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Whatever you do, don’t paint from the heart

14 September 2009 in art technique by David | 36 comments

Occa­sion­ally you see books, arti­cles, or work­shops ded­i­cated to help­ing artists “paint from the heart,” loosen up their style, whack them­selves on the side of the head, dis­cover the light of Tus­cany, or some other damn thing.

It’s crap. Your heart will never have any idea how to paint.

Of course, there are a few artists out there who could ben­e­fit from some loos­en­ing up. For every one of them, there are a hun­dred oth­ers who need to learn how to actu­ally paint. This entails the acqui­si­tion of dif­fi­cult skills and the mind­set to use those skills to achieve spe­cific goals. Some of those skills are:

  • How to draw
  • How to draw exactly what you see
  • How to draw the figure
  • How to draw the portrait
  • Pro­por­tion
  • Per­spec­tive
  • Fore­short­en­ing
  • Color the­ory
  • Color mix­ing
  • Com­po­si­tion
  • Brush han­dling
  • Ren­der­ing
  • Art his­tory
  • And lots more

That is the case even if you want to paint loosely. Read Richard Schmid’s book on paint­ing (he paints in a loose alla prima style that is won­drous to behold) and you’ll see how hard it is to learn how to paint that way, too.

Heck, it’s a lot of work learn­ing to paint abstractly, if you want to do it well.

Paint­ing from the heart is for lazy peo­ple who just want to schmear paint around, feel artis­tic, and find peo­ple to tell them how won­der­ful it must be to paint.

Instead, learn to paint with your mind and your soul. That’s a lot harder, but will take you much fur­ther toward mak­ing paint­ings that belong on a stranger’s wall.

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Avoiding the pasted-on look

16 August 2009 in art technique, painting by David | No comments

Some­times you look at a paint­ing in which each pas­sage is com­pe­tently exe­cuted, but the over­all look just doesn’t hold together. The parts don’t look like they exist in the same visual space. Usu­ally, the prob­lem is with incon­sis­tent key­ing, with edge con­trol, or both.

Key

Key refers, of course, the the range of col­ors in the paint­ing. The most impor­tant key is the value key. If the degree of light and dark on one object doesn’t fit that of other objects in the paint­ing, then they won’t look like they belong together. It’s easy to get so involved in one par­tic­u­lar pas­sage that its value key doesn’t fit that of other parts of the paint­ing. Another pos­si­ble look, besides that of being pasted-on, is that some pas­sages fade out inexplicably.

It is, of course, pos­si­ble to sim­i­larly mess up the chroma key or the hue key of the paint­ing. Value is a more com­mon and notice­able prob­lem, however.

The best way to avoid incon­sis­ten­cies in key is to fre­quently step way back from the paint­ing and either squint or throw your eyes slightly out of focus. Incon­sis­ten­cies tend to stand out.

Edges

Another way to inad­ver­tently achieve a pasted-on look is to make all your edges equally hard. If all of the edges are the same, then all of the objects appear to come for­ward equally and the paint­ing fails the verisimil­i­tude test. Some oth­er­wise excel­lent aca­d­e­mic real­ists make this mis­take. So do many begin­ners who have begun to develop the abil­ity to render.

Softer edges recede, harder edges advance. Con­trol edges and you con­trol the dimen­sion­al­ity of each object in the paint­ing. Do that con­sis­tently and the paint­ing looks like each pas­sage is part of a whole.

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Article on sound practice

29 May 2009 in art materials, art technique, oil painting by David | No comments

Tad Spur­geon has an excel­lent sum­mary arti­cle on his views regard­ing sound oil paint­ing practice.

Because the struc­ture of an oil paint­ing is inher­ently com­plex, it’s always best to attempt keep both it and its var­i­ous com­po­nents as sim­ple as pos­si­ble. How­ever, this ele­ment of sim­plic­ity should not nec­es­sar­ily extend to pur­chas­ing ready-made mate­ri­als if the hope or expec­ta­tion is to cre­ate higher qual­ity work: generic mate­ri­als have a strong ten­dency to pro­duce generic work. While bou­tique mate­ri­als are usu­ally higher qual­ity, this is not nec­es­sar­ily the case with the oil. And they still don’t impart the vital infor­ma­tion about the nuts and bolts of the craft: at the end of the day, there is no real process, just a set of pur­chases, a pseudo-craft.

Go read the whole thing.

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Stretching canvas

20 May 2009 in art materials, art technique by David | 1 comment

I’m get­ting ready to stretch a 61 × 37.75 inch (155 cm x 96 cm) can­vas for a com­mis­sion. So I’ve been look­ing at online arti­cles on can­vas stretch­ing. Here’s one by James Bern­stein at Golden paints that sug­gests a dif­fer­ent set of pro­ce­dures than gen­er­ally used.

Rec­om­men­da­tions include:

  • Draw­ing a line along the weave of the can­vas in pen­cil along the bound­ary before­hand, so that you can check to see that the edge of the stretcher is even with the can­vas weave as you apply it to the stretcher chassis.
  • Sta­pling or tack­ing from the edges of the can­vas inward. This is exactly oppo­site from the way every other source I’ve seen says to do it.
  • Using push­pins for the ini­tial attach­ment of the can­vas to the stretcher, for ease of adjust­ment, before final tack­ing or stapling.
  • Let­ting the can­vas set­tle onto the frame for a day or two, with adjust­ment as needed, prior to final tack­ing or stapling.

These meth­ods dif­fer from stan­dard prac­tice, but the author makes a good case.

(Note that I found this arti­cle via a related post by Ran­dall Stoltzfus.

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Guest Post: The Importance of Depth and Linear Perspective

9 May 2009 in art history, art technique by David | No comments

The van­ish­ing point has always held a cer­tain mys­tique about it to art his­to­ri­ans and art con­nois­seurs alike. The cre­ation of spe­cific van­ish­ing points in the early Renais­sance was a turn­ing point in the art world, and led to cement the depth in many paint­ings of this time period. Before this point, most artists used skenographia on stage in order to give it more depth, with the artist Giotto even attempt­ing a math­e­mat­i­cal cal­cu­la­tion to deter­mine points of dis­tance within art.

Brunelleschi was the first Renais­sance artist to use the van­ish­ing point and depth per­cep­tion dur­ing this time period. Brunelleschi addi­tion­ally noticed that when draw­ing Flo­ren­tine build­ings, all lines con­verged at the hori­zon line, there­fore lead­ing to the real­iza­tion of the van­ish­ing point. Other artists such as Donatello and Perug­ino helped to fur­ther cement the impor­tance of depth dur­ing this time, cul­mi­nat­ing in Da Vinci’s Last Sup­per; never before had there been a paint­ing with such math­e­mat­i­cal accu­racy in rela­tion to depth per­cep­tion and lin­ear for­ma­tion. The real­iza­tion of lin­ear per­spec­tive and the van­ish­ing point was kept within Italy for years before flour­ish­ing through­out the rest of Europe.

The checker­board floor pat­tern is one of the most obvi­ous exam­ples of orig­i­nal per­spec­tive. Alberti was one of the first artists to rec­og­nize this phe­nom­e­non, and named it as the “pave­ment” con­struc­tion, as it typ­i­cally led to the addi­tion of a pave­ment scene. He later wrote a trea­tise enti­tle “De Pictura/Della Pit­tura” explain­ing the proper meth­ods of per­spec­tive paint­ing. His the­o­ries were based more on pla­nar pro­jec­tions and cal­cu­la­tions using the height of tri­an­gles in the dis­tance, and also using pre­vi­ous math­e­mat­i­cal con­cepts from Euclid.

The van­ish­ing point and depth per­cep­tion are con­cepts which we take for granted today because we have never known an art world with­out them; how­ever, if you tra­verse through the ages, you will see pieces from the Mid­dle Ages where the baby Jesus appears to be the same size as Mary because the artists had no way in which to sig­nify per­spec­tive. It is amaz­ing to view in art muse­ums this sub­tle change in tech­nique; many muse­ums have paint­ings set up in chrono­log­i­cal order, or at least by major move­ments. The Renais­sance was truly its own move­ment within the art world, and sym­bol­ized a shift away from the chaotic, extremely fanat­i­cal world of the Mid­dle Ages.

With­out this kind of rev­o­lu­tion within the art world, we would still be look­ing at one-dimensional art works, lack­ing a proper depth per­cep­tion. This would prove to be a com­pletely dif­fer­ent world from the one we know now, per­haps even lack­ing the fun­da­men­tals of tele­vi­sion and movies. With­out depth in art, that could not have trans­lated over into any other medium. There­fore, we owe a great deal to these post-Medieval artists who truly paved the way for mod­ern art and art move­ments. Picasso would not have been able to exist with­out his acute under­stand­ing of the many lay­ers of depth and per­spec­tive, and we there­fore would have missed out on abstract art entirely as well as every sub­se­quent mod­ern art movement.

This post was con­tributed by Heidi Tay­lor, who writes about the online schools. She wel­comes your feed­back at HeidiLTaylor006 at gmail​.com.

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Flesh tones

6 May 2009 in art technique, painting by David | 2 comments

The last sev­eral weeks, I’ve attended a local fig­ure drawing/painting ses­sion in which there is only one pose for the full time. The last cou­ple of times I’ve attended, I’ve done oil portraits.

The por­trait from the first week was pretty awful. Last night’s was not exactly good, but not nearly as bad. Maybe I’ll post them when I have some­thing a lit­tle bet­ter to com­pare them to.

This is the first work I’ve done with por­traits or fig­ures in about three years, so I am not sur­prised that some of my skills have got­ten rusty. One skill that has improved, how­ever, is mix­ing flesh tones. I remem­ber, when I was tak­ing fig­ure paint­ing classes, hav­ing a heck of a time get­ting flesh tones that looked even approx­i­mately con­vinc­ing, even when I could take my time over a multi-session pose of 9 or 12 hours. The poses I’ve been work­ing from lately are only 2.5 hours, but I now find paint mix­ing to be rel­a­tively straightforward.

Because these are pretty short poses, I have not wor­ried too much about get­ting exactly the right hue, instead choos­ing to con­cen­trate of value, chroma, and shape. I’m work­ing with a very lim­ited palette in which flesh tones are mixed from lead white, raw sienna, burnt sienna, and raw umber. (I’ve also used some black and some ultra­ma­rine for dark hair and back­ground.) The flesh tones are basi­cally con­vinc­ing, how­ever: oth­ers at the ses­sion have remarked on it and my wife, who remem­bers my pre­vi­ous strug­gles, has men­tioned that these flesh tones seem bet­ter. I should note that, thus far, the sub­jects have been Cau­casian, although I don’t think I would have any greater trou­ble paint­ing folks of less pallor.

I’m not sure why this aspect of paint­ing has become eas­ier, except for all the prac­tice I’ve put in mix­ing still life col­ors over the last cou­ple of years. The very sim­ple palette seems to help as well.

Now if I can just get the shape of the head down cor­rectly in paint, I’ll be just fine.

Update

7 May 2009: On fur­ther reflec­tion, I think that one of the things I’ve learned over the last cou­ple of years, even with a very lim­ited palette, is much bet­ter con­trol over chroma. Many artists mix overly intense skin tones. Most people’s skin is very low in chroma. Even when using rel­a­tively dull earth col­ors, you often need to cut the chroma of your mixes to get accu­rate color. For these por­trait stud­ies, I’ve been using raw umber for that pur­pose, as it’s chroma is very, very low.

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Light on the painting

2 May 2009 in art technique, painting by David | 4 comments

Lately I’ve come to real­ize that the light on a paint­ing as you’re work­ing on it is as impor­tant as the light on what­ever you are painting.

I’ve recently added a light over my easel that pro­vides more illu­mi­na­tion than any­one would actu­ally shine on a paint­ing that was being dis­played. I tend to keep it off much of the time while paint­ing, but turn it on peri­od­i­cally to check my work. Under a higher level of illu­mi­na­tion, I often catch prob­lems, espe­cially in the deeper shad­ows. With­out enough light, it’s easy to miss inac­cu­ra­cies in value, hue, chroma, or gra­da­tion. These prob­lems might not show up too strongly when the paint­ing is dis­played, but can be sig­nif­i­cant enough to cause notice­able errors.

Of course, the color of the light shin­ing on your paint­ing should be neu­tral enough that it does not itself intro­duce dis­tor­tions and thereby lead you mis­un­der­stand hue rela­tion­ships while mix­ing paint.

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Really light lights, really dark darks

25 April 2009 in art materials, art technique, oil painting by David | 7 comments

Some­times, you need the high­est value high­light that it is pos­si­ble to get in paint. Other times, you need a dark accent that is as low in value as you can get. Beecause paint doesn’t have any­thing like the dynamic range of human vision, it’s good in real­is­tic paint­ing to have as wide as range as you can. Small dif­fer­ences can some­times be important.

The whitest white I’ve been able to find is “radi­ant white” by Gam­blin. It’s tita­nium white in poppy oil. Most of the time I pre­fer paints ground in lin­seed or wal­nut, but for this pur­pose it makes sense to use the whitest pos­si­ble pig­ment and the most col­or­less binder avail­able. I’m still paint­ing out test strips on a neu­tral gray back­ground, but I’d guess it’s a quar­ter Mun­sell value step than the next bright­est tita­nium white I’ve played with. I’ll use it only when I need a very light highlight.

The dark­est black I have is Williams­burg intense black. The pig­ment is listed as “car­bon from gas flame.” The back label says: “warn­ing: very slow dry­ing.” It is just notice­ably darker than bone (“ivory”) black. The slow dry­ing can be com­pen­sated for some­what with a drier such as lead napthen­ate. I will use it only for dark accents at the very last stage of paint­ing, so dry­ing time for this par­tic­u­lar paint is not that impor­tant for me.

Update

2 May 2009:_ There’s a small high­light that I had pre­vi­ously painted in Old Hol­land tita­nium white. It’s light reflected from the shiny metal part of a clothes hangar. In real life this high­light is very notice­able, but on the paint­ing, sur­rounded by rel­a­tively light tones, it did not stand out at all. I recently painted it in using pure Gam­blin radi­ant white. It is notice­ably brighter than before—giving an effect that is much more like what I was try­ing to depict.

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Keep working until it’s done

10 April 2009 in art technique, painting, personal by David | 5 comments

Keep work­ing on a paint­ing until you’re sure it’s fin­ished. Then come back again a few days later and work on it some more if you real­ize it’s not as good as you thought it was.

That seems like a “duh” kind of state­ment, but it’s incon­sis­tent with lots of art book advice. We are told that it takes two to make a paint­ing: an artist to do the work, and some­one else to hit him (or her) on the head before it gets ruined. Fresh­ness and spon­tane­ity above all, we are told. Never over­work the paint.

That advice was a prob­lem for me until I real­ized what a crock it is. My prob­lem isn’t a lack of freshness—it’s that I am so often tempted to stop too soon. I get parts of the paint­ing to look really good and the rest basi­cally not too bad, so I want to stop rather than put in the extra hours needed to get the hard parts exactly right. That whole “fresh­ness” canard is an excuse for laziness—something seen in the work of many a mar­ginal painter of approx­i­mate smears.

If you really want the paint­ing to look like you got every part of it right the first time (i.e., “fresh”), then do what Sar­gent did and con­tin­u­ally scrape off any­thing that didn’t come out exactly right and paint it again. And again. And again, until it is cor­rect in it’s cal­cu­lated appear­ance of per­fect spon­tane­ity. Even if you have to paint it 100 times.

If a look of fresh­ness is not what you’re after (it’s not some­thing I’m all that inter­ested in, myself) then just keep paint­ing until there isn’t any­thing you know how to do that will make it bet­ter.* If you’re not will­ing to keep at it until the dif­fi­cult parts look right, then you’re not seri­ous about painting.

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*Or you real­ize that this paint­ing is just a dog and trash it. You should allow your­self to do that only very rarely, however.

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Newbury Street

28 March 2009 in art technique, demo/in progress, oil painting, painting by David | No comments

Here’s a recent paint­ing; I thought I might pro­vide some detail on how it was made.

This is “New­bury Street,” oil on panel, 20 × 20”. Many artists shy away from the square pic­ture for­mat, because it can be hard to achieve a dynamic com­po­si­tion within such a sta­ble frame. I worked on over­com­ing that within a sim­ple “bulls­eye” com­po­si­tion with a bit of ten­sion between the jacket and its shadow. I think I suc­ceeded fairly well with that.

The panel, which I had primed with lead white, had been cur­ing for more than six months. Dif­fer­ent sources sug­gest dif­fer­ent amounts of time to let an oil ground cure; any­where from a cou­ple of weeks to sev­eral months. I can say that this well-cured sur­face was excel­lent to work on.

Click on a thumb­nail to see the full-sized image.

I started with an under­paint­ing using a mix­ture of raw umber mixed with a small amount of Stu­dio Prod­ucts Tus­can red (a bright iron oxide pig­ment). Unusu­ally for me, I used the wipe­out tech­nique for the under­paint­ing. I did that by smear­ing on a bunch of thinned paint in any given area, then wip­ing it back. I used a mix­ture of min­eral spir­its and lin­seed oil, with a bit of turps. Then I used a bris­tle bright brush to wipe the paint back. A bright is good for this because the short bris­tles allow for easy scrub­bing. The idea is to wipe the paint away, let­ting the white ground show through in the lights and let­ting the paint stay thick in the darks.

Nor­mally, I avoid the wipe out tech­nique because I don’t think that thin­ning paint down a lot is a good idea—it can gen­er­ate a paint layer that is not prop­erly bound in the oil vehi­cle. How­ever, because the oil primed sur­face was smooth and not absorbent, I found that I only needed to thin the paint down just a bit in order to use the wipe out method effec­tively. It allowed me to eas­ily get the struc­ture of the paint­ing down quickly and eas­ily, and to cor­rect errors eas­ily using a rag dipped in thin­ner. Because there was some lin­seed oil in the thin­ner, the final result was a sur­face that was clearly well-bound, as I could not eas­ily scratch it with a fin­ger­nail or rub any pig­ment off.

Once that was dry (within a day, due to the sicca­tive prop­er­ties of the raw umber), I painted in the back­ground and shadow. That took a few days to dry. Then I applied a very thin layer of Stu­dio Prod­ucts glaz­ing medium to the sur­face of the paint­ing and began work­ing my way over the paint­ing, attempt­ing to paint some­thing close to the final effect in each area before mov­ing on to the next. That took sev­eral paint­ing sessions.

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Paint strings

14 December 2008 in art materials, art technique, color by David | 1 comment

Michael writes,

Dear David,

My ques­tion is in ref­er­ence to “Paint Strings”. I’ve never heard this term before. Is this an oil paint­ing tech­nique? (I’m just learn­ing to paint and I’m using slow dry­ing acrylics if that makes a dif­fer­ence.) Can you one day do a blog post­ing about mak­ing paint strings.

Thanks, Michael. “Paint string” is an oil paint­ing term because other kinds of paint dry too fast for it to be prac­ti­cal. What it means is to pre-mix a series of col­ors in a gra­da­tion from one color to another. Usu­ally, the string goes from high value to low value at a sin­gle hue. Typ­i­cally, chroma is high­est in the mid­dle of the range, because that mim­ics the pro­gres­sion of chroma across objects in the real world, and because that’s eas­i­est to mix.

You can use paint strings in a cou­ple of dif­fer­ent ways. At one extreme is to just mix one or two strings that you think you’re likely to use. For exam­ple, you could have a string of neu­tral grays that you use to decrease chroma in mix­tures (the best way to decrease chroma with min­i­mal effect on other aspects of chroma is to mix in a neu­tral gray of the same value). You could also mix a string of “aver­age” flesh color in prepa­ra­tion for work­ing on a fig­ure. Per­son­ally, this is usu­ally how I work with paint strings.

At another extreme is a “set palette.” This means that you care­fully plan out the col­ors you will be using and mix them all out before you begin paint­ing. That way, you don’t worry about mix­ing as you work because the col­ors are right in front of you. Frank Reilly, for exam­ple, was a 20th cen­tury artist who taught a set palette method. Artists who work with set palettes often tube a bunch of their most com­monly used mix­tures so that they don’t have to spend so much time at the begin­ning of each paint­ing session.

You can pre-mix color with water media, but you need to do some­thing to pre­serve them over the course of your paint­ing ses­sion. I have not tried the new slow-dry acrylic paints and have no real sense of how they behave. With oil paint, it just works that way naturally.

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Form painting demo

29 November 2008 in art technique, oil painting by David | 1 comment

If you haven’t run across it already, I’d sug­gest you take a look at this demon­stra­tion of the “form paint­ing” method by Tony Ryder. It’s pretty close to the pro­ce­dure I learned from Den­nis Cheaney. Den­nis and Tony are both stu­dents of Ted Seth Jacobs. (I should be clear that I have no con­nec­tion to Tony Ryder what­so­ever, and I have only met Ted Seth Jacobs once.)

The method pro­ceeds through sev­eral stages.

Poster Study

This is a small paint­ing (5 × 7” or so) done quickly, to develop an over­all sense of what the final com­po­si­tion will look like. It is painted entirely in big blobs of color, with no detail and no gra­da­tions (i.e., no blend­ing). Each blob rep­re­sents the over­all aver­age color of a big shape, such as the hair of the sub­ject of a por­trait. It’s best to do a lot of squint­ing while com­plet­ing a poster study. Poster stud­ies never look good enough to dis­play as sep­a­rate works of art, as stud­ies by some artists do. If it looks that good, you didn’t do it right.

The poster study allows you to solve a lot of paint­ing prob­lems before­hand. You quickly come to under­stand your com­po­si­tion in a way that thumb­nail sketches do not allow. You see color har­monies evolve and fig­ure out how you are going to mix most of the col­ors you will need. Lots of mis­takes can be caught in this man­ner before you ever touch the final paint­ing. Once you start, the poster study becomes a ref­er­ence to refer to as the final paint­ing progresses.

Under­draw­ing

The next stage is draw­ing the forms on the can­vas (which is white, not toned). Tony does this in vine char­coal, then inks in the under­draw­ing in diluted paint. Den­nis some­times also had us do this in dilute paint from the start. The idea behind the draw­ing is to lin­early delin­eate all of the impor­tant forms through­out the paint­ing, with a high degree of detail. All the impor­tant deci­sions about place­ment, shape, and struc­ture are made in this stage.

Note that you must be able to draw accu­rately for this to work. Then again, if you can’t draw well, there isn’t really much point to try­ing to paint realistically.

Color Wash

The next stage is what Den­nis calls the “color wash” and Tony calls the “wash in.” It involves appli­ca­tion of diluted paint to the can­vas, approx­i­mat­ing the final color. Although Tony doesn’t men­tion it, Den­nis empha­sized that you should never use white when doing the wash in. This is a trans­par­ent appli­ca­tion of paint in a man­ner sim­i­lar to water­color, in that the lights are gen­er­ated by the white of the can­vas. The entire can­vas is cov­ered in the wash-in, so that vir­tu­ally none of of it ends up pure white. While the level of detail is not as high as in the final paint­ing, the wash-in gets pretty detailed. In his demo, Tony says this:

The wash-in helps solve many of the prob­lems that we would oth­er­wise encounter if we were to paint a fin­ished paint­ing directly on white can­vas. One such prob­lem has to do with know­ing whether or not the col­ors we’re apply­ing to the paint­ing are indeed the ones we want. Col­ors, by them­selves, are never right or wrong. They can only be judged in their tonal con­text, i.e., in the paint­ing itself. That con­text is never fully real­ized until the paint­ing is done. Con­se­quently, while the paint­ing is in progress there is always a degree of uncer­tainty involved in the choice of col­ors. How­ever, we can take steps to lessen the degree of uncertainty.

Form Paint­ing

Den­nis also calls this “paint­ing opaquely.” Over the color wash, you start in one area and slowly cre­ate the final appear­ance of the pic­ture. You can now begin to use white, which is part of what makes this stage opaque (you also stop dilut­ing the paint to a watery con­sis­tency). This is called a “win­dow shade” tech­nique because you attempt to cre­ate the final appear­ance of one area of the paint­ing, move to an adja­cent area, do the same thing, and con­tinue. The paint­ing appears slowly, as if pulling up a win­dow shade. The pro­ce­dure is there­fore basi­cally a direct paint­ing method, applied over the wash-in (which has dried very quickly because it was applied so thinly). It may take many days to com­plete the paint­ing, but each sec­tion is fin­ished before you move on to the next. (Cor­rec­tions are allowed, of course, but the goal is to not have to do any.)

This is not how I actu­ally paint nowa­days, although there are strong sim­i­lar­i­ties. I am often too lazy to do a poster study, although it would be a good idea. My under­draw­ings are usu­ally done in paint, not char­coal. I almost always tone the sur­face rather than paint on a white ground. Because I don’t like to dilute paint to that degree (I am con­cerned about its tech­ni­cal sound­ness), I don’t do a color wash. I do at times delib­er­ately work in lay­ers rather than directly.

This is an effec­tive way to paint real­is­ti­cally, how­ever, and I may go back to these roots more over time.

Update

30 Novem­ber 2008: I should also note the strong oppo­si­tion to work­ing from pho­tos that pro­po­nents of this approach espouse. All work is done from life or from the imag­i­na­tion, never with mechan­i­cal aids and never from pho­tos. I myself find pho­tos to be pretty bad sources of infor­ma­tion to use for real­ist art, although I am not nearly so opposed as Jacobs and his direct stu­dents are to “cheating.”

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Question about glazing

29 November 2008 in art technique, color, oil painting by David | No comments

In com­ments, Julius writes:

David: In the beau­ti­ful work you show on your gallery, are most of the effects achieved with your “thick glaz­ing” tech­nique? I have been exper­i­ment­ing with thin glazes and have run into prob­lems at every turn. For exam­ple: How to achieve an intense red or orange, since cad­mium col­ors are out? How to glaze thinly and be able to do fab­rics and table­cloths — espe­cially in light col­ors? How to do a light color ceramic bowl (as in one of yours)? Maybe you could speak in detail about the work in your gallery…

Thanks for the kind words, Julius. Glaz­ing is not my pri­mary oil paint­ing tech­nique.* I tend to paint fairly opaquely most of the time, attempt­ing to achieve the final look of each pas­sage before mov­ing to the next. I’m not dog­matic about that, how­ever, and will go back over a pas­sage, opaquely or trans­par­ently, if I didn’t get it right the first time.

I do use glaz­ing for spe­cific pur­poses. For exam­ple, the back­ground of the self por­trait in the gallery is yel­low ochre glazed over white. Although YO is usu­ally thought of as rather dull, its under­tone has a very dif­fer­ent character—much higher in chroma and value. That’s one great use of glaz­ing: to avoid “chalk­i­ness” (low­ered chroma) at high values.

As far as intense red or orange, here’s how that was done his­tor­i­cally. Start by paint­ing that spe­cific pas­sage in a flat opaque color sim­i­lar to your desired final hue. For exam­ple, you could use cad­mium red light (his­tor­i­cally, this would have been ver­mil­ion, which behaves sim­i­larly to cad red). Let it dry. Then glaze over it with a sim­i­lar trans­par­ent color such as alizarin crim­son (which is fugi­tive) or pyrol ruby (which is not). Make this sec­ond color thick where you want it dark and thin where you want mid­tones or lights. If desired, paint into the lights with the same or sim­i­lar col­ors mixed with white. Let it dry. If the darks are not dark enough, apply another layer of glaze to those areas, per­haps dark­ened with another trans­par­ent color such as ultra­ma­rine blue. Over two or three lay­ers, you can get the darks as strong as you like, in a higher chroma than you can get with­out glaz­ing. I’ve tried this, and it works. For orange, you are lim­ited in glaz­ing col­ors, but hansa yel­low mixed with any of the mod­ern trans­par­ent organic reds or crim­sons can work.

Does this method allow you to get any color you wish? No, it does not. You are lim­ited to avail­able shades of trans­par­ent pig­ments. But the Old Mas­ters were even more lim­ited, and they didn’t make junk.

As for fab­rics, this method works quite well if you have the patience for it. Be pre­pared to go back into the lights, while the glaze layer is still wet, with opaque col­ors mixed with white.

Ceram­ics are easy. For a white ceramic glazed with blue, just paint the object with­out the blue and allow to dry. Ultra­ma­rine or other semi-transparent blues glazed on top are quite con­vinc­ing (that’s how I did the ceramic cup in the “Three Cher­ries” paint­ing in my gallery).

This would be eas­ier to show than to tell, but I hope this is helpful.

*In part that’s due to the influ­ence of my teacher, Den­nis Cheaney. Den­nis is a stu­dent of Ted Set Jacobs, who long ago rejected glaz­ing in his own paint­ing method, because he believes it makes it more dif­fi­cult to pre­cisely con­trol hue, value, and chroma. I don’t paint the same way that Den­nis and Ted do (nor nearly as well), but the vast major­ity of my for­mal instruc­tion has been in a direct paint­ing style.

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Solving a painting problem with a velatura

23 November 2008 in art materials, art technique, demo/in progress by David | No comments

White Shirt

Here’s where the “White Shirt” paint­ing is at. What I’ve done is fin­ish ini­tial ren­der­ing of each area of the shirt. I found that the hues were uneven—I am still learn­ing to man­age near-neutrals across rel­a­tively large areas of a paint­ing. What I tried was to glaze trans­par­ent yel­low oxide across bluer shadow areas, which evened out hues some­what, but the over­all paint­ing was uncon­vinc­ingly yellow-orange. I had also over-rendered much of the shirt, with too broad a range in value between darks and lights.

This was a per­fect time to apply a velatura.

Tak­ing a hint from Tad Spur­geon, I mixed up a batch of putty. This was cal­cite (ground mar­ble dust) mulled with wal­nut oil and a bit of stand oil. The result­ing mix­ture was a dull grey with the con­sis­tency of, well, oil paint. Putty is a medium used to increase the trans­parency of paint, since the cal­cite is essen­tially invis­i­ble in an oil vehi­cle. This is bet­ter than adding a lot of oil or resin, as the calcite/oil mix­ture is as strong and as resis­tant to dis­col­oration as oil paint.

I mixed the putty with lead white (Doak’s flake 1C) in approx­i­mately equal amounts. Then I added a very small amount of neu­tral gray paint (ivory black and burnt umber) which I had pre­vi­ously tubed. I now had a very light gray, rel­a­tively translu­cent mixture.

I oiled out the sur­face of the paint­ing with a thin layer of wal­nut oil, which is very slip­pery and less yel­low­ing than lin­seed. I applied the gray mix­ture to the sur­face. Ini­tially, it looked awful—my care­ful paint­ing was cov­ered with flat gray. With a stiff bris­tle flat, I started work­ing at adjust­ing the thick­ness of the velatura layer, pulling the under­paint­ing out. I found that it was effec­tive to moisten the brush with a bit of wal­nut oil. It took awhile, but even­tu­ally the under­paint­ing began to show through, with the value range com­pressed toward the gray value of the velatura and the hue pulled toward neutral.

It needs a bit of work once the velatura layer has dried to restate a few high­lights and dark accents, but over­all this was a suc­cess­ful exercise.

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Wipe

13 November 2008 in art technique, oil painting by David | No comments

So tonight I’m work­ing on my “White Shirt” paint­ing. I spend a good hour on the most detailed part of the piece—the hangar hook and its shadow. I do a really nice job, with small brushes, get­ting each curve and the flash of metal just right. Detailed, but not too fussy. Then I step back.

I’ve made an error. The hook is too small. It looks almost right, but not quite.

I sit for a minute, then take a rag dipped in turps and wipe it off the paint­ing. You need to be will­ing to do that some­times, just as an author needs to be able to delete a won­drous chap­ter that just doesn’t work with the rest of the novel. If it’s not right, it has to go, no mat­ter how much you like it.

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