Digital Painting Update

Please check out my "first pass" of a digital portrait at my other blog:

Back To The Drawing Board

Figure Studies

I've really been enjoying the opportunities I've recently had to spend time drawing and painting from the figure. It's been quite a while since I spent any time in a figure class, and it's been great! Yesterday, for the first time in years, I got up the courage to take out the oils, and spent the afternoon with a bunch of friends making this small study. These are water miscible oils, as the studio in question doesn't allow solvents, and I like to have a thin, washy paint for the underdrawing. For the rest it's just paint straight from the tube and a tiny bit of oil to assist with flow.

This is small, 12x16, and it took me most of the 3 hour session to bring it to this stage. Overall, I'm very pleased with the visual quality, although it's not a particularly flattering portrait of the model. I'll be drawing her again at Visual Ats Mississauga's Open Studio life session on Thursday. These Thurdsay sessions have been extended through the spring, starting April 4th.

Below are some recent drawings from these sessions, done with carbon pencils and pastel pencils on toned paper.

Mixed Media

I've been considering trying to do something with oil pastels for a little while, and my friend Aleda O'Connor, who has worked with them for some time, was very encouraging. Much as I love Aleda's approach (and I urge you to check out her blog) I wanted to do something different with them.

Recently, with my acrylic landscapes, the surface texture of the painting has become more and more important to me, to the point where I now regularly texture my panels with various rough grounds and use thick paint where I can. I was hoping that using oil pastels over top of such an acrylic underpainting would yield some interesting results.

So, during a recent landscape class, I coated an acrylic underpainting with clear gesso and took the oil pastels to it. I was very pleased with the results.

I have also been looking for an approach to figure painting that would allow me a more expressive, gritty feel. I took an abandoned demo of a landscape underpainting and coated it with a pastel ground. I made a very rough, blocky carbon pencil drawing of a figure and overpainted thin acrylic washes to emphasize warm and cool areas, then went to town with the oil pastels. Again, I am very pleased with this little experiment, I think it shows a lot of promise.

Next, I'm going to try some still life or floral compositions, and see how those suit me. I may be on to my next obsession...

Acrylic Step-by-step

I originally painted this several months ago for a school group presentation at Visual Arts Mississauga, an introduction to creating a painting from the ground up, as it were. I've since been asked to add some explanatory text to the step-by-step photos and post it for others, so here goes.

There are some general guidelines worth keeping in mind, not just for landscape, but for most painting:

Paint from the big shapes to the smaller details - don't get trapped in each and every detail at the first stage. Use large brushes at first, switching to smaller as you need to add detail or refinement. (You may find, as you go along, that there are lots of details that can be left out.) You don't have to paint every leaf and flower petal - leave the greatest detail for your focal area.

Paint from thin to thick, transparent to opaque. Shadows are usually most effective if they are somewhat transparent. Avoid adding white to your shadow colours until you need to modify the colour and/or the light later on in the painting process.

Lay down your brush stroke, and leave it alone. Don't mush your brush back and forth along the same stroke; that destroys all the character of the stroke. And do try to stroke, not jab, dab or stab.

Consider your composition first. It's important to go into the painting stage with a plan, so several thumbnail drawings of your subject are always a good idea. These are small, simplified drawings, with no concern for detail, but looking at balance, shapes, arrangements of lights and darks, etc. Interesting composition tends to avoid placing your centre of interest actually right in the centre of your painting! A good starting place is to divide your canvas into thirds, both horizontally and vertically. The points where the thirds meet are good focal areas.

The first thing I like to do with my canvas is give it a thin wash of colour all over, very roughly. This is called the imprimatura, and it gives you a mid-tone to work on, which makes it easier to judge your darks and lights. I usually do my initial drawing directly with a brush and thinned paint. In the example you can see how scrubbed on and rough the imprimatura looks. I have only concentrated on the big general shapes, nothing fussy.

The next stage is blocking in the darks. I tend to to use cool dark colours, at least in the beginning - blues, purples and cool greens. They can always be overpainted later if they need to be lightened a little or warmed up. Then, consider where the lightest light(s) will be. Often, this will be the sky. Now you have a pretty good idea of the range between the darkest dark and lightest light. Everything else will relate to these. The roof of the tower will eventually be fairly dark, but I don't want to lose it in the dark of the tree at this stage, so I'm going to leave it alone for now.

Notice that the sky is not a solid blue. It's lighter towards the horizon (and maybe a tiny bit yellowish) and the large areas of blue are broken up with some paler, almost white, shapes. I haven't tried to paint anything that looks like a puffy cloud, just the suggestion of clouds.

Now we get into the real landscape colour - green. It's very important to vary your greens. Look at how deep and rich the midground trees are, compared with how cool, bluish and paler the far background trees are. The hedges and lawns are much warmer, with more yellow and orange added. Some of the shadows have been modified to give them a little more colour and light. A point about brushwork - don't try to smooooth out all your strokes! An important part of the Impressionist approach is to have distinct brush strokes with varying colour side by side.

With a lot of the foliage taken care of it's time to look at the tower and bridge. Now I can look at the lights and darks of the architecture in relation to the surroundings. Even though the tower will be lighter than this in the shadows, I still want to be sure that I'm keeping the sides distinct from each other - light, mid-tone, and dark. I'm also starting to work in some of the colour on the paths and the far background buildings.

I can start to fill in the colour of the stonework now. I have no intention of trying to paint each individual stone and brick, but I want to leave a strong impression of the difference in texture between the tower and the trees. Individual strokes, laid down and left alone, are the key here. You can see that the shadow side of the tower is now considerably lighter than the previous step, but each side of the tower is still seperate. Can you see a hint of warm reflected light in the shadow side of the tower? I've also cleaned up the paths a little, with better definition of the lights and darks.

Some finishing touches and the sketch is complete. I've added more detail to the left side hedges, defined the distant tree trunks and added some sky reflection and accent darks to the canal.

Voila!

Shades of Gray

I had the pleasure of leading a drawing workshop on Saturday at the Neilson Park Creative Centre in Etobicoke. "Shades of Gray" focused on using various drawing media on toned paper. The idea here is to use the tone of the paper as an overall mid-tone, and draw in the darks and the lights. This challenges our ingrained habit of filling a white sheet with dark marks to indicate form, often with interesting results.

The first exercise was the old "make a circle look like a sphere," using charcoal or carbon pencils, wax-based coloured pencils, and "white charcoal" pencil. (If anyone knows what goes into making General's White Charcoal pencils, I would be very interested)  From the very beginning I encouraged the group to use line for basic layout purposes, but ultimately to pay more attention to the value masses, and how the relative lights and darks interact next to one another.

The next challenge was to draw a carton of eggs, and I don't think it made me any new friends... This one really showed that this technique requires the artist to think differently about representing values. There were times when it was more advantageous to add white to the shadow area of the eggs, because the midtone of the paper was too dark!

After a short lunch break, things were a little more open, with each artist choosing their own subject matter from a selection of reference photos: flowers, a portrait, a landsape, a dilapitated old barn, etc. I demonstrated an ink-wash technique during this time.

The focus and concentration was very intense, and the group tried a number of techniques, including brush drawing, pen drawing, and coloured  and watercolour pencil, often in combinations. They were a tired bunch by the end of the day, but they all felt very pleased with the work they had produced.

I must apologize to some of the participants if their work was not included in the post - my camera let me down, and I lost about half the shots I took. I am very sorry.

Digital Figure Study

I continue to play around with painting in Photoshop, and I finally have a figure study I'm not embarassed to share. This is actually the third version of this image. I decided that I really needed to push the colour and texture a little to create a little more interest in an otherwise monochromatic painting, so I banged in some greens, blues and purples and massaged them into the original warm oranges and browns. A lot of this is experimenting and playing with the various brushes and settings that are available in Photoshop. I think it has a bit of that trashy paperback/pulp look from the 50s and 60s. Kinda fun...

My Fall painting class has started, so there should be some posts of acrylic landscapes again soon. But I'm not giving up on the digital world!

More Digital

I spent a few days either side of the Labour Day weekend on Georgian Bay, and I felt it was time to attempt a digital landscape painting. All I had to do was look out the window, after all... Really this is just a quick study, not a full landscape, but I'm getting a better painterly feel for the medium. It's still pretty rough around the edges, but it's coming.

The physical size is about 10x13 inches, so I was working at about 50% to fit the entire image on my monitor. This helps with the principle of working broadly at the beginning of a painting, getting the big shapes and value relationships early, and not looking too closely at detail too soon. In fact, there is not really any fine detail in this painting, I left it in a very sketchy (in places nebulous) state, as the detail illustrates.

There is likely enough here that I could increase the size of the "canvas" and spend another hour or two making a much more detailed finished painting, but that was not the intent of the exercise.

I'm pleased with how this is going, but with any luck I'll have a couple of more traditional painting classes starting in a couple of weeks, so there will be more acrylic demos to show. However, the digital isn't going away; you'll see more soon.