work in progres

You are currently browsing articles tagged work in progres.

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.

Tags: ,

On the easel

31 May 2008 in demo/in progress, oil painting by David | 1 comment

I hes­i­tate to post this. The image depends on very sub­tle gra­da­tions of value, and those are not cap­tured very well by my cam­era (with my lim­ited pho­to­graphic skills at least). Many of the value changes are much harsher in this image than on the actual paint­ing. But here it is.

“Bag and Bulb,” oil on lead-primed can­vas, 16 × 20”.

Bag and Bulb

Tags: ,

The fuglies

16 January 2007 in art technique, painting by David | 3 comments

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.

Tags: , , , ,