SAGITTARIUS

A good friend asked for a painting of her as a Sagittarius - her astrological sign. I thought it was a good occasion to try out a method of working with oils that I am convinced was used by Frazetta (more in a later post)...that or something similar. His work is characterized by very thinly applied paint in the background, with very smooth, "smoky" color transition, that remind of watercolor. I am convinced that he did his backgrounds in one passage, without buildup of paint and mixing the color on the untoned canvas....his toning was his background, so to say.

The topic of woman and horse reminded me anyhow of a Frazetta painting - this one:

from which I brutally imitated the waves and rock in the background - a good occasion to try out a putative Frazetta technique by copying a little part of one of his paintings.

The whole thing started out as thumbnails, as usual, which then crystallized into a drawing and digital value study.

This time I did the color studies in Photoshop - mainly using color balance layers - not the cleanest of methods but a very fast one. I did 8 color variations, from which my friend choose the last one....but “a little more like the sunset photo”, which I also showed her as one of the possible color schemes.

Here is a lineup of the references I used: one of the nebulas in the Sagittarius constellation, horse and archery photos, sunsets by the seaside and of course the Frazetta painting above and a portrait photo of the model.

The palette I used on this one was yellow ochre, cadmium scarlet, alizarin, burnt umber, ultramarine blue, cerulean blue and both titanium and zinc white. My first pass on the canvas was the background. According to my take on Frazetta, I just mixed a variety of thinly diluted oils directly on the canvas, rubbing and mixing the colors with a cloth to achieve a watercolor-wash effect. I was very happy with the result, which already established the color scheme:

My second pass was refining the waves and the rock and darkening some of the cloud with dry-brush scumbling. 

I then painted the figure, section by section, from top to bottom.

Finally, I shoot a ultra-high resolution photo and loaded it in Photoshop. There, I adjusted brightness, contrast, saturation, levels, then painted digitally over the face and arms to achieve a smoother skin texture, repainted the hair almost completely and added the stars, using some stars photos which I overlaid with the “screen” mode and individual color adjustments. 

The end result is a true mixed traditional-digital piece:

The lower part of the canvas remained practically as it was after the very first “toning” pass. I loved this technique, which I think combines some of the working process of watercolors with the perfect control of oils - I think I will use it often.

OIL PAINTING FOR BEGINNERS - PART 3: TECHNIQUES

In almost all books about oil painting, two methods are mentioned: “alla prima”, which formally means finishing the whole painting in one session, thus painting wet on wet for the whole piece (which is made up of only one layer) and...non-”alla prima”, where you let the paint dry at different stages, working in multiple sessions and layers, which may include "glazing" (applying thin layers of transparent pigments or color mixtures) and "scumbling" (applying thin layers of non-transparent pigments or color mixtures, which often include some amount of white). Multiple layered methods are sometimes associated with the generation of a monochromatic underpainting, which is let dry and "colored" at a later stage. The whole story about “fat-over-lean” refers to multilayered approaches. 

Now, unfortunately, this is just like saying that there are two ways to cook pasta: either with or without meat...I am Italian, so I can think of at least 100 different spaghetti sauces without even bothering to open a cookbook.

The AAU teaches a very specific approach, which is one of the many types of "alla prima" painting, though you can use it also for paintings spanning multiple sessions. It is a very easy and very effective method, and I will describe it in more detail below. However, I am sort of a compulsory collector of painting techniques and I scan today´s massive information ocean searching for the painting approach of different artists and then try them out as good as I can. It is easier if the artist is generous enough to provide a tutorial, more difficult if you have to decipher it from books and at the most challenging when you piece together fragmental information from anthologies and commentaries. So I came out of this semester with at least three different approaches which I consider successful and two which are undoubtedly successful for the artists who patron them, but I found them very challenging for the beginner....at least for this particular beginner. 

When I try to make order in the many different ways to apply paint to canvas, the elements  that make a difference for me are two: a) whether you work on the whole painting at once or only a piece at a time and b) whether you mix the color on the palette or on the canvas. I will try to make sense of these distinctions and their implications by looking at both my experience and the work of different artists.

The AAU tutors insist on the necessity to work on the whole painting at once, and they have good reasons to do that: it requires an enormous discipline to keep a painting consistent if you complete it one piece at a time. Completing a piece at a time on a painting is called "window shading" - and it is actually my preferred way of working. So I had to hide my WIPs most of the time, because they looked something like that:

The Norns - Window shading in progress

There are very prominent "window shaders" out there who do marvelous paintings. David Gray (who offers fantastic tutorials on his website) is a "window shader" and also a "canvas mixer" - he mixes smooth transitions on canvas, using very small brushes, and achieves and incredibly smooth rendering. Sometimes he does a monochromatic underpainting, sometimes he does not. This approach is wonderful for children´s skin or any other surface that needs to be completely atextural. Another "window shader", though to a lesser extent is Donato Giancola: he works on a very rough acrylic underpainting and finishes one section of the painting at a time. Donato Giancola, is also a canvas mixer: he dabs different colors and values in different areas of, say, a face, then works the transitions on the canvas as much as on the palette. If you feel inclined to learn more, check is fantastic video tutorial about Joan of Arc. It is a very powerful and fast approach and I have used it extensively. Rather than mixing a million different hues, you can just work out the extremes and then make the transitions on the fly. This really exploits the power of oils, as it is only possible with paint that stays wet for a reasonable amount of time.

You can also avoid mixing the transitions altogether - the master of the masters for this approach is Gregory Manchess. His highly painterly and impactul pieces avoid overmixing and overrendering and use brushwork to the most of its potential. Loomis called this method the “blocky approach” in his masterpiece “Creative Illustration”. Colors are not mixed on canvas (thus avoiding the always present risk of muddying them), only the edges are controlled. I have studied his work for hours and humbly tried to imitate his approach in my work. I did not manage in full (no surprise you need years of experience to do that properly), but the closer I came the more I liked my paintings. Here are some details where I think I managed to achieve something similar. 

I do not know whether Greg Manchess is a window shader or not, but I do not think it makes much of a difference. When you magically get the handle of it and you are in flow on mixing colors, this approach is so fast that you can finish a whole painting in one day. I actually painted my most ambitious and biggest painting, The Norns, mostly in a continuous 2-day session. It is also an "alla prima" form, because you finish each part of the painting in one single session...so even if you go on the next day it is always a single layer. Gregory Manchess also stated once that he never does any glazing.

I have tried monochromatic underpainting followed by both opaque and transparent glazing. This experience was defeating. Maybe it is just not my way. Adrian Gottlieb makes absolutely stunning paintings with this method. Actually, his underpaintings are so beautiful that he sometimes calls the job done at that stage. Here are two of my monochromatic underpaintings and the final results:

Learning to Fly - WIP and final

Self Portrait - WIPS and final

In the first, I managed to keep it to a semi-glazing approach on the figures, but worked on the background with a standard wet-in-wet approach. In the second case, i really tried hard to keep transparent glazes throughout, but had to repaint the face three times and the hands twice and it is still not finished. It was enormously time consuming, difficult, frustrating and definitely not in line with my way to enjoy painting. However, I did learn a lot about opaque and transparent pigments and about dry-brush scumbling (the best way to underpaint), which turned out to be extremely useful for other paintings. Glazing and scumbling are very powerful ways to refine a painting at whatever stage, and it is worth spending some time to familiarize with the behavior of thinned transparent or opaque pigments on a dry underpainting. This work below was glazed over two times: once to get rid of the "blotchiness" on the skin and the second to cool down the skin color which had got too warm with the first glaze. I do believe the work improved on both occasions, and it was less than 1h work in both cases.

Spring Giulia

And finally, the best method I can contribute for the beginner is the "AAU method". I got so bored with it after a while that I felt the urge to explore other methods (and I am really glad I did so), but I came back to it in the end as it is really easy and powerful - almost a guarantee for success. They initiate it as "alla prima", but in reality you can let the work dry at any stage without loosing anything and sometimes actually gaining control, so it is totally stress-free. They really insist on the need to work on all the painting at once, and it does really express its full potential that way. I would break it up in six stages:

1. Apply local colors in shadow
2. Apply local colors in light (midtone or slightly lighter)
3. Adjust edges
4. Apply lighter lights (and or midtones, depending on how light was step 2)
5. Apply darker shadows and/or reflected lights
6. Highlights and accents

Stages 1-3 go very fast and at the end you have what I call a "poster statement". Each area of the painting is expressed as a two-value statement with a soft or hard edge depending if it is a form or cast shadow. Here is a painting after stage 1-2 and the final:

Richard

It is advisable to go through to stage 3 before letting the paint dry too much. This painting got to stage 3 and a little beyond on the face and then was left to dry completely before going forward through the other stages

Winter Giulia WIP and final

Notice the poster statement on the folds and flower in the WIP.
It is not necessary to let the paint dry at that stage but I do prefer to do so. Stages 4-5 can be handled in any order or all at once and they are the most time consuming. I mix in stage 6 as well as I go along, to get a more complete feeling of where the painting is going, as adding the highlights can really make the painting "pop". Human beings tend to overestimate the reflected lights, that is why stage 5 is both about darker shadows AND reflected light - sometimes what you need is not a reflected light but a darker core shadow.

Richard and Winter Giulia, two of my more successful paintings in my eyes, were painted this way.  Mark was painted as a mixture of this method with Gregory Manchess method, leaving paint unblended on canvas - though it actually achieved more of a Sargent-like appearance. 

Mark WIP and final

And here is for me also the greatest win from my first experiences with oil: the fact that I can actually blend and mix the different approaches to find my perfect cocktail, and changing the proportion both between paintings and whitin the same painting. You can use one for the background and a different one for the figures, or, if you are not in figurative painting, you can paint the foreground elements with a different style than the background.

It bears reminding: no matter what technique you choose to use - technique alone will never make a painting. A painting is carried by composition, design, value structure and color, not by medium or technique. Without the basics of composition, color and form, no magic trick or knowledge will create a successful painting. Something I need to constantly remind myself too.

ILL 607 - SITUATION AND ENVIRONMENT

My second course this past fall semester was also an oil painting course: "Situation and Environment" under the tutorship of Warren Chang - an impressive artist who worked several years as illustrator and then turned to fine arts, specializing in autobiographical interiors and field worker scenes - basically genre paintings. The title and course description suggest also this type of painting, with a treatment of the figure in setting, atmosphere, mood, narrative and the like. In reality, unless you are prepared to go the extra mile of inventing the environment for your figures (which is optional), this is basically a figure painting course, not very much different from Figure Painting or Sustained Figurative Concepts. Every week you had a choice of 4-5 model poses to paint from and you could create an environment fitting the figure if you felt thus inclined. For example by doing something like this:

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The fun part were the three extra big projects that you had to plan, design and reference yourself - that was a  fantastic learning experience, and my first shot at calling in a model. I finally gathered the courage to ask a friend of mine to pose for me - with instruction, direction, lighting, etc....I was very surprised by how willing and flattered she was. Not only that, but many other friends who caught wind of this asked if they could pose too. So, what Jeannie Brunnick was telling last semester is right: it is easy to find models among your friends and aquaintances! For the second and third projects I used myself and my family as models, mainly for time reason. Stil, it was great fun to direct them and to organize mock-up costumes, props, maquettes, lighting schemes, etc...I could fully enjoy my passion for drapery by designing each scene to include unusual materials and a variety of textures. The stressful part was that these projects, although they span four weeks each, were on top of the weekly figure paintings, which used beween 8 and 12 hours studio time. The last project I painted during a lonely weekend, basically without interrumption for 40 hours or so.

The course itself is incomplete in that nothing in the course material really prepares you to the task of fitting a figure in an environment, especially if you are making it up or combining different references, as I chose to do most of the time. There is nothing on determining the horizon on the figures, nothing on consistency of light and color scheme, very little on mood and narrative, nothing on shadow consistency, etc.. etc. In fact, I relied on several of the topics I learned in ILL - 625 "Drawing from Imagination" (now called with understatement "Perspective for Illustrators"): so much that I think it was the first time that I really understood the power of what I learned in that course. So my advice is, if you want to be able to create full scenes using multiple unrelated reference, take "Situation and Environment" after "Drawing from Imagination". If you are only interested in an advanced form or figure painting, then this course is fine as a standalone.

Warren Chang´s critics are on the succint side and sometimes I missed the answers to specific questions. He is a knowledgeable painter and a tough but fair grader and I have learnt a lot from his comments - yet, not what I had expected to learn. It was a similar experience as with Jeannie last semester - I really understood her only after the semester was over. 

Overall a useful course, though not for the reasons I thought. And I feel myself a big step further in the direction I am aiming at, which is realistic fantasy illustration.

Here are some of the weekly exercises - all oils in an approximate 16" x 24"  (40 x 60 cm) format. 
I will discuss two of the three big assignments in a future blog on technique.

We also had exercises on the environment only: this was for exterior environment. To  my utter surprise, it was the only piece to make it into the Winter Show. Fine Artists are strange.... (the winter show is a purely FA show).

This was my first 4-week assignment, for which my friend generously posed. It took me 7 hours just to paint the window, but it was a great experience. The clothing, books and dragon came from improvised maquettes and one of my daughter's toys. I got a B for this one, on the accounts that is too dark and the figure is a bit overworked. Indeed, the original (and the first photo I sent in) are very dark. But then, thanks to Photoshop, I changed it to this version, which I actually somewhat like. Oh, it's nice to be an illustrator in the 21st Century!
And then, should not dungeons at night be dark places??!

FASHION AND SLUMS

In the weeks just after Christmas, many bookshops dump the prices on a wide choice of books to try to get rid of the unsold “gift books”, that typically have a market just around Christmas. These lavishly illustrated volumes on anything from dog breeds to cake decoration are sold at a fraction of the original price - a treasure trove of reference material for sometimes ridiculously low prices. I typically gravitate towards the sales tables like a fly to honey and go from one delightful discovery to the next. It is now quite evident that in terms of photographic books, I am irresistibly attracted by certain specific topics: people, unusual settings or light effects and anything that has to do with fabrics, costume, patterns or textures. In this spirit I scouted a couple of bookshops yesterday and came home with a number of wonderful and wonderfully cheap coffee-table books. Only when I unloaded my crates, I realized that there were two books rubbing covers in the same bag that represented the most outrageous contrast in content, worldview and ethics that you could possibly think of. 

The first was “Fashion - a history of the 20th century”, a compilation of items from the Kyoto Costume Institute edited by the well-known German coffee-table book magnate Taschen. These books are already fairly cheap when they are sold full price. This was to be had for the equivalent of 7 dollars and is a feast for the eyes. I am not particularly interested in fashion, but I am in costume (if you get the difference) and very much so when it is combined with the most unusual and luscious fabrics that designers can access, and tailored with the highest level of skills. Page after page of brocades, golden lace, diaphanous silks, furs, wonderfully designed combinations of shape and pattern, trims, sewed textures, and, in the latest pages, op-art fabrics, high-end punk, “fabrics” made of metal, plastic, paper and wood. Almost every page offered either an element for a picture I am already planning or an idea for a totally new one and some of the textures and light effects will come in handy in a variety of unrelated situations.

The text accompanying the pictures is very slim and yet informative, offering some precious insights in the fashion revolutions that characterized the century and the modus operandi of the major designers.

The second book is a slap in the face of so much sophistication: under the iconic title “The places we live”, the norwegian photographer Jonas Bendiksen has collected photographs of the slums of four major world metropoles: Nairobi, Mumbai, Jakarta and Caracas. The book has a very unusual format: each spread opens up to a four-pages wide landscape photograph, each page isolating one wall of the typically one-room dwellings and depicting the inhabitants (very often large or extended families) in their own “houses”. I got caught up by the book after a very cursory examination because the photographs are just stunningly beautiful and, given that the rooms have mostly just one door and no windows, the lighting is extremely moody and directional, sometimes literarily sculpting the features, attitudes and belongings of the subjects. The images are sometimes really breathtaking. Then you start reading the accompanying texts (short testimonies from one of the family members, generally the man of the family when present) and the breath remains away. It is the kind of sentences and images that you know will haunt you for quite some time, make you think and rethink about your life, the world you live in and the nature of happiness. When you listen to people praising their homes (these homes!) and how they are attached to them and how they worked to improve them and their lives, you start thinking: who is really the privileged here? When you see a mother sleeping with her 9-month-old on a bench in the street and happy because she has work enough to feed her child, you wonder what will become of our children, whom we fret upon because they eat with their elbows on the table or because they refuse to close their jackets...and who occasionally get sulky when they are refused the 100th toy....

The photographer generously makes available a free link to a slide-show of the photos, which can be found here.