This is a commissioned piece. The customer wants a painting of this pair of jeans (supplied by him) against a black background. We went back and forth on the composition, eventually settling on making it look as if they were being worn by an invisible person. That entailed hiring a model to wear the jeans as I paint, since I’m pretty bad at working from photos.

As you can see, I’m working my way down. I mixed and tubed a base color and applied that as an initial dead coloring layer. I am working on top of that. Right now, the jeans are hung in midair so that I can paint the inside parts. The customer wanted to capture the iconic nature of Levis 501’s, so the inside tags—especially the one that will have a bright red 501 on it—are important.

I’ll try to post better pictures later on.

I like how it’s coming at the moment. In some ways this is an interesting and exciting project, and in others it will be really good to get this done, as it also represents a block on my other work.

This one has kind of a story to it. For the last 50 or so years, my wife’s family (on her mother’s side) has used this conch shell as a joke gift. It’s been passed back and forth many times. The real gift is hidden in the shell, or the shell is included as a part of the gift. Big laffs. Right now the shell is in my wife’s possession, but who knows how long that will last?

“Red Laces,” oil on canvas, 11 × 14”.

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.

I made it myself, using my mad coding skillz, such as they are. In case you’re interested in geeky stuff, it’s running on the Joomla content management system, using the Hivemind template from Rockettheme.com and the excellent Phoca gallery extenstion.

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.