Studio Time

Second Stanza

I sprayed this with clear acrylic to fix the pastels. I do tend to wonder how this would have worked out if I hadn’t.

I wanted a sort of general “mid” tone to this canvas, so… I mixed up three small tubs of acrylic medium, water and Sennelier’s Sepia, Burnt Umber and Mars Yellow paints, soaked the canvas panel with water and used a 4 inch house painters brush and a rag to give things a “not really all that even” tone.

Even wetted, the raw canvas tends to suck up paint. I salted this, which can give you some really nice effects with watercolor. Here, it just adds a sort of grainy look to the paint. You can see it better in the detail below. Salt does tend to give your underpainting a sort of “sparkle”. Some of the light spots come from spraying up close with a water bottle… The spatters are from bottles of Chinese Orange and Alizarin Crimson watercolors, mixed with water, that I keep to use with an airbrush. The acrylic tends to seal the watercolor. I’m still pretty sure they’re going to bleed when I seal this.

(I did a series of canvases a while back that I covered with acrylic and sprayed with a garden hose. It gave me some very nice, subtly blended colors. You can get stuff that looks like batik or tie-dye with raw canvas as well. 🙂 I’m not sure a wax resist has a place in an underpainting.)

August 16, 2023

Acrylic Painting, Automatism, Poem, Watercolor
A Poem About Toadstools

A couple of days ago, I mentioned that I had an idea for a new image. This is it. At least, this is the beginning.

I know, the first thought that probably comes to mind is “Why the hell would anyone do something like that to a poor, defenseless canvas?”

I intend to generate this image from paint. I wanted consistently sized forms on the canvas. I suppose I could have drawn a grid or filled this thing with row after row of circles. That would have been horribly restrictive and this seemed like a more expressive way of defining things. The forms are roughly the same size and the letter shapes will probably inform the final forms. I have no intention of doing typography here but I’m sure a few elements of the letters will make their way into the final image.

The scribble? It’s to hold things together and begin relationships between the letters. Some of that will probably make its way into the final image as well.

This is done with pastels on unprimed canvas, mounted on a 30×40 inch piece of hardboard. Pastels work wonderfully on raw canvas. You can go through an entire stick in no time though. Raw canvas holds a lot of pigment.

The poem… is nonsense. It does mention toadstools.

(Canvases are hardly “defenseless”.)

August 15, 2023

Acrylic Painting, Automatism, Oil Painting, Poem
A Sunny Day in the Rain

This is the sketch of “A Sunny Day on the South 40” It’s been transferred to a panel and drawn in a bit. It’s unprimed canvas that’s adhered to hardboard with acrylic medium. Basically, it’s going to go straight to paint. This is just to give me an idea of the way things need to work.

I decided that our heroine here… a farm girl caught mid-frolic out in a pasture, wasn’t really likely to be prancing about in the nude. So, in an effort to alleviate a bit of that “drawn on the wall in a service station bathroom” look and make things a little more realistic; I decided she needed a frilly, lace top. I’ve never actually painted a frilly, lace top so we’ll see how that goes. I doubt it will end up being much more than the suggestion of a frilly, lace top.

My graphite paper has given up the ghost after many years of faithful service, so… I transferred this by rubbing pastels on to the back of the print. That always leaves things a little messy. The lines are darkened with watercolor pencil. I’ve shaded things a bit just to get them started… I sprayed it with water to set the drawing, further start the shading process and give me a few random drips. This is wet in the photo.

I’ll give this a coat of clear acrylic a bit later just so it doesn’t soak up huge amounts of paint, sand it and go straight to acrylic for the under-painting. I have some ideas as to how this will go. As usual, we’ll see what happens.

August 14, 2023

A Sunny Day on the South 40, Acrylic Painting, Digital Emissions, Oil Painting, Portrait
Portrait in Yellow

This is another painting based on a photo of Mera. It was featured in a series of “bus stop” benches that the Collective gallery did around the city as a promotion. If you live here, you’ve probably seen it.

As you can probably tell, the “automatic drawing” here wasn’t quite so automatic. It’s closer to a Cubist technique to break things into forms and planes than anything generative.

This is 18×24, oil on commercial canvas panel.

August 13, 2023

Automatism, Oil Painting, Portrait
The Reluctant Nude

I finished the Green Nude. ….Mostly. It’s still going to need a few minutes to get cleaned up and highlighted. I’ll put the final image up in a day or two.

In the meantime… I’ve got a couple of new things in mind: one that I’ve defined a fairly complex process for and will start when I’ve got a consistent few hours to work on it… And one that’s been sitting around the studio for ten years or so:

I know… it’s a little rough.

I’ve used a wide format printer that’s capable of 13×19 prints for quite some time now… a couple of HP’s… Nowadays, an Epson. At one time, I did a lot of 18×24 paintings, from digital sketches, by cutting them into two 13×19 images and printing those on decent paper: Rives BFK or Canson Edition… Arches watercolor and so on. Those prints got trimmed, then adhered to a hardboard panel with acrylic medium. You’ve still got the seam in the middle to deal with but it’s not terrible. A few coats of acrylic will usually fill it in.

When I did this particular image, I decided I’d get “artsy” with it and cut the paper into shapes and glue those to the panel.

I did not deal with this very well. I just could not handle the edges of the paper showing. If it had been a collage or the paper had been thinner or it was simply a different image, I might have been able to handle it. …Not here.

Originally, I thought that maybe I could just sand the edges down and cover the thing with acrylic and make it all go away. This did not work. I ended up with the edges still standing and a surface that was so smooth that it was impossible to paint on. I figured that the alternatives to this were to add some sort of texturing agent to the acrylic and try to fix things or let it sit in the corner of the studio for 10 years until I figured out something to do with it. I chose the latter course.

Ten years later, it’s possible that I’m a little wiser and more capable of dealing with this whole thing. So… I shot a photo of the painting, made some of the changes that it wanted digitally and printed that to tiles. I’ll transfer that to the panel that I have waiting in the studio, paint over the offending, paper-edged thing that’s been taking up space in my studio for all this time and cover the back of the panel with canvas. No one will be any the wiser and I’ll have 2 panels and a start on a “new” painting.

I like this idea, for some reason. I think that I can push it to something interesting. This is what’s getting transferred to a 16×20 panel:

We’ll see how it goes.

August 12, 2023

A Sunny Day on the South 40, Automatism, Digital Emissions, Green Nude, Oil Painting, Portrait
Green Nude in Repose

I spent some time yesterday listening to somewhat newer “psychedelic“, cleaning things up and getting some of the final colors in place. I think I managed to fix the upper right and reflecting it below is just going to be a matter of making the existing forms a bit brighter. The blues and violets are next.

(…Still cleaning up the image libraries. I’ve decided I need a consistent, well organized copy of everything on the server. I’ll probably delete everything on the other drives and set up some form of incremental backup. One thing about writing a blog… It’s forced me to get organized. I think I’ve managed to resolve the issues with photographing things as well. Ambient light was most of the issue. I’m going to have to find some decent “blackout” style window shades so I can pull the cardboard off of the studio windows. 🙂 )

Colors: Sennelier’s Cadmium Yellow Light, Burnt Sienna, Naples Yellow Light and Deep, Alizarin Crimson and Titanium White as well as Rembrandt’s Cadmium Orange.

August 11, 2023

Automatism, Green Nude, Oil Painting
The Dragon Window

That blue strip across the lower half of this was pretty much the concept I started with. I wanted to introduce negative space into the image…. a sort of window. The dragon’s at the top, of course.

This actually began life the other way round. What was the top is now the bottom. I just liked it better this way and changed the lighting and so on.

This is Oil on commercial canvas panel… 24×18

August 10, 2023

Automatism, Oil Painting
The Green Nude Unscathed

I got a bit obsessed with this yesterday and spent a while calmly modeling forms, making changes to the colors, adding shadows and highlights and generally enjoying myself. All the while, I had the nagging thought in the back of my mind that I just couldn’t allow that orange form in the upper right get away with running out of the composition. So… I imprisoned it in a small blue cage. This, of course, screwed up the way everything else in that corner worked and I spent a bit of time reworking things up there. …Over and over again.

Finally, I had it exactly the way I wanted it… stood back and thought it over, then wiped everything off, smeared in the sketch for the revision with my finger and calmly put the brushes away. Despite my frustration, I did not injure the painting. Now, I think I need to figure out a way to reflect that change in the lower left corner. 🙂 That shouldn’t be a big deal…

Colors: Liquitex Manganese Blue (A truly old tube… probably untouched since the early ’80s. I actually had to break the cap off with a pair of pliers.), Sennelier’s Titanium White and Naples Yellow Light, Rembrandt’s Cadmium Red Light and Winsor Newton’s Prussian Blue.

August 9, 2023

Automatism, Green Nude, Oil Painting
The Return of the Green Nude

Just in case you thought I’d forgotten about this… I haven’t. It has been back-burnered a bit over the past few days while I try to make sense of the files on my backup drive.

As you can tell, I put the spheres in. I like the sort of “stair-step” effect that gives. …Painted the white form on the upper left orange and spent some time modeling stuff with Naples Yellow Light. …Toned down the “psychedelic” greens…

I liked the orange form before it was orange. Right now, I’m a little irritated with it. I think it throws things out of the composition. I should be able to fix that with lighting though. The color definitely needs some work as well.

I think that a few of the elements in this are starting to work pretty well… the mottled look of the large form on the upper right, the form that fades into the distance below it, etc. I have a pretty good idea of the way things need to go… some blueish forms, shadows, rendering and so on…

🙂 We’ll see what happens.

Colors: Sennelier’s Naples Yellow Light and Rembrandt’s Cadmium Red Light and Cadmium Orange.

August 8, 2023

Automatism, Green Nude, Oil Painting
Condescension

This is a composite of several different stencils that I’ve airbrushed with watercolor and white gouache. It’s 25×19 inches on Crescent Illustration Board. This is a print version. The original is not quite as contrasty and a bit more blue.

…A short history of the stencil:

Way back in the late ’70s, before I started college, I did paintings of simple abstract “landscapes”… worlds of floating checkerboards, stripes, shadows and so on. After a time, I started populating these paintings with simple organic forms. Most of them resembled “squiggly, little blob things” for lack of a better term.

Over time, they got a little more complex and I started “collecting” them in sketchbooks. I managed to build up a considerable catalog by the end of the ’80s. When I started doing airbrush work it made sense to cut them into acetate and use them as stencils for various and sundry paintings.

When I switched my focus to digital stuff back in the early ’90s. I spent many happy hours in Aldus Photostyler. Photostyler had a function that would let you save selections to a file. So… many of my stencils became digital files and I used them joyfully with Photostyler’s digital airbrush and it was all great fun. Of course, after I discovered a copy of Minix on a BBS, I parted ways with those files and learned that backups actually are useful.

(Minix is lovely by the way. It’s probably a good idea to actually know what you’re doing before you try running it. 🙂 )

Dana

August 7, 2023

Airbrush, Watercolor