Source Materials

Hello, my name is Stuart Lockridge. I wanna talk about source materials and these are the sketches or the ideas or the reasons that I have to pursue a cartoon on cardboard or a painting on cardboard. So there's all sorts of reasons why I might jump into a painting on cardboard. One could be I have this really funky vintage frame and I wanna put something in it and enjoy it up on my wall or give it as a gift for somebody. Um It could even be a busted up frame. Well, I'm not gonna bother fixing it. I'm just gonna put something in there so I can cut a piece of cardboard to the size of that frame and decide what I wanna paint into it. You can cut an oval. So if you can find oval frames, circle frames, odd size frames, the cardboard can be cut to size. It's, it's a handy substrate for that reason. Um Say I want to, you know, say I want a Raphael here is a painting by Rafael Saint Catherine of Alexandria on the cover of this national Gallery art book. Well, I mean, that would be a great painting to have up in the office or the bedroom or whatever it is. So I might do a copy of that on cardboard. So that's an option, you know, II I love copying old masterpieces. But my own source materials, the most important to me and I often sketch on toned paper. Here's an example of a watercolor using transparent and opaque methods, painting on a brown tinted paper. So obviously, this makes an easy transition into sketching on cardboard because my idea has already been applied to a brown surface. So it, it just just makes sense to jump into a brown cardboard. Um And this is a sketch of a moonrise just the other night over the river valley. So it's fresh in my head. Um I it would be fun to see what it looked like in a larger format, perhaps with a frame around it. Here's a sketch of the River Valley in which I live with the city completely removed and it's on a tan paper. So again, a mix of transparent and opaque. Um I'm out and about taking long walks, sketching from life, finding ideas. And I would love to see this image enlarged onto a sheet of cardboard and tucked into a frame and see what it looks like and inspire me to take the next step into a more proper substrate or more archival substrate and maybe work into oil painting or something like that. And the, the nice thing about working up a uh a small sketch into a larger cardboard cartoon is that then you could put that cardboard cartoon across the room and look at it from afar and do a painting from it. So you're not having to hover over the top of these tiny little sketches. So here's a tiny sketch on blue tinted paper that I did last summer down on the river again, I took out bridges. I took out the city and kind of gave it this uh throwback feel. But yet use the trees that were right there in front of me. And this is again, a mixture of transparent and opaque water colors. And this is the image I'm going to use for a cardboard cartoon here. And it has some methods in there. Some techniques of paint handling that I can simply uh imitate in the painting of the cardboard. Um I have here a cardboard piece ready to go and this is a double corrugated piece of cardboard. It's a nice sheet of cardboard even if it is non archival and on the back, I've attached uh another piece of cardboard. It's a, it's just a cut length and it's attached so that I can tack to it. My little sketch. So that way it's out of the way of the water. And you can see here, I can simply attach it there probably won't be splattering on it too much. I can just keep it out of the way of the mess and it's available for quick sight, quick view and it's close to what I'm working on. That's important too. If it's, if you're gonna be working from a book, it helps to have that book set up nearby and upright to whatever you're working on at the same plane so that you can make quick, accurate comparisons between the two from your source to the painting. So it's just a brief overview on source material. What inspires me why I like the tone surface of cardboard versus a white surface. Um I like popping the highlights and using the opaque whites as I do in my little sketches when I'm out walking around. So hope that gets you started into some uh ideas and thought processes on working on a tone surface and uh in particular, the cardboard surface.