Hare-Brained

The next two Nautilus shells are drawn up in pencil. I need to tint another sheet of paper for the last one, but at least that's two more underway. They just need colour, but if I start now it will time to go to collect son from school and I won't have eaten. So stop for lunch, and blog.

Nothing much to show for the shells. At the moment they look almost like the first one, only there's no ink, and they have chambers and markings sketched in. Which are really interesting, because you can see the external markings from inside and...

But that's for later.

So instead it's me delving back into the past, in more ways than one.

As I have said before, I like to copy other artists. It's a great way to learn, and a time-honoured tradition for that very reason. Sometimes I copy drawings, or oil paintings, sometimes illumination, sometimes watercolours.

My son loves Durer's Hare. He has a picture book from when he was little, "A Child's Book of Art: Great Pictures First Words" (pub. Dorling Kindersley), which introduces words and concepts using images from great paintings in both Western and Eastern art and from antiquity (up the back it lists each image and who painted it and when). And in the Animals section is the Hare. 

I love this book. Good for children of all ages, including me.

So a few years back I did him a copy. It hangs on the wall in his bedroom and he still loves it (yay). I got it down to photograph it for this post and he was quite protective of it. "Will you have it long? When will you hang it back up? Be careful with it."

In order to do the copy I had to do quite a lot of hunting around on the internet, not just for images but also for analysis. I would love to see the original, but I don't think that will ever happen. The original painting is rarely displayed because it is now very fragile. It was, after all, painted in 1502. It was done in watercolour and bodycolour (aka gouache) on cream paper. Even in his own lifetime other artists were copying the Hare and learning from the way that Durer abandoned or adapted conventions of painting.

Feldhase, Albrecht Durer, 1502, watercolour and bodycolour on paper

One reason I would like to see the original (apart from just the breathtaking experience of seeing the original), is I would love to see the real colours of it. Have a quick search on the internet for images of it and see what I mean. Some are more yellow, some are more grey, others more red. Fortunately there is a lot known about the Hare and the colours it was painted in, so I went with those. Although it took a while to find a proper analysis (in an actual book). Most of what is published on the web is art waffle rubbish (the insctrutibility of the hare as indicative of man's inability to understand the mind of God, and so on. Please).

Over the years pigments can shift. They may be sourced from different places, the paints are made under different circumstances (a lot of paints have "fillers" these days, making the tones more muddy. Always buy the best you can afford, even if you have to build up your paints a tube at a time, or a jar of pigment at a time). Even the fact that our air make up has changed, with pollution, can alter a pigment. But all in all the colours are more or less right (unless you look at Venetian Red. It has shifted dramatically).

Hare, Megan Hitchens after Albrecht Durer, 2011, watercolour and bodycolour on paper

My version is not on cream but on off-white (I should have had the guts to start tinting back then. C'est la vie), but other than that is in the colours listed - ochres (red and yellow), sienna, umbers (burnt and raw) - with one exception. Durer had lead white gouache.

Oh, how I want a tube of lead white gouache. It has to be handled carefully, gloves and all, but it has an opacity that cannot be matched with substitutes. White watercolour and white gouache are not sufficient. White watercolour is not opaque at all, and white gouache is not opaque enough. And they are cooler in tone than lead white. Lead white has a warmth to it, it is more in the yellow, whereas Titanium white is more blue. Actually all the whites are more blue compared to lead white. I ended up using an "Opaque White" that I usually deploy in illuminations, and it was okay, but still not quite... right. Or enough. Or something.

As much as possible I worked as Durer did - put down areas of watercolour to build up form, shading, etc, then come back with gouache for the details. And oh, there is so much detail. The image appears remarkably quickly. The whole thing took less than an hour. But I did think I was going to go spare from all the little individual hairs. It would have been warmer on cream, but even so, it's not too bad. And I learnt so much from it, about technique and brushwork and paint, not least of which is 

I want lead white gouache

Ooh, look, it's school pick up time. But at least I've eaten