painting

I recently offered to provide a public critique of paintings and drawings that anyone might want to send to me. In response, Phil Holt has sent this one. It is “Discovery,” 12 × 16”. I assume it’s in oil as he describes himself as having painted in oil for several years. He notes, “Obviously painted from a photo. I morally prefer to paint from life but was intrigued with the facial expression on my granddaughters face.”

It takes some courage to send an image that you’ve spent many hours on and send it off to a stranger to look at and critique publically. That’s especially the case since a computer image of a painting is never perfect, particularly when it is not professionally shot. There are, for example, a few strange color/value transitions that I think are almost certainly photographic artifacts. One example is the lack of gradation in the paint around the girl’s right hand. My guess is that it isn’t there in the painting itself (I’m sure Phil will correct me if I’m wrong about that) or that the photo exaggerates what’s there. So what I’m doing here is looking at a photo of a painting and doing my best to imagine what it looks like without distortions introduced by making a photo of a painting and sending it as a JPEG file to be viewed on some one else’s computer screen. (CONTINUED) ⇒

Also of interest

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• Three ways to use oil painting mediums (0)
• The most influential painter you’ve never heard of (2)
• The fuglies (1)
• The Flemish method (22)

There is a slang term used in the U.S. (usually by women): “the fuglies.” It refers to days or weeks when everything seems wrong with your appearance and you just can’t manage to look the way you want to. The term is also sometimes used to insult someone you find unpleasant to look at. The word’s etymology is profane.

In my experience, just about every painting goes through one or more fugly stages. There is a point where the painting, at least to the artist, is hideous and seems unredeemable. There is no point to continuing, because the painting is doomed. I’d post more work in progress shots, but the fuglies really bother me.

Unless you are prepared for the fuglies, they will destroy your ability to finish any painting. It takes a leap of faith to look at a work in progress, be revolted by what it looks like now, and believe that it has potential nonetheless. You have to believe that you can make it look right, even though right now you can’t stand to be in the same room with the thing. The more you’ve done it, and the more you can remind yourself that you’ve been able to get through this before, the easier it gets.

If you’re a beginner, it’s even worse. You may not yet have made a painting that looked anything like what you wanted it to, so it’s hard to keep working on what feels like a piece of junk from start to finish. That’s a leap of faith as well—faith in the idea that even if this painting is ugly, the next one will be less so. Take my word for it: if you keep at it, your work will get better.

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• Tempera grassa 2 (0)

Historically, two of the important words that Italians used to describe the act of painting were “disegno” and “colore.” As I understand them, the words had broad meanings that I’d like to discuss a bit.

Disegno meant both “design” and “drawing.” It referred to the whole process of planning and laying out a painting, up to and including any underdrawing. It also referred to what we think of as drawing, independent from painting.

Colore meant both “color” and the process of applying paint. It included selecting which colors would be used where, layering paint, blending paint, shading, brush strokes, and so on.

I absolutely love how these words bring together concepts that are separate in English. If in painting I make a mistake in placement, I might say that I made a “drawing” error. But unless I did an actual underdrawing that doesn’t quite make sense. In Italian, however, it is exactly correct to say that the disegno was not right. It’s also great to have a word for the application of paint and its relationship to color. One can say that, in his later life, Titian paid less attention to disegno than he had previously and put most of his emphasis on colore. Impressionism is all about colore and less about disegno. In the 15th century, Netherlandish painting impressed Italians with their colore—their wonderful and precise application of paint. These words just make incredible sense to me.

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• You say “sfumah-to,” I say “sfumay-to” (0)
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• The Flemish method (22)
• The classical palette (0)

I’ve discussed some palette strategies lately, and I thought I’d go over mine. I am very comfortable working with a limited group of low-chroma paints, but I don’t always want to make low-chroma paintings. So I use what I call a core palette.

That means that I have a core group of paints that I almost always have on my palette. These include flake white, burnt sienna, raw sienna, yellow ochre, and ultramarine blue. I am very, very familiar with how these paints mix together. I’ve used them over and over; they no longer hold any mysteries for me. Lots of painting problems can be solved with just these paints, because most of the world is pretty low in chroma and is filled with hues and values that can be mixed with these paints. By using low chroma paints, rather than neutralizing intense colors as some painters prefer, it is much easier to avoid accidentally drifting the chroma too high.

When needed, I will add some other low-chroma paints, including red ochre, Studio Products’ Tuscan red, Williamsburg Italian terre verte, Doak French ochre extra pale, burnt umber, raw umber, ivory black, transparent blue oxide. When I want very bright, opaque whites, I add titanium white. When I want very subtle mixtures with white, I add zinc white. I’m pretty familiar with how all of these colors work

That’s 90% of the paint I use. But there are times when I need more chroma. If so, I pull out some of my bigger guns: viridian, Prussian blue, cadmium red, bismuth yellow, cobalt blue, genuine vermilion, pyrol ruby, Doak Florentine lake, Doak Alger blue, Indian yellow, dioxazine purple. I don’t know these colors that well, so when I use them I often need to spend time experimenting with how they mix. Often, I use them to intensify mixtures of my more standard colors. When appropriate, I use them with only slight modification, for those small areas of chromatic color that can really make a painting jump (or fall, if done badly). Lots of my paintings don’t have any of these intense colors, but I like having them there when I need them.

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So I’m working on a still life as a gift for my brother and my sister and law. They used to blow glass (hey, Steve and Linda, if you’re reading this—are you ever going to get back to glass again?). Anyway, the subject of the still life is two lovely glass Christmas ornaments that they gave me some time ago. It seems like a nice full-circle kind of gift. (Yes, I know it’s late.)

The two ornaments are sitting on a yellow comforter. Since that takes up the foreground, middle ground (except for the ornaments) and background, most of the composition consists of yellow fabric. It’s an oil painting on a gessoed hardboard panel.

On my first pass, I messed up the color of the yellow. For the lights, I used mostly ochres, especially Doak’s wonderful French ochre extra pale. In the darks, I used raw sienna, bunt umber, and raw umber. That was a lot of time panting complex folds of fabric, and while I was doing it it seemed fine to me. The next day, it just looked wrong. After some thought, I realized that I had screwed up the chroma of the darks, making them too dull. When I focus on the darks, they look pretty low in chroma. But when I painted that dullness, it became clear that the overall relationship between the chroma in the darks with the chroma in the light was wrong. That can happen when the difference between one color and another is subtle, but repeated throughout a painting. An error that would not be noticeable if it was in only one part of a painting looks really huge if the same problem repeats itself over and over.

So I went back over the fabric parts of the painting (after wet sanding for good adhesion from one layer to the next) and re-painted, paying more careful attention to chroma. For darks, I used yellow ochre, raw sienna, burnt sienna, and ultramarine blue instead of umbers. That worked much better.

I am no hater of umbers; for really low-chroma yellows, they are hard to beat (some artists think that umbers are “deadening” colors just like black is purported to be). But in this case, they were not the right tool for the job.

Also of interest

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I’ve noted previously that, while there is no such thing as cheating in art, photographs present certain problems when used as reference materials for realist drawing or painting. These problems are exacerbated when you try to do something with an amateur snapshot, which is typically to be used as the basis of a portrait. To be useful as a portrait reference, a photo really needs to be composed largely in terms of the direction and intensity of light. Does the light illuminate the face in such a way that the structure of the nose, the brow, the mouth, and so on are clearly delineated? Are the lights blown out? Are the darks impenetrable? Are there lively catchlights in the eyes? Will the smile on the face translate into something that looks like a horrible grimace? (Almost all portrait paintings, in my opinion, are better if no teeth are showing.)

No one gives the least thought to any of that stuff when taking, or judging, a snapshot. Nor should they. But if they bring it to you and ask you to translate it into a painting, you need to be willing to explain why that’s just not a good idea. Even working from life, it takes great skill to paint a good portrait. It’s even harder when working from a set of well-lit and correctly exposed photographs. Making it work with a crappy snapshot is almost impossible. That’s especially the case when the photo was made with a flash on the camera pointed straight at the subject, which will eliminate all trace of dimensionality and make everything look flat.

So I want you now to make these two promises to yourself:

I solemnly swear that, if presented with a good snapshot, taken without a flash, and asked to paint a portrait from it, I will not comply unless offered really impressive amounts of cash or threatened with serious emotional blackmail by a family member whom I know to be crazy enough to convince my mom to stop speaking to me for a year.

I solemnly swear that, if presented with a bad snapshot, or any snapshot taken with a flash, it would take a credible threat of death to me, a loved one, or a family pet in order to get me to try to do something with it.

Now you’re ready for when your Aunt Stephanie finds out that you are an artist and wants free portraits of the whole family. Leave it to Chinese sweatshop artists to attempt “genuine oil paintings made with artist-grade materials” using only crappy snapshots. You owe it to yourself and to the rest of us.

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• The Flemish method (22)

With painting in my life I have verbal and nonverbal language I can use to describe and think about visual things. I can lay awake at night and consider the things I saw that day, reflecting on their shape, their color, and how they existed in space. I can think about what I saw and how it made me feel, and why. The more I paint, the more I see, and the more the sensation of vision persists beyond the moment.

Here are some things I would probably never have noticed if I were not a painter:

Morning light filtered through white translucent curtains.

The color of shadow.

The shape of fingers.

The way the sky is one blue below a cloud layer and another blue above it.

How the light looks with my head under the covers.

The way the color of a sunset changes, radically, about every five minutes.

The many colors that white objects possess.

The gradation in the hue of my infant son’s irises.

I sometimes look at a sky and think, “that’s a watercolor sky,” or “that’s an oil painting sky.” I can’t quite explain what the difference is, but to me it is clear.

I’ve encountered people who have learned to appreciate paintings, but they don’t—they can’t—understand them the way a painter does, any more than someone who attends the ballet can understand dance as intimately as a dancer. For the understanding that I am starting to develop, I am deeply grateful.

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The word “scumble” is an art term that has a lot of meanings. Sometimes, it means thin glaze with a mixture that contains white. Sometimes it means painting with a dry brush using a broken color effect. Sometimes it means other things. In fact, it means so many things that it really doesn’t mean anything at all unless you define what you are trying to say each time you use it.

Let’s just get rid of it. It causes more confusion than it’s worth. It should be replaced with terms like “glaze,” “broken color,” “drybrush,” and “velatura,” which actually do have coherent meanings.

Just say no.

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One way to put together a palette is to deliberately use just a few colors of paint. A limited palette is any group of six or fewer paints (plus white) chosen for how harmoniously they mix with each other. rather than a color theory palette selected for a wide range of hues and the highest possible chroma. Limited palettes often focus on earth colors, since they harmonize well together. They usually include paints from the warm side and the cool side of the hue circle (although the cool may just be a black) and often make use of mixing complements.

Any small grouping of paint colors will do. Here are a few useful limited palettes:

• Burnt sienna and ultramarine blue.
• Raw sienna and ultramarine blue.
• Yellow ochre, alizarin crimson, and black.
• Yellow ochre, alizarin crimson, burnt umber, and black.
• Yellow ochre, alizarin crimson, ultramarine blue, burnt sienna, and black.
• Cadmium red and black.
• Black (and white).
• Black and burnt umber (and white).

(Note that you can substitute a more lightfast substitute for alizarin crimson, such as pyrol ruby.)

As you can see, with these palettes there are hues and chromas that can’t be mixed, only suggested. Often, by using warm/cool contrasts, you can create the impression of colors that aren’t actually there. The classic example is creating the illusion of bright blue eyes using only a mixed grey from black and white, by placing warm yellows, reds, and oranges nearby. Many master figure painters juxtapose warm flesh tones with colors that look cool, but are actually warm/neutral. In doing so they often make deliberate use of a very limited set of paints. Because you are using so few colors, you become intimately familiar with how each of your few paints mixes with each of the others, and how various mixtures work when set against each other.

The lessened range of hue and chroma that are characteristic of a limited palette create a sense of harmony. Each part of the painting is consistent with every other part, and a group of paintings made with the same limited set of colors makes a series that is obviously related. It is harder to achieve realism with a limited palette, but once you are comfortable with a certain limited palette it can be surprising how seldom that seems like a serious limitation.

When selecting the particular paints to use, be aware that not all “raw siennas” are the same. Paints labeled identically by different manufacturers can have radically different masstone, undertone, color mixing, transparency, or other characteristics. That is particularly true with earth colors, which are often really synthetic oxides these days. So if you get used to having ultramarine blue and burnt sienna work beautifully together, you may find that if you switch brands (or even get a different batch) that wonderful balance of color isn’t quite so perfect. If you find a perfect paint, you may want to get an extra couple of tubes, because that perfection may not be available forever.

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So I called up Robert Doak over the Summer to order some paint. As he does, he asked me about how I paint and started suggesting additional things for me to buy (he’s a very good salesman). One of the things he pushed was his new medium, “cristallo.” At $12 USD for a 40 ml tube I decided to splurge and pick some up.

Mr. Doak says that the primary ingredients in cristallo are leaded glass powder and sun-thickened walnut oil. It also contains small amounts of cold-pressed walnut oil, beeswax, and lead drier. It is based on recent research indicating that 16th century Venetian painters added more powdered glass to their paint than was previously thought, although he makes no claim that this is the “rediscovered” medium of Titian, Giorgione, and Tintoretto. He suggests that it is best used by spreading it thinly onto the surface and painting into it. He also suggests that it is a good replacement for varnish on a dried painting, but I am dubious about that application and have not tried it.

I’ve now painted with it, off and on, for a few months. It is a sort of thick, colorless fluid, about the consistency of ketchup. It is not sticky the way mediums containing resins, balsams, or stand oil tend to be. It is easy to spread very thinly onto the painting surface with a finger (you can feel a slight granularity from the glass powder, but it is barely perceptible) and it becomes more fluid as you move it around (i.e., it is somewhat thixotropic). It is nice to paint on, providing a pleasant, slippery quality to the painting surface. Mixed into paint, it dilutes it slightly and gives it extra brushability. It doesn’t hold brush marks. It does not seem to markedly increase or decrease the drying time of oil paint. So far, I like it. It does not make the paint magically transparent or luminous, but I didn’t expect it to.

If you do use cristallo or any other painting medium, add only very small amounts to your paint—never more than 20% of paint volume and preferably much less than that.

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Periodically, I see a post on an internet art forum along the lines of “Why buy expensive mediums when leftover bacon grease works just as well? I’ve been using it since 1953 and I’ve had no problems so far!” People (especially we Americans) seem to have a strong desire to use the materials we are familiar with, have left over from other activities, or can get for a dollar less per gallon than an “equivalent” material at the art store. So you see artists using white house paint to prime their canvases, cheap boiled oil from the hardware store as a painting medium, cheap generic spray varnish, and other substitute materials.

I think that’s a false economy. I believe that, in order for paintings to be thought of as valuable, they should be made from fine materials using excellent craftsmanship. Imagine if a maker of handmade violins thought that balsa wood was just as good as a good hardwood, or that generic spray varnish produces just as good a finish and tone as a properly prepared resin varnish. That would not be an “innovative” way to save money on violin-making supplies. Working like that could possibly produce a violin that looks OK, and maybe it could even sound OK, but it would not be an object of craftsmanship.

I’m not an elitist. I have limited money to spend on art materials, too. I buy inexpensive Venice turpentine from a tack shop instead of the costly stuff from the art store, because it seems to be the same stuff and is a lot cheaper. I make my own traditional gesso panels because I can’t afford to have the guys at Real Gesso make them for me (theirs are better than mine).

I understand the desire to come up with personal solutions that feel more clever than the fancy stuff in the art store. But hardware store boiled linseed oil is junk. It’s made for tasks like protecting the wooden handle of a gardening tool from the elements, not for making permanent artwork. Adding a little bit of cheap oil (or leftover bacon grease) to your paint won’t make it explode. Painting on latex house paint “gesso” may not cause noticeable problems. The painting may last long enough, under decent conditions. And it is certainly the case that most of us will never produce a masterpiece that will deserve to hang in a museum 200 years from now.

But I can’t make paintings that way. Using house paint, cheap boiled oil, or any other junk material makes me feel like a hack, not a craftsman. Decent materials are not that expensive. And while junk materials may work out OK, they may well not, and they may cause a good painting to fail prematurely. Plenty of 19th century painters discovered that when they forgot the traditions of craftsmanship and just used whatever seemed to work they often got paintings that didn’t last. While I sometimes hear anecdotal stories about any number of weird materials being used with “no problems so far,” my own bias is to use quality materials from companies I trust, not jury-rigged stuff that is “just as good.”

Also of interest

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The Notebook is a web site where random bits of information about art, design, resources, art education, and lots of other stuff are collected. It includes the text of several books with lapsed copyrights (including the first real book on how to be an artist—Cennini’s Il Libro dell’ Arte). It is ever changing, so it’s worth poking around there every few months to see what’s new.

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There are a number of strategies for keeping oil paint from drying out on the palette. One is to put it into the freezer. Another is to submerse the paint under water (before using it again, you drain the water away and let any remaining drops evaporate). You can also cover your palette in plastic wrap to seal out oxygen, but that gets kind of messy. Some artists squeeze out a large blob of paint, then let it skin over. When they want to paint again, they cut the skin away with a knife and use the fresher paint inside.

The best paint is fresh paint. In a perfect world, you would have paint made fresh every morning, but that isn’t practical unless you have an indentured servant to wake up at 5:00 AM to mull the day’s paint. The next best paint is fresh from the tube. Fresh paint has the most binding power and the best handling. Old paint is sticky. Paint that has been frozen and re-thawed has undergone chemical changes—even if it seems OK, it isn’t quite the same stuff. Paint that’s been put under water may absorb some of the water and that also has the potential to cause problems.

Most of the time, I squeeze out only the paint I think I’ll use that day and discard any unused paint rather than trying to save it. I’ll often save it from one day to the next, but no more than that. I don’t waste a lot of paint, because I don’t put really large blobs of it on my palette anyway. When I need more, I squeeze out more. I’ve seen advice that says you should always have lots and lots of each color of paint ready on your palette, because that somehow makes you freer and more creative. I don’t do that, and I think I’m plenty creative. The worry seems to be that unless you’ve got big honking wads of paint right in front of you’ll be too restrained. Worse yet, you might use the wrong color rather than get up and get more paint. I’ve never done that, because squeezing out more paint isn’t really any effort. So I am a little stingy with how much paint I put on the palette and always willing to squeeze out more on when I need it. Works for me.

Every once in a while, there is a reason to save paint for a few extra days. That happens sometimes when I’ve made some paint up fresh or when I’ve put a lot of work into mixing just the right color. I think the best way to save oil paint is by retarding its drying rate with clove oil. Clove oil slows the drying of oil paint without, so far as I can tell, causing significant chemical changes or causing any stickiness. I don’t like to mix clove oil with my paint, because that will retard its drying after its been applied to the painting. I have heard of one artist who has lots of small glass jars. She saves paint by smearing some clove oil inside a each jar and then putting it upside down over a paint blob on a glass palette. What I do is similar: I transfer my paint to a ceramic butcher’s tray, then smear some clove oil around the sides of the tray and cover it with plastic wrap. Most paint will last an extra few days this way.

If you like to paint in one layer and you like to play around with wet paint on the surface for days at a time, mix a drop of clove oil into each nut of paint on the palette. It will stay workable for a long time.

Also of interest

• Doak’s cristallo medium (5)
• Three ways to use oil painting mediums (0)
• The Velázquez palette (3)
• The classical palette (0)
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Mixtures are usually lower in chroma than paint straight from the tube. So with just a few paints on your palette, there will be colors you cannot approach, because when you try to mix the right hue you lose too much chroma. One way to deal with that is to simply have a very large number of paints on your palette. That way, whenever you need to represent a high-chroma color, you are likely to have one that is close. You can then get the right color with a minimum of mixing.

My teacher, Dennis Cheaney, uses this approach. It is based on the method advocated by Ted Seth Jacobs, his teacher. Here’s what Ted says about this in “Light for the Artist,” the book I’ve quoted from in a number of posts.

Some painters prefer to work with the fewest possible colors (called a “limited palette”). The disadvantage to this method is that mixed colors are not quite as chromatically intense as their counterparts out of the tube. For example, an orange made of red and yellow loses some chromatic intensity as compared to tube orange. The limited palette reduces our available chromatic range.

Another one of Ted’s students, Tony Ryder, was profiled in a recent article in American Artist. His palette for one painting has 47 paints on it:

flake white, misty blue, zinc white, titanium white, Naples yellow green, jaune brilliant, Naples yellow light, Naples yellow, Naples yellow red, cadmium yellow lemon, cadmium yellow, cadmium orange, coral red, brilliant pink, cadmium red, cadmium red scarlet, alizarin crimson, rose grey, cobalt violet, cobalt violet light, Winsor violet, ultramarine violet, cobalt blue, king’s blue, ultramarine blue, cerulean blue, cobalt green light, viridian, green grey, chrome oxide green, cinnabar green, Bohemian green earth, sap green, yellow ochre light, yellow grey, raw sienna, Old Holland ochre, deep ochre, raw umber greenish, mars yellow, mars orange, burnt sienna, mars violet, burnt umber, Van Dyke brown, Payne’s gray, ivory black.

That’s a lot of different paints. (CONTINUED) ⇒

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• The Velázquez palette (3)
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The Inseparability of Value and Hue. Many painters, such as the surrealists, for example, lighten values only by adding white. They treat the value scale as if it were only a lightening and darkening of the same hue. This is a serious mistake for the optical artist. It is an essentially “black-and-white” approach. The result is similar to a colored drawing, with local colors washed over the value changes, and does not take into account the fact that the light is colored. Value and color change together, organically. We cannot run up and down the value scale without constantly varying the hue.

For example, if the light source has some kind of (unnameable!) yellowish coloration and the shadow turns correspondingly complementary, as the values darken the yellowness will also drop. We need to incorporate this hue change into each value change. We must see each change as a colored value. Otherwise we are essentially painting in a monochrome. We also must avoid “tinting” value changes with the same color. For example, if the light itself is yellowish, we ought not to put the same intensity of yellow everywhere in the light.

Also take care not to give the shadow the same kind of hue as the light. The color of the shadow can be deceptive. For example, when the body is under a yellowish light, the reflected light in the shadow may be very warm. However, approaching the terminator, where there is the least influence of reflected light, the shadow may show more of its complementary nature. Some students notice only the very warm reflected lights and paint all the shadow warm. This makes for a warm-on-warm effect that does not correspond with optical reality. The effect is rather heavy, or hot, and the picture will not have the feeling of light speeding through it. The hue will be turgid if it is too similar in the and the shadow.

Also of interest

• The Velázquez palette (3)
• The kitchen sink palette (7)
• Light for the Artist 3 (0)
• Whites (4)
• The core palette (8)