Still clarifying things… In keeping with the “yellow to violet blend” idea, I covered a few things with Sennelier’s Indian yellow orange and worked into that with Sennelier’s Naples yellow and some of Sennelier’s burnt sienna. I added the three green “seeds” in the corner with Senneliers viridian and Naples yellow and clarified a few of the red forms with a mix of Winsor Newton’s scarlet vermilion and Naples yellow.
I figured that for this session, it would probably be a good idea to resolve a few of the essential elements of the thing. I put in many of the shadows and darks with Sennelier’s alizarin crimson, worked in the wishbone, rib cage and whatever those other bones are with Sennelier’s Naples yellow, worked out the intestines a little further with alizarin and naples yellow and clarified a few elements with Winsor Newton’s scarlet vermilion.
Despite the weather, I have managed a bit of time to paint. Our internet is finally up and running. I’ve just been writing this as I go so I’m going to put the entire thing up at once.
I started this session with a glaze of Sennilier’s burnt sienna over the outside of the yellow forms and blocked in some of the elements like the “hair” and so on with Winsor Newton’s scarlet vermilion. I glazed over the “intestines” (what’s an evisceration without intestines?) with Sennelier’s alizarin crimson and added some shadows and darker passages with Sennelier’s caput mortuum. Some of the yellow objects got modeled a bit with Sennelier’s Naples yellow. I added a few highlights with it as well. The greenish “seeds” were painted in with Sennelier’s viridian and naples yellow. Some of the mid-tones are painted in with Winsor Newton’s terra rosa.
I seriously considered changing the name of “Self Evisceration” to the above title. That is what most of this last week or so has been.
We had a tornado wander down the alley behind our house the other day. That marks the second time in my life I’ve been scared shitless by the weather. The first was a few years back when lightning hit the porch I was standing on in the middle of a thunderstorm. Usually, I love thunderstorms. I frequently go outside to watch them. Watching the world explode around you is like turning the thrill knob up to eleven though.
This last time; my son and I were standing near the door that leads to our deck watching the back yard and discussing whether it might be a good idea to go downstairs and actually pay attention to the tornado warnings that kept popping up on our phones. The kids were already downstairs but my son had come back up to try to convince me it wasn’t safe. True to form, I sort of discounted the idea. Being much wiser than I, my son started to walk back downstairs anyway. As he did, I turned back to the window, just in time to see half of the trees in our yard simply… disappear. I followed fairly quickly. If the wind had come fifty feet closer to the house I doubt that I’d be writing this today.
I’ve spent the better part of the past several days out back, with a chainsaw, trying to uncover what used to be our yard. The picture above is a pretty good representation of what the entire yard looked like last week. There’s a Japanese maple in the cage there… It’s 4 feet tall. The cage is 3 feet tall… just for scale. It was meant to protect the little tree from rabbits.
A couple of things occurred to me yesterday while I was working on this. One was that it would be be cool to grade from purple to yellow… sort of like a flower with a yellow center and violet petals. The other was that James Gurley is definitely one of the greatest guitarists ever to walk the earth… and one of the most underrated.
The above link is my small effort to resolve Mr. Gurley’s ratings problem. As to the issue of developing a gradient on this painting… I started with a thin glaze of Winsor Newton’s Griffin brand Indian yellow. “Griffin” is Winsor Newton’s line of alkyd colors. Alkyds are, for all intents and purposes, fast drying oils.
Next step was to brush Sennelier’s ultramarine violet into the outer part of that and to follow it with Winsor Newton’s cobalt violet. I spent some time manipulating the actual gradient then brushed titanium white into it. From a distance you can see the actual violet/yellow vignette/gradient. It’s not so apparent up close.
I went ahead and blocked in some of the forms on the outside with Winsor Newton’s scarlet vermilion to give things a kick and to establish a sort of reference to start building color from… to begin to develop relationships and so on. The colors in this photo are pretty accurate. Things will get “kickier”, more saturated, etc… White tends to “bleach” stuff out but it’s a fast way to define forms.
The medium is Liquin. Liquin is an alkyd based substitute for traditional mediums like linseed oil.
I decided I needed a break from the street yesterday. I spent a few hours cutting panels in the reflective air fryer that is my driveway, and did a bit of work on the painting you see here. This actually has a sort of deadline. It does have a bit of time and it’s pretty far along anyway. I figured it might be a good time to spend some time with it though.
( 🙂 I actually have a version of this photo with even lighting by the way. For some reason, I decided I like this one better. The painting’s got a ways to go anyway. This does show the texture of Arches oil paper pretty nicely.)
This is a version of a painting I did a while back called “Three Aging Musicians”. The title of that one is sort of self explanatory.
This is printed in greyscale on Arches oil paper and reworked in oil. I did have to make a few changes to things to get it to work the way I wanted. I’m sure it will go through quite a few changes before it goes to the gallery.
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A couple of the things that I really like about gimp (aside from the fact that the developers make every effort imaginable to provide as many options as possible for carrying out a given task: the gradient tool offers a choice of eleven shapes, a choice of color spaces, etc…) are the warp tool, the cartoon filter and the “Little Planet” filter. There are a lot of other things that are great about the program but those are some of my favorite toys. I used them all on a photo of the original to come up with this.
I’m not a big fan of filters that distort things in general but The Little Planet filter, in particular, seems to work with my style of painting. I’m not sure what other uses it might have (aside from making little planets) seeing that it does some pretty severe stuff to an image, but it works nicely for me. I went through a few hundred photos of my paintings recently and came up with a fair number of “re-mixes”:
Yesterday’s session used Sennelier’s alizarin crimson, Naples yellow and titanium white, Rembrandt’s cadmium yellow and Winsor Newton’s cobalt turquoise and scarlet vermilion. I started working on a few of the details. I figure I have most of the colors and forms where I want them… It’s time to wrap things up… details, cleaning up the edges, adding a few highlights and glazes…
Much of the “noise” you see in these images is actually from the texture of this panel. As I mentioned elsewhere, I didn’t sand this after I sealed it with acrylic medium. I find that the texture makes blending the way I do it; scrubbing very thin passages of paint into things, much easier. I like the feel of it as well. It does leave things a little noisy and manages to play hell with very expensive brushes. I like the noise… the effect on my brushes, not so much. 🙂 It does give me an easy way to grind down older brushes. I usually end up applying the color with something new then scrubbing with something that’s been around a while.
I imagine that’s one of the things that’s making this so hard to photograph. The light hits every little protrusion and the camera picks it up as noise. For the sake of my sanity as well as my brushes… I’ll sand the next panel… a bit.
Yesterdays session began by “glazing” over some of the darks with Sennelier’s alizarine crimson, blending into that with Sennelier’s Naples yellow light, Naples yellow deep and titanium white and Rembrandt’s cadmium yellow. I ended things by scrubbing Sennelier’s warm grey onto the “walls”.
This session involved using Sennelier’s Naples yellow, titanium white and Modigliani ochre to build up the lights. I refined that with Sennelier’s burnt sienna and sap green… used it to smooth out the rough edges and so on. I managed to tone down some of the orange and to implement a bit of Modigliani’s idea of what a fleshtone should be.
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An update on the photo issue: I don’t really mean to harp on it, whine, complain or whatever. I am still building this studio… I’d like to set up a permanent photo system that lets me simply shoot this sort of thing without moving half of the furniture in the room, playing acrobat, re-shooting 20 times with different lighting or spending an hour with graded masks in a photo editor; something that will let me simply “shoot and go” so to speak. Much of this will resolve when the painting’s dry. As I’ve said otherwheres… It’s not usually an issue. I’d like to have things optimized, regardless. I want the best prints possible.
I built a sort of make-shift soft box this morning. (Basically hung a sheet of plastic a few feet from fluorescent fixture that I use to light the easel.) It helped a bit. 🙂 This probably means I’m going to have to make a trip to the local home improvement store eventually.
After reading half of the stuff about photographing artwork on the internet; most of the stuff that deals with this sort of thing suggests doing exactly what I’m doing. 🙂 It’s not working. The most commonly suggested upgrades to the process are polarizing filters, softboxes and umbrellas. The polarizing film will happen, regardless. I don’t really have the room for umbrellas. I can build a permanent softbox on the ceiling and a portable one for the floor… or maybe built into the easel. That would make life considerably easier. Eventually, I’d like to hang a few fixtures from the ceiling as well. 🙂 Maybe take a hacksaw to my old lights?
Yesterday, I put in some more shadows and darks with Winsor Newton’s cobalt violet and Sennelier’s ultramarine rose and cobalt blue. Transparent and semi-transparent colors like these add a bit of color to the darks so that you’re not stuck with something drab and boring. You can play them against compliments and create a subtle interplay between the lights and darks… It’s not immediately apparent but it does perk things up considerably.
(There are a lot of good books on color theory. It’s a subject that can get insanely complex and touches on everything from psychology to electronics. There are many different color models… some of them have very specific uses. Basically, in the subtractive model that we use in painting… compliments are directly across from each other on the color wheel… red/green, yellow/violet, blue/orange, etc. Combining them will typically give you some sort of neutral color… a brown or grey of some sort.)
I started brightening things up with Winsor Newton’s scarlet vermilion. Rembrandt’s cadmium orange got blended into that followed by Sennelier’s cadmium yellow light.
I’m thinking I’ve let things get a little too orange. It makes for a nice base color to play with though. I’ll try to get a little creative with the colors today and start cleaning things up and winding them down. I’m seeing a stopping point within the next few days.
I am serious about the “series” idea I mentioned yesterday. I’ll build a panel for the next piece next week. I like the car idea. I’m thinking a night scene might be cool as well. It would give me an opportunity to play with lighting.
Studio Time 