A Peak Behind the Curtain, Part I
Over the next week, I am going to treat you all to a peak behind the curtain, as I show an oil painting in varying (and hopefully increasing) stages of completion, so you can garner a better understanding of the artistic process (for me, anyway). I have been meaning to do this for several years now, but I haven’t because quite frankly I haven’t been able to devote much time for painting and when I do start a painting, by the time I think to take a photograph of it, it is already half finished and so a useful chronicle can no longer be made. Well, this time I remembered, so hopefully this will be found interesting, if witnessing the handwringing I go through to create Art can be considered interesting. Many thanks to Carie Ketz, for supplying the photo which contained the raw material for my inspiration.
Stage One:
OK, the composition - intended to be a magical forest scene - is pretty much set, and the foundation laid by doing a fairly detailed sketch. This type of painting demands such an approach, as I will be doing quite a bit of glazing, where I use multiple thin, transparent layers of paint. It’s sort of a glorified “paint by numbers” approach - or like when you were a kid and used crayons in a coloring book. I am using a primed Masonite board instead of a canvas (which has more texture than I would like for this style of painting). The sketch is made: the proportions and positions of the various elements of the composition are assiduously set and refined, and then sprayed with a fixative spray so the sketch can be painted over without it smudging, smearing, or the graphite floating off the surface and migrating into the paint. A lot of the major creative decisions have already been made. I now have a pretty good idea already what the painting should look like when complete, although obviously color selections could change.
As you can see, I have already put brush to board here: a thin application of black paint - which looks gray, because the white of the board is shining through it - has been applied to define the beech tree that dominates the composition (and indeed is its raison d'être) This violates the usual method of painting - especially landscape painting - where you work from back to front. You do the background first, since you usually end up painting over some of it, and it has very little detail. However, I am in a position now where I feel like I can bend the rules a bit. Since the branches, and especially the roots, go all over the place, painting this first helps subdivide the work into smaller chunks that I can paint at leisure and tackle one at a time. (Plus, it’s more enjoyable to tackle the most interesting stuff first!)
Stage One:
OK, the composition - intended to be a magical forest scene - is pretty much set, and the foundation laid by doing a fairly detailed sketch. This type of painting demands such an approach, as I will be doing quite a bit of glazing, where I use multiple thin, transparent layers of paint. It’s sort of a glorified “paint by numbers” approach - or like when you were a kid and used crayons in a coloring book. I am using a primed Masonite board instead of a canvas (which has more texture than I would like for this style of painting). The sketch is made: the proportions and positions of the various elements of the composition are assiduously set and refined, and then sprayed with a fixative spray so the sketch can be painted over without it smudging, smearing, or the graphite floating off the surface and migrating into the paint. A lot of the major creative decisions have already been made. I now have a pretty good idea already what the painting should look like when complete, although obviously color selections could change.
As you can see, I have already put brush to board here: a thin application of black paint - which looks gray, because the white of the board is shining through it - has been applied to define the beech tree that dominates the composition (and indeed is its raison d'être) This violates the usual method of painting - especially landscape painting - where you work from back to front. You do the background first, since you usually end up painting over some of it, and it has very little detail. However, I am in a position now where I feel like I can bend the rules a bit. Since the branches, and especially the roots, go all over the place, painting this first helps subdivide the work into smaller chunks that I can paint at leisure and tackle one at a time. (Plus, it’s more enjoyable to tackle the most interesting stuff first!)