Mitchell and I attended the Restoration Celebration to raise money for the
the 2016 Most Endangered Places, and to hear the winners of the 2015 Demuro Awards,
as the guest of one of our clients, Karla Pearlstein of Restoring History.
Restore Oregon is an excellent place to put your time and dollars toward preservation.

This is the beginning of a series for Restore Oregon.

I teamed up with Drew Nasto (photographer) and Denise Bartlett (Restore Oregon)
to collect great images to place into sketch format to commemorate the night!
This post is a teaser, to show the process of moving from great pictures to sketch.

In this instance, I started with Drew’s excellent images of the Demuro Award plates
and lovely image of Peggy Moretti, Executive Director, Restore Oregon.

Pencil first, both watercolor and graphite.
(If you use pencil first, and erase some or all of it, use a clean eraser!
If it is a knead-able eraser then pull it into a clean place!)
Moving to a fine point fountain pen, then a Japanese brush pen.

I laid in ink to unify the background, Super5 Dublin and Australia.
It is so different working on really nice watercolor paper;
I am usually in a Moleskin or Stillman & Birn journal:
great journals but obviously not like good watercolor paper!

I began layering washes,
Quinacridone Gold and Yavapei and Piemonite and Sepia,
Sap Green, and Imperial Purple. I tested colors on a piece of the good paper, to see how the inks reacted to the good watercolor paper and to watch the colors build to the deep colored piece I ended with. (The glittery shimmer in the images is wet paint. No sparkles were added).

I am no portraitist, so it is nerve-wracking to do someone’s portrait.
But I’m learning!  Finished piece: 1/4 of the folded journal, sans writing, below.

Process slide show below!

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Inked sketches on a handmade Arches Journal with (mostly)
Platinum Carbon pen, Pentel Brush Pen, or Pilot Parallel pen 1.5;
Super5 or De Atramentis Document inks;
Daniel Smith, QoR, Holbien and Greenleaf & Blueberry Watercolors.

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My images/blog posts may be reposted; please link back to dkatiepowellart.
Photographs by Drew Nasto or others as noted, with permission.