time capsule

though i’m not blessed (or cursed as the case may be) with total recall, i do have a pretty good memory, though this doesn’t seem to extend to things i read. i’ve often attributed this to doing artwork. the hours, days, or weeks spent on any artwork are a sort of time-capsule of experiences and activities that occurred both in the making of that piece or just in life outside it. by looking at a piece of art i’ve done, even years and years later, I can usually crack the capsule open and retrieve any number of random bits of my life that went into it.

when people say that an artist puts his life into his work, there is a sort of truth to it. it’s true for everyone in the projects they do at their jobs but for many there is no clear delineation between one task and another and so time can sort of turn into this continuum where it’s difficult to clearly remember details along the way. i imagine builders may have a similar time-capsule experience, and certainly anyone involved in any other art field.

when i look at any drawing or painting i’ve done, even most preparatory studies and work done back when i was a child, i can visually recall each piece in at least one incomplete stage, and my working on it. that in itself is fascinating to look back on, these mental snapshots that accompany looking at past works. but the bits of life are valuable to retrieve as well—the mundane activities that accompanied the period of time. or, sometimes emotionally charged events and moments. they’re all in there, but in each case the things that were sealed away with the painting were beyond my control. sometimes the most random and dull memories come rushing back, but there’s no understanding why they were attached to the piece but not something else that i know for a fact happened at the same time. so in a real sense, when you purchase a piece of original art you really are purchasing a bit of the artist. i’ve occasionally considered accompanying each painting i sell with the art’s own mini-biography detailing these things, but that’s a bit self-indulgent. so i blog about it instead!

tips & techniques: undertow, pt.5

the finish

the final stages were discussed in the prior posts, but here's the final scan. the following image has 4 squares highlighted. below that are those 4 sections, 1.5" square, each. the painting was scanned at 300ppi, so those 1.5" squares are going to be incredibly blown up on your monitors, creating the equivalent of putting your nose right up to the piece.

my scanner is a crappy canon lide 35. i link to it only so you can see the specs and have a good laugh. the thing is under $100. before moving abroad, knowing i'd be moving fairly often and needing to carry my hardware on my person in planes (along with the rest of my stuff), i abandoned a respectable epson scanner i quite liked because it was way too big for the moving thing. the canon had the advantage of being incredibly thin and of being powered by the same usb that feeds the images into the computer: no extra power plug meant no power converter needed. great, so the scanner served those needs but it is really terrible. the scan quality is passable if you work at it. and work at it i did: the painting (18x24") was scanned in 8 parts or so and stitched together in photoshop then color corrected. that took about 8 hours to do. fun.

here then is the map and then the detail shots for your enjoyment.

tips & techniques: undertow, pt.4

step 10f: two days worth again

first off, another two days work are captured in this photo. day one had me finishing the arm of the right-hand lady. i also went back and painted in the highlights on the left hand gal, including practically repainting the outstretched hand. i'm pretty sure that was a half day as well (grocery shopping or some other real-life errands interrupt the muse regularly). for reference my typical workday is about noon til midnight. well, that's my painting day anyway--morning emails and administrative stuff usually gets done in the morning before then. so a "half day" is really just business hours or, you know, a regular workday.

the second day i laid down the fishy parts on the left, including the patterning of scales, which was a headache and a half. three false starts resulted in wiping and restarting til i got the hang of how to handle it, and even then there were some funky parts. i also painted it "flat" in that the colors are laid down irrespective of light source and shadowing. that would've been way too much to think about along with the patterning so i decided i'd glaze in the shadowing later. i knew that backflowing water from the rocks would obscure parts, but not knowing exactly i had to paint the whole thing beyond what would show in the end, just in case. because i could decide that water detail later, i could also decide to use the water to obscure less-skillfully handled areas. left hand fish part took an entire long day. perhaps it's hard to appreciate the effort at this distance. some artists have painted mermaids with only the suggestion of scaliness. i sought to have the detail there if someone wants to look or inspect, but not have it shout out and draw too much attention. so the following stages would require subduing the detail. it's easy to want to show off detail, but sometimes you have to know when to put in effort that won't necessarily be admired, but will add to the whole.

the third morning i began painting the right side, when i realized i hadn't snapped a photo. so i took this one, which also had the benefit of showing how loosely the process began. big fat strokes of color which were then blended, into which scales were painted while wet, and then softened again in the following photo.

step 10g:

the right hand scales took most of a long day. upon finishing i knew i didn't have enough time to do the next parts, so i called it a day. the next day i went back into the hair of both ladies and finished it up. when that was done, i painted the long dorsal fins on both. again, it looks stuck on and the whole thing flat because there is still no indication of shadowing. that comes in the next step, but i needed the dorsal fins in place first.

i use acid-free black tape to edge my piece at the beginning. i use this to create a clean border of empty protective space in case the painting's edge gets dinged someday. in the meantime i wipe my brush on the edges. as i finish areas i peel the tape from those places. this helps the piece feel less in-progress and helps me judge the whole thing in an increasingly "framed" way where the stark edges define my painted areas versus the taped areas where the paint runs off and over the edge onto the tape. when the piece is done and varnished i apply the edging tape again to clean it up for presentation since sometimes it's not so clean under there. i got the post-finish taping from seeing my friend ben thompson's paintings. he used white tape but the effect was the same, i just preferred black.

step 10h: reality sets in

using a dark made of 1/2 burnt umber, 1/4 dioxazine purple and 1/4 ultramarine blue, i glazed over the fish parts and in so doing defined their roundness, their shadows, and simultaneously subdued the detail a good amount. the layer beneath was completely dried first. then i used a wide soft brush to spread on walnut alkyd mixed with thinner (maybe 20% oil to 80% thinner) over the areas i was going to glaze. just enough to wet the surface, not enough to drip at all. this allows the glaze to move easily as i brush it on (applying paint to a dried layer causes it to drag and not spread much). using a soft dry brush i can lightly blur and soften the glaze as i need, or lightly remove paint if i put too much glaze in an area. i enjoy this process and it went fairly quickly, so this is not a day's work at all. i dried it again and worked on another new piece i was starting. the next day's work would require this area to be completely dry again.

step 10i: high tide

half way during a long workday i took this picture. i did the rocks first, then the right side, then began the left. earlier in the day the right side had looked just like the left--again, loose and brushy. i mixed a few shades of color and painted the white parts loosely as you see at left, letting the color i'd established in earlier stages show through between the light patches. i then took a soft dry brush and lightly softened the bold strokes. next, using a small detail brush dipped in pure thinner i cut back into the white, lifting it off to create the ragged edges sea foam has on water. when i lifted the white off, the deep greens and blues poked through again, or the scales showed beneath creating a pleasing effect. as needed i'd then use the detail brush to add some more paint to the white parts as desired. finally, another soft blending stage leaving some sharp edges in the foam, and softening others. then, i did it again on the left side.

that's the last in-progress shot i took. another partial-day's work after finishing the foam finished the painting. the last day is fine-tuning. the whole time i was unconvinced that the more vivid greens and blues used in the color study, that show through between the sea foam areas, would work. sometimes what works on a small scale looks terrible on a large scale. until the very end i left it off, going for a more naturalistic approach. on the last day i attempted to add some of those colors back into the dark "water" parts visible between the foam. it looked great though it wasn't as vivid still as the study. i also did another pass at the right hand lady's eyes. throughout the piece i reworked them maybe three times. and lastly, it was decided that the cliffs were still too forward, too detailed and bright and contrasty. a very fast glaze over that area knocked it back one last time. and finally, the last touch of highlighting was added to the outstretched arm. all of these adjustments were saved to the end, so that i could balance the parts against the whole. i had a clear map of where i was headed but it's hard to know exactly what you're going to end up with, so sometimes it's worth readjusting things at the end depending on choices you've made that were unforseen along the way.

so, what was the final result? next entry, see the final and some close up details from the final scan!

tips & techniques: undertow, pt.3

i was painting something else at the time i began the final of undertow. during drying sessions for that other piece i popped the undertow board on to do a little work. this lasted a few days then i went full-time to finishing it.

step 10: paint paint paint
basically at the start of each work day i took a photo of the painting, so you can see one day's effort, though as mentioned the first few days are very partial days between sessions on another piece.

step 10a: underpaint

i had the drawing enlarged onto white drawing paper thin enough to satisfy the repro shop (they are notoriously nervous about running foreign stock through their machines). the toner they printed with was darker than i prefer. i don't always do an underpainting. typically i paint on colored canson paper, which serves as a unifying underpainting. in this case i needed to get rid of the white and "knock back" the black of the toner. this took little time at all. maybe an hour or two. the bottom blues/greens in the near water were reminding me of a monet giverny painting at this point.

step 10b: back to front

i tend to paint objects furthest to nearest. this is one standard way of painting and ensures your edge overlaps are correct. i'm a big fan of bouguereau (no idea how to pronounce that). his faces and figures were often extremely tightly painted and detailed and beautiful, and then his backgrounds subdued in detail so you are forced to look at the figures and faces. sometimes he passed over the backgrounds a bit too much, but there's no doubting his effect. i recently saw a photo of him working, where it is apparent that he painted the faces first then actually did subjugate everything else to their primacy:

completely unpainted background, figures first and central. and from life, ah the luxury!

i toyed with doing this painting that way. i've never worked like that before, and in the end decided a large personal work was not the place to experiment that much. i'll try it elsewhere on smaller pieces first, but i can definitely see the logic.

this photo was taken at night after a most-of-a-day painting session. the sky has been painted but you can't see it clearly in most of the photos so you won't see it til the final scan. the darkness at the bottom is mainly due to having no window light.

step 10c: foundation

i was trying to establish the color of the water that would be visible under the foam. there are many ways to paint foam but i intended to do it foam over a layer of dried "water" rather than painting the whole thing wet-in-wet. at this stage i re-established the colors of the fish parts and added more color to the figure to subdue the copied drawing beneath even further.

my color study sits next to my painting as i work. i use it as an overall reference but don't make much effort to match it exactly. i don't render the color study with a lot of exactitude, so i don't expect it to rule my final painting. sometimes happy accidents happen that i can use, often i made mistakes or decisions without thinking and simply ignore them in the final. in this case i realized that i'd painted the cliffs with too much detail and contrast in the prior step. they weren't sitting in the distance well enough. no better way to destroy the illusion of depth than to over-detail and make things in the distance very sharp. so i applied some glazes to the dried cliffs to subdue their vividness and contrast, and it helped.

step 10d: send in the ladies

i finished the other piece i was on, leaving me freed to devote myself to this painting. this is also 2 days of work later, i failed to take a picture between workdays. the first day i worked on water and then spent the rest of the day detailing the rock a good amount. the next day i did all the figure on the left that you see, wet-in-wet in one long workday. her hair is partially done, and her whole left side, the side lit by sun, is only partially painted. later on i'd come in and "light her up" with the strength of light that becomes appropriate. all things in relation. you can see i'm wiping my brush in the area of the other girl's hair, and a little on the fish areas. no better place to do it, really, in my limited workspace. later on i'd come in and wipe it off.

step 10e: and the other one

the second figure went fairly smoothly, and again her hair is only partly done. for the first lady i mixed a few large batches of base flesh tones then tweaked them upon application as needed. i added in some pure walnut oil so they would stay nice and wet for the following day and gal #2. this is a normal workday's worth, by which i mean a business day. i could've finished her arm and hand but had some place to go in the evening. the walnut oil kept the pre-mixed color wet for the next day too, thankfully, although the batches were dwindling.

between stages or as needed i'll put the painting on the tile floor and set it about a foot away from a space heater (the type that has heating elements but no fan, to avoid dust). i try to time these drying sessions to match with something that needed doing so i wasn't waiting around much. often i'd paint until about 8pm and then go for my jog. when i got back and showered i was ready to continue.

and speaking of continuing, the second half of the step-by-step follows immediately. two posts in one day. mark it, it won't happen again any time soon!

tips & techniques: undertow, pt.2

after completing the landscape i was working on at the same time, and having more time than i thought in waiting for an illustration project to progress, i was thrilled to get back to my mermaid piece. i had it in my mind to have it done before summer conventions so i could issue a print if it went well, and have the original on display. i also knew i wanted to paint it a bit larger, in this case 18x24". i had a problem in that i knew in a month from then that we'd be moving to spain and that everything would be harder to accomplish versus in england. so getting some things done before moving would increase the odds of getting it done in time.

step 4: protect the innocent
a model was hired, by which i mean for free and from my living room. to protect the innocent once again the photos have since been deleted but i can relate there was a large pile of cushions and pillows where a rock should've been, and photoshop compositing (one model, two mermaids). being in england i had little access to waves and rocks. had i but waited another month i could've waded out into the beach at nerja and taken the photos, perhaps...if my camera were waterproof.

step 5: get the lead out
digital is a great medium, and there is rarely a painting i do now that doesn't benefit from digital preliminary work. the amount of fast changing and options-considering that can go on is irreplaceable in my book. but at heart i'm a painter and a traditionalist. i'm happy to take advantage of technology but as often as possible i hope that the technology improves what in the end are still physical paintings. so i was happy at this point to pick up my pencils, my sharpener, and a sheet of 11x14" paper. using my silly photo composite and referencing the faces of some 1930's or so ladies, i set to work. a note on that last point: while some artists strive for very modern, maxim-inspired looks to their women, i prefer a more classic/classy beauty. if my going on and on about the pre-raphaelites and other victorian classicists hasn't made that abundantly clear, then nothing else will.

by the time that was done, i'd gotten approvals on my sketches and it was time to get back to my regular work. knowing that i would not be able to find an oversize copier i made efforts to have this drawing enlarged while in england. i went to cirencester, where i knew they had such a machine, and convinced them to let me run my own paper through their machine to blow my drawing up to an 18x24" sheet. took a few tries. i rolled that into a tube and within a few weeks i was in spain.

step 6: the usual, made more difficult
i arrived in spain and continued work on my illustration stuff. i now needed to get a board large enough to mount the drawing onto. i searched around nerja and some of malaga and found nothing comparable to what i usually used. i tried ordering board from the states but either stores didn't ship to europe or the shipping was incredibly expensive. finally dick blick ended up having what i needed at a very reasonable shipping rate. unfortunately their whole shipping system was down, which delayed everything a few weeks. meanwhile i was finishing up existing work and was nearing the period of time i'd set aside to paint this thing. if i couldn't get the board in and that time arrived i'd be spinning my wheels and would have to find something else to do. that ended up happening to an extent so i did some other stuff in the meantime. then the board arrived, i got the drawing glued down and sized and ready to paint. but during that wait....

step 7: value study, redux
large paintings take more time to do, so i often spend more time in the preliminary stages ensuring that effort goes to good use. i scanned my drawing and popped it into the existing value study then re-painted the figures and such to get a better idea of what i was after.

step 8: playing with color
still waiting for boards to arrive, and on another sketch-approval day for some d&d art, i got to work on my digital color study.

here as you can see i increased the contrast a bit. i referenced some fish and some waves and stuff. you'll note one small difference in the rock they're on from the value study. between that and this i happened to be down on the balcon de europa in nerja, on my anniversary as it turns out. you have to know i really don't like the beach. i melt at 80F and hate my body and that pretty much disqualifies me for anything sand-related. i looked down, where there be rocks, and noticed a detail i hadn't considered. basically the waves lap up onto the rocks and slide back down, and they leave a ring of dark wet rock up to the line the water rises to. i snapped some photos and incorporated this little detail. always work from life if you can.

from the balcon de europa, home to 20+ cats

step 9: second thoughts
not very long before starting, a nagging in the back of my head made me stop and go back to my color study. those cliffs in the distance were not convincing me, they were too flat. the forced lines in the cliffs explained in part 1 weren't doing it for me either so i cut the right-side into a more natural shape, tweaked the distant water some, and added the washback from the rock over the fish-parts, which felt more natural. now i was ready.

the painting was about to begin, so stay tuned for pt.3!

tips & techniques: undertow, pt.1

earlier, i described the "5-year plan" involved in personal paintings. here begins the tale of the latest large one (not counting my landscape stuff). the theme of the piece was simple, perhaps trite: mermaids. yet such a classical theme, while often made cheesy, has made for some incredibly beautiful paintings. an image regarding one such got lodged in my head maybe 4 years ago. for a long time it was simply that i knew i wanted to do a piece with mermaids. eventually images got attached to the idea. in april while in england, i began working on it and this very day i actually signed and finished it. here then is its story, told in a few parts and part of what is turning out to be a bi-annual step-by-step series. this one will be more extensive and told piecemeal over a few weeks.

step 1: nailing down a concept

for a long time a particular idea was in my head, and it had been whittled into form in a series of mental edits long before i sat down to do thumbnails. as such, it was ready to spring forth. starting about 7 months ago or so i recommitted myself to the art of thumbnailing. it used to be for a long time that i'd do these mental edits, during which the initial idea is changed or refined many times, and then use the most recent mental revision as the basis for a painting. so i've endeavored to work up an average of 5 concepts per piece now. the results have been largely favorable--in almost every case i end up preferring a later image. would it happen this time?

thumbnail 1: the original idea, with some tweaks on-the-fly:

as i said, this was pretty much ready to leap out. i hadn't considered the background, so played with rocks and such. there was this theme running through my mind having something to do with her having paper hearts, and them sort of falling into the water and sinking. you know the standard femme fatale motif rendered in symbol.

thumbnail 2: beyond the pale

the first thumbnail was a couple of years of occasional mental turning. as such, i quite liked it. the hard part now was to expand on the theme. i worked away for awhile and ended up here. i sat back and laughed in realization that once again, in a short time i managed to best what i'd considered in my head for a lot longer. of course, i could not have gotten here without the prior ruminating. it was tempting to stop and declare a winner, but i had promised myself to search further....

thumbnail 3: hey, where'd she come from?

check out those brows!

the genesis of this image is easy to see: the right-hand figure's pose echoes the prior thumbnail. on a whim i tossed in another maid, of the mer variety. playing with it created a pleasant sort of double-helix shape. gone are the trail of hearts. here they each pull at one larger one, tearing it. at this point i decided this heart idea was getting ridiculous. onward....

thimbnail 4: quit while you're ahead

if you're an art student, realize you will never ever get away from gesture drawing.

each image prior was using rocks as compositional aids, so i decided to make them more prominent and created this cove of large thin standing rocks, around which i attempted to pose our ladies. all these thumbnails are done in painter ix, using slightly tweaked versions of the "detail sumi-e" brush and the scratchboard rake. going back and forth between the two and swapping constantly between black and white allows me a very brushy, loose way of drawing and shading, then cutting back in with white and reshading. it's very fast, very expressive and serves as a good basis for my later efforts. i paint pretty tight usually, so it's important that as much expressive work is done early so that when tamed it retains some of the energy of the preliminary work. it's tempting to want to take these further, but their goal is to establish basic mass and some value (light and dark) relationships. the files are fairly large and have been reduced here. each image is maybe an hour or so in the making. in the first 15 minutes i scribble out multiple concepts, wiping then restarting until something takes hold, then i develop and tweak it into shape. this concept went nowhere after about an hour so i abandoned it in a very intermediate state, one which i normally never show in public! i think they looked too seprentine and weren't engaging the viewer as the others all were. if i'm getting bored at this early stage, there's no saving it.

thumbnail 5: relax

the theme of the work leading up to this thumbnail was cast-light. i imagined a pretty dark image with a bright pool of light hitting it, and reflected light bouncing around illuminating the rest; like the sun hitting your wall through a window at evening creating this ultra-bright patch. it's ok. originally she was just sorta hanging out but it looked like she was sitting in a jacuzzi or something so i turned one hand and added some hearts (abandoned in the last stage and throughout this one until this point). that only hurt, and i didn't like it enough otherwise. partially because it was maybe too...sexy? when my art pleases men and women alike i am at my favorite place. there's a line in my mind between beauty and sexiness, between admiration and lust, and between the depiction of women as beautiful, mysterious and graceful, and objectified. in my art over the years i have consistently sought to avoid the latter and emphasize the former.

step 2: and the winner is
choosing a winner was difficult. my idea had split into this single vs. dual-figured struggle. #2 was clearly my favorite single-figure. however, i could get most of the same things i liked in it by choosing #3, and i would also have this more interesting double-helix composition, and a second interacting figure. a lot of my illustration is single-figure of necessity. i was pretty torn but, all things being equal, i chose #3. the lady on the left had some funky anatomy and there was a lot to be ironed out, but i had a good basis to continue on. next up, i copied this image into a new file and painted a 6-value greyscale study. i credit loomis with this method of value simplification. eventually a full complement of values will creep into the image, but starting out by defining the image in 6 shades of grey from white to black helps to focus your value range. this is one of the things i've picked up during my ongoing re-education. you can literally isolate the 6 shades.

step 3: clearing up the murk
back in painter i chose my usual "oil painting" brush, "round oil pastel 10," customized. i then used this limited pool of values mentioned above to make sense of my scribbles. as you can see there is little concern for drawing here, that'll come later. what was once a sweep of boring sky and horizon has been changed by adding some cliffs. they are cut to reveal sky between them to emphasize a head and to create an escape line through the image: your eye enters lower left, creeps mainly along the right figure then continues up and left through the left head and out the sky.

there's the basic idea of concepting out the piece. at this point, you'll note i abandoned completely that awful heart idea. also the original had a starkness of dark and light that this piece didn't have. while i liked the overall pattern of values here, i would choose in time to "step down" the entire mid-range to get closer to the thumbnail.

this was all in a day's work, while waiting for approvals on some illustration sketches or something. start to finish was about 6 hours. afterwards i went back to my easel and continued working on the churn for the rest of the day. the approvals were late in coming and i finished the landscape and got further on this piece within a few days. installment #2 will follow in less than a week while i get the final dried, varnished, and scanned.