lake regions just outside the city in which I live. These are sketches on tone paper using a variety of transparent and opaque water colors. Again, here's a sketch on a blue tone paper right down on the river. I took out the entire city and made it more of a natural scene.

These little sketches are a major inspiration and driver for my work, but they're so small. So how do you take that leap into enlarging them? And what happens to the space on these sketches when you enlarge something uh in a small sketch that may not be so apparent, becomes glaringly apparent, apparent when you go large and a good way to do that for me is to take the stress off the materials. And so I'll develop cartoons in the traditional, uh meaning of the word cartoon, which is a preparatory sketch for a larger piece. So I will often do my cartoons on cardboard with the medium of and it just is, it's like working my sketch onto a larger version of itself.

So here's an example of a painting on cardboard can even see there's a ding in the cardboard. Uh It's all right. It doesn't matter. It's just, it's, it's a cardboard piece. I don't have a whole lot of attachment to it is different than water color in a few ways.

They do both have gum Arabic as their base medium and they both can be recharged or re wetted. Unlike acrylic paint, the difference of gush from water color is that gosh, is an opaque medium. It's mixed with calcium of carbonate, which is a chalk and the pigment is also more coarse. So water color is a transparent medium. It uh it's, if you're painting on a cardboard with water color, just that brown is going to keep dulling your colors.

But with gosh, it's an opaque color and it's nice to start out on a tinted surface. So I have here my layout we're working on glass that I have found at thrift stores. I have some pencils, tubes of paint, the opaque whites, of course. And my paper towels are out, the water brushes. When painting, wash, it's great to use old, worn out brushes.

Um, and then I have the easel, I'll be working up right and standing. So working on cardboard is just a low stress substrate. You can procure it anywhere. Everybody's getting boxes of packages and whatnot. And you can just cut up these pieces of cardboard, tape them to a ladder or your wall or an easel or work flat on the floor and make a uh just have a fun way of painting.

And I find that, that excitement and that fun you bring to that painting could then really inspire you to perhaps pursue a more serious substrate into a more of a challenging medium, but to have that fun, uh easy going excitement at the beginning where you're not worried about inexpensive materials. I mean, the cardboard can just be cut down and put into any old frame. Uh You could use it as packing material, you're just not attached to the finished product, but just having fun. That's what this is all about. And I hope you'll give it a try in your own methods, in developing small ideas into a larger format.

Thank you.