Studio Time

Category: The Dark Queen

The Wings of the Dark Queen

I figured that I may as well put in the red forms… I added the orange form on the right… That empty green space was just throwing things off and I want another largish orange form on that side. I’m thinking it will balance the striped objects, pull things forward a bit and set the queen herself back a little in space. I’m a little frustrated with that dark space on the lower right as well but I think that may work in the final image. I need to make it a little more interesting though.

I scrubbed purple madder into the robe/hair form. The color there is actually pretty accurate (The greens in this image… not so much.) I scrubbed the left side back nearly to black. The texture there is the texture of the canvas. That entire form will have a narrow highlight across it and the color will change a bit. It’s actually somewhat close to what I was looking for. I blocked in the wing/arm forms with purple madder and titanium white as well. I’ve decided that purple madder is the true color of evil. Black doesn’t hold a candle to it. 🙂 (Caput mortuum, on the other hand…)

The next real decision, for me, is what to do with those forms inside the robe. I can go with a bright blue that will add contrast and blend with the colors in that space or go with something jarring like an orange or yellow. Blue wouldn’t be my typical decision… I should probably go with that. I’m going to do the bones in the wings a bright yellow. It might make for an interesting interplay between the two colors.

Most of these colors will get more intense. 🙂 I’ll eventually clean up her lipstick.

Colors: Winsor Newton’s cadmium red deep, purple madder and cadmium yellow deep, Sennelier’s alizarin crimson and titanium white and Rembrandt’s Chinese vermilion and cadmium red light.

August 1, 2023
An Oilier Queen

I decided that I like the psychedelic feel to this. So… I set up a Santana/Doors/Hendrix/Big Brother/Airplane and, of course, Ultimate Spinach playlist and broke out the phthalos. I can’t think of any colors that are more suited to psychedelics.

I decided that I needed a few more striped objects to balance things out, repainted all of the greens with a combination of phthalocyanine green and lemon yellow, glazed over the black form with phthalocyanine blue and scrubbed phthalocyanine blue into the shadows here and there; again, for balance. I started on the yellowish form and tried to balance that as well.

The colors are actually a lot more intense in the painting. Seeing that I’m still shooting in near dark to counter the glare… the photo doesn’t show them all that well and turning up the saturation just makes things noisy.

Colors: Sennelier’s burnt sienna, titanium white and lemon yellow, Winsor Newton’s phthalocyanine green and Rembrandt’s phthalocyanine blue.

July 31, 2023
An Oily Dark Queen

This has gone a little slower than I expected. The simple stuff, that I’d normally paint in without thinking about it, has decided to be difficult. I didn’t think it showed enough progress yesterday to warrant a post.

Black is a color that I typically use for outlines and details. It struck me as necessary in order to convey a “Dark Queen”. It may have been a bad decision. 🙂 It will get glazed over anyway. I think I’ve got things figured out now. At least, I’m pretty sure I know the way they’re going to go.

Colors are: Sennelier’s caput mortuum, carbon black, cobalt blue, burnt sienna, raw sienna and titanium white… Winsor Newton’s purple madder and Rembrandt’s gold ochre.

July 30, 2023
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
Hail the Dark Queen

This began life as a photo of “Nefarious Doings Down on the Farm“. As I’ve said elsewhere, I like subjecting my images to the “Little Planet” filter in gimp. This particular image has been mirrored, “planeted”, warped and variously distorted to a fairly high degree. I have a few hundred of these that I fiddle with once in a while. While I was fiddling with this image, I decided that the figure in the center really resembles an evil queen (Probably the source of all of those nefarious doings.) and deserves to be painted as such. I’ve set about doing just that:

I’d previously run the cartoon filter on this; which looks really cool but imparts a texture that I really didn’t want in the print that I intended to work from. So… I ran gimp’s dilate filter across it… several times. That removed most of it. I ran the cartoon filter again, because it does a nice job of defining the edges of things, then desaturated the image and raised the output levels so that it’s fairly light. I don’t want to waste a huge amount of ink on this and I want to be able to draw on it when I transfer it to the panel and actually be able to see what I’m drawing.

I decided that this needs to be 30×40 inches 🙂 seeing that I just happen to have a couple of 30×40 panels cut. I don’t have a 30×40 printer and the idea of driving downtown to get this printed doesn’t really appeal to me. Optionally, I suppose I could connect the computer to the television and use that as a light table (Hold a piece of paper to your monitor… You’ll see what I mean.). That’s sort of a pain though. Using a projector is just as much of a pain and the “grid method” just isn’t happening. I suppose I could simply re-draw it, seeing that I’ll be making changes to it anyway, but I think I’d probably lose some of what makes it appealing to me. I want a hard copy, so the best option I have is to print this out as tiles, tape them all together, transfer that and so on…

I could use the tiling function in some printing program that does it automatically. That just strikes me as horribly inaccurate though. That leaves me with slicing the thing up and printing pages individually. Many graphic programs offer some sort of “slicing” function. Gimp will let you set guides and slice things that way. So… I scaled this to 30×40 inches at a print resolution of 72. I’m not really looking for high resolution and… ink…

I set the guides, sliced the images and saved them out individually; 16 10×7.5 images. It’s really not as much work as it might seem. The entire process of making the prints took me about twenty minutes. Gimp is nice enough to number them all so you don’t have to play jigsaw puzzle with them when you put them together.

July 26, 2023