Studio Time

Category: Acrylic Painting

The Dark Queen’s Underpainting

This is all worked in with acrylic paint. I’m working out some of the details. Seeing that the sketch was fairly well finalized when I transferred it… I don’t really need to do a lot of that.

Colors used are: Winsor Newton’s cobalt green, hooker’s green, permanent alizarin crimson and cadmium orange… Golden’s cobalt teal, Sennelier’s cobalt blue and Golden’s Open Acrylic dioxazine purple and C.P. cadmium red light.

Golden’s open acrylics are formulated so as to emulate oil paints. They are convenient and they do “emulate” pretty well. They don’t quite get it, but they are much nicer than traditional acrylics; they keep longer and work easier.

I am phasing out acrylics aside from a set of basic colors. I don’t actually use them for anything other than underpaintings or “utility” paints. It doesn’t make sense to pay for an additional tube of expensive colors like cobalts or cadmiums. This is something of an attempt to use up some half empty tubes. I’m a little short on earth tones, so I’m skipping a few of the elements in the underpainting. I’ll just go straight to oil. I’ll probably just buy basic sets of Utrecht, Sennelier Abstracts or Blick brand acrylics in the future.

July 28, 2023
Drawing the Dark Queen

This is the result of going through that whole rigamarole yesterday. I trimmed all of the prints with a paper cutter… Alternately, you can use an X-acto knife and a straight-edge.

After taping all of the prints together with transparent tape, I transferred the drawing using graphite paper (Carbon paper made with graphite.) and a ballpoint. (Ballpoints don’t tear the paper as often when you bear down on them and they give you a lot better reference regarding what you have and haven’t traced.) I re-drew it with water-soluble graphite, sealed that with a light coat of (mostly) water mixed with acrylic medium, sanded it and drew a bit more…

I gave our queen a bit of cleavage (Seemed necessary… she’s “dark”.), a pair of velvet hot pants and striped stockings that reflect a few of the other forms in the painting. I stylized the rest of it and made a few changes here and there, then made an attempt to map out some of the colors with watercolor pencils. It got 2 more coats of acrylic medium. That blended the colors into fairly continuous fields as well as fixing the drawing into the canvas. This dried overnight and got sanded again. (rotary sander… it makes things go much faster. You need to be careful on stretched canvas though.)

I just realized that her robe/hair is going to have to be dark or she’s going to come off as some sort of bouncy, Pollyanna type. I’ll make some color changes this morning… I’m pretty sure how they need to go.

July 27, 2023
Nefarious Doings Down on the Farm

This is 20×41… Oil on canvas. It started out as an automatic drawing that ended up as more of a framework for the figures than anything else. Most of them are consciously developed. The focus here is on the figures themselves, color interactions and using the stripes to define the contours.

I occasionally do fantasy style images that derive from a hypothetical farm. It has a small cast of recurring characters and gives me a sort of base construct to place things in to as well as a place to develop narratives and so on. This draws from that a bit… hence the title. The “Nefarious Doings”? 🙂 They’re in there.

July 25, 2023
Lunacy

This is an automatic painting with some loose intent behind it.

Sometimes it just feels more appropriate to start something with a brush. With a colored ground, you may actually have no choice. (I do tend to do lots of experiments with acrylic paint that at least define a starting point or give things a base color.) Pastels or colored pencils may show up on it and give you a usable drawing but it’s frequently easier to just go straight to paint. It can be a lot more fun as well. I started with circles for eyes, blocked in a loose drawing of a face and let the painting sort of work its way from there.

🙂 “Lunacy” is a sort of recurring theme with me. I’ve done quite a few variations on the idea. It’s inspired somewhat by the faces from older cartoons.

This is 18×24 inches… oil over acrylic on panel.

July 22, 2023
Jack in the Box

I’m not really sure where this photo came from. I found it while digging through some gallery directories. I may have shot it with my tablet or something. I must have stripped the EXIF camera data.

This painting is oil on canvas and was originally much larger… 4×6 feet or so, and more complex, and… just didn’t work. It sat rolled against the wall for some time before I decided to cut it up. I cut the original in half, reworked it and mounted each side on wood (plywood or hardwood, one. I sold this a long time ago. I really don’t remember which.) The other painting’s about half this size. I did manage to cut out the elements that weren’t working for me and come up with two paintings that I liked.

That is one of the advantages of working with panels. This was on a stretcher. When you stretch stuff you lose several inches on the sides when you wrap the canvas around the stretcher bars. Re-stretching it would kill a lot of what I was trying to save. If you adhere things to a panel, you can cut your canvas pretty precisely.

It’s basically a sort of fantasy thing that’s generated from an automatic drawing. In the first version of this; the “Jack in the box” (That face you may or may not see in the upper left hand corner. 🙂 ) was much more clearly attached to the forms on the right side and may have looked a bit more like an actual Jack in the box. I think it works better this way.

July 18, 2023
Dryad

This is 18×24… oil on canvas panel. It’s just straight, out of my head, with no references; one of those rare paintings that just worked out of the gate. I blocked it in with acrylic paint. It took, maybe, four brushstrokes to resolve the face… the rest went pretty easily. It took a bit longer to add the details and so on.

July 17, 2023
A Bit Further Down the Street

Yesterday was a matter of filling in the blanks, adding some color, rebuilding and modeling the forms and so on.

Colors are Winsor Newton’s viridian blended with Rembrandt’s cadmium yellow, The blues are Winsor Newton’s French ultramarine with varying percentages of titanium white. The shadows are just ultramarine scrubbed over the greys as well as in to a few other places. I’ll be blending more greys back into that, as well as shadowing with a bit of violet. I want to see what sort of paint effects I can come up with on the “wall” areas.

The reds are, um… “reinforced” with Winsor Newton’s cadmium red deep blended to Rembrandt’s cadmium red light.

Frankly, I’m thinking the greens are a bit harsh and the whole thing sort of reminds me of Christmas. I’ll be toning things down and adding some paint effects throughout. I’m thinking along the lines of a summer scene… moderately bright, saturated colors… clear, sunny skies, all that.

June 21, 2023
Walking Down the Street

I actually managed a fairly decent amount of time with this yesterday. Most of that time was spent shaping things with burnt sienna and a mix of raw sienna and titanium white. I followed that with Tuscan earth midtones and some Naples yellow highlights… changed the hair on the mother from the “mother and child” grouping and reworked her legs a little bit. The guy at the top center is supposed to be eating an orange. Eventually, the orange will be orange and the mouth should be a little more “mouth-like”.

There are a few small changes yet to be made. Today, I’ll break out the greens and blues and try to get a little interplay going between the colors… maybe put in a few shadows. There’s not a lot to say about it that isn’t better said by the image.

June 20, 2023
On the Road

Yesterday’s was a short session due to Father’s Day festivities. I did manage to pretty much resolve the structure of this thing. Aside from a few small changes, it’s basically ready to paint. 🙂 …Shadowing, rendering, color and so on. This is the pleasant part where I can just basically get lost in things, listen to Americana or Jazz and fiddle with colors and forms.

Colors in yesterday’s session are: Sennelier’s raw umber, carbon black and titanium white for the greys and Naples yellow for some of the modeling. The oranges are Winsor Newton’s cadmium scarlet and Rembrandt’s cadmium orange.

Oh, I still had the lights and camera set up from yesterday. A couple of shots and a few twists on the polarizing filter were enough to get this image. It’s still sort of weird shooting in near dark.

June 19, 2023
The Street Revisited

This is the point at which things get a little frustrating. I made some changes to the overall structure of things yesterday. There will probably be a bit more of that. If this were any other time, or any other painting I’d probably just lose the linear stuff and just go with organic forms. That doesn’t really work with the way this was conceptualized though.

I think I’ve come to terms with the architectural stuff. I’m going to simplify a few areas, add some shadowing and go for a sort of trompe l’oeil look…. Sort of dangle things in front of a grey, concrete wall. In addition to the structural lines, it should give me what I’m looking for.

It’s probably a little unprofessional of me to apologize for the image quality… so, I’m going to do it anyway. This is image number 53. It’s taken with the lights reflecting off of the opposite wall, the window shades drawn and the polarizing filter on the camera cranked up all the way. It’s wet… It’s really difficult to make the glare go away and I need coffee yet. 🙂

Colors are Sennelier’s Tuscan earth, titanium white and Naples yellow. Naples yellow, and specifically Sennelier’s product, may just be the most essential color in my paint box. I typically use it instead of white. It’s wonderfully dense and opaque and makes rendering and highlighting much, much easier.

I used Grumbacher’s Mars black for the greys and the outlining. I usually use lampblack or carbon black but, I have a few old tube “ends” that I need to clear out of the paint box.

June 18, 2023