Trying Other Methods

For the most part I'm an alla prima painter. I like to work wet in wet and finish quickly, blending as I go. I had some time on my hands recently and decided to try an older method where an underpainting is applied using a greenish tone and lead white is mixed with the green to paint the lights and halftones. It's important to identify the darks early and try to maintain them. I suppose you can use a drying agent like Liquin to speed up the process but I didn't.

I ended up painting some of the warm colors into the lead white mixture when it was wet, which is  not what I was supposed to do. If I try it again I'll use a drying solvent.

Here are a few progress images and the final, which I was pretty happy with. Why did I attempt this? Because I visited a museum a couple weeks ago and noticed that all the paintings I really liked had the red-green complimentary color scheme going on, and the green was very visible in the shadows.

I used a photo for my painting but this method was used extensively in the 16th and 17th centuries from life. Yeah- they didn't have camera back then. :)

More People and Houses

Lately I've had requests for paintings of people in front of their houses. I enjoy painting these little slice of life pieces, except when I have to make stuff up. If the painting is a gift the giver apparently stalks the receiver's Facebook page and finds a group picture of the family. Most of the time the people don't have legs. Sometimes they are standing in front of their Christmas tree in their pajamas and I edit the clothing because I have a strong premonition the people would not like a painting of themselves standing in front of their house in their pajamas.

Wouldn't life be wonderful if every reference picture was perfect and in focus? If no limbs were cropped and had to be added? I've come to realize that's not what you get when you agree to paint from someone else's photos, and that's OK. I like challenges.

16" x 20" oil on linen

More Rework

Another found painting: this time it is a model who posed years ago for our local portrait group. I could never paint this woman's face quite right. I have a picture of her but it is taken from a different angle than the painting I did. One of the regulars who come on Saturday mornings takes photos of the models and brings them in the following week. I may have grabbed his instead of taking one of my own pictures because I couldn't find a matching reference.

I recalled how well the painting of Bathsheba went. I didn't have a photo reference for her either. So I decided to "wing it". I pulled up a Rembrandt painting on my computer with similar lighting and tried to fix this girl.

I am sharing the various stages I put her through, from beginning to end. I think this might be my second attempt at fixing this painting.

Something amazing happens when you throw the photograph away. You work from your memory and your general knowledge of the subject. My finished painting might not look exactly like the model but it looks much nicer than the attempt I had made at "painting a photograph." This is a general rule I've known about for awhile but it really sinks in when you see it in action and experience it yourself. As Judith Carducci repeatedly stressed in her portrait workshops: "Don't use photos- they kill your eyes!"

Painted from a photo-and not very well

Getting rid of distracting elements and simplifying values

Adding decorative jewery and cool areas to the skin tones and hair

Engaged Couple double oil portrait

This client had a grainy image he took with his cell phone of a proof on a computer screen. The couple attended a wedding and the photo was in the wedding set proofs on line. They did not buy the photos because they had just begun dating. Fast-forward two years and they are now engaged and realize this was their favorite picture ever. Could I possibly paint an oil of them from this perspective-skewed, faded pixelated image.

I still don't know how I did it. But they're happy.

11" x 14" oil on canvas

Kenda's House

A commissioned painting of a really cute brick house that has many interesting architectural details that aren't readily apparent in the photograph of the whole house. I had to use four other detail shots and raise the point of view a bit to get everything in that the client wanted to include. (Also deleted a lot of things she DIDN'T want like neighbor's houses, eaves troughs etc.)

9" x 12" oil on canvas 

Portrait of Dave-- Finished

I am finished with Dave's portrait. Can;'t wait to see what he does with mine. I will explain a little about my process when I paint a portrait from a photo. It is very different from what I do when I paint from life. I prefer to paint form life because there is no guessing about what color something actually is or how a certain form turns, eye color etc. Plus it is really more like plein air painting, as you have a limited time period to capture what you see in front of you on canvas and I really enjoy plein air painting.

So when I do a portrait from a photo I try to encourage the person to give me a picture that flatters them and that actually says something about them. I am going to post the picture Dave initially gave me and that I rejected. Here it is beside the one that I eventually chose as a reference.



Again, the one I chose was not necessarily the one that had the best "portrait lighting", per the instructions at the beginning of the WC! thread. BUT it was one I thought made Dave look good and he seemed to be in his element and enjoying himself. He had told me he fixed boats and was on his way to work on one this past weekend. I asked him if he would mind getting some pictures of himself with the boats. That's the look I was interested in.

I think the pose with boats is much more "Dave", but I would be guessing because I don't really know him. Very well. At all.

This portrait was a lot of fun because I got to paint Dave's wispy hair and beard. It is the perfect kind of hair for a wet in wet technique, which is what I always use.

I increased the contrast in the original photo to make the lights and shadows easier to see. I did the umber underpainting and after I had all the values pretty close I did couple coats of color. You can see the umber color is still a big presence in the painting and it helps harmonize the other colors.

This is a limited palette painting. I used titanium white, yellow ochre, ivory black, raw umber, alizarin crimson, ultramarine blue, cadmium red light and cad yellow light.

Music and Art: A Great Relationship

I like to listen to music when I paint and I think the tone of the music I’m listening to has an effect n the painting I’m working on. When I attend a group painting session I try to listen to fast, upbeat music. I particularly favor Third Day, Pink Floyd and Journey. The pace of the music seems to speed up my own painting and I am almost always able to complete the piece in two hours or so. Because the model only poses for a couple hours this works out great for me.

If I’m involved in a more complicated piece that requires thinking and planning I tend to listen to music that is calming and less likely to reach a fever pitch: usually classical piano concertos. The music stays in the background and my thoughts stay focused on what I’m painting. 

When I’m working on still life I can listen to pretty much anything because this is the easiest type of painting. The subject is in front of you, the composition has been worked out by the arrangement of objects and I have the freedom to just paint and interpret on the fly. It’s one of the more enjoyable things to paint for me and I love to listen to singers like Adele and Carrie Underwood when I do these pieces.  The rising crescendos and surprising turns in these ladies’ voices really help me think of ways to make my painting more interesting. Music is similar to painting in many ways. If the song is a lullaby with no tonal differences and a very calming melody it puts us to sleep. If a painting has all soft edges and little value changes it presents us with a calming vision. That’s not all bad and some paintings are intentionally done in this manner.

But I don’t paint that way. I like to have variety in strokes, in color, and in flow. I find excitement in texture and randomness. I enjoy the way a turquoise note plays against a backdrop of orange. Even the words we use for painting can be interchanged with those used in music. Notes and harmony are just two examples I can think of at the moment but I’m sure there are more.

Working with photos is a challenge but also fun if you approach it the right way. I think you need to work from life for at least five years before you can trust and interpret accurately what you see in photos but after that you probably have learned enough to enjoy it. Photographs can’t accurately create what we see with the eye because they sacrifice the values in the darkness in order to include those in the light—or vice versa. The human eye can see many more gradations, although that doesn’t mean we WANT to. Sometimes the simplest painting has two or three values and it is a winner.

I always prefer painting form life but this isn’t always possible so I tend to fall back on my supply of photographs.   I never try to create a physical copy of a photo when I paint. There would not be much point to it…we already have the photograph! Instead I use the photo as starting point and think about what kind of painting I can make. Sometimes this process requires years. I had the photograph I used for this painting stored in my computer files for over a year, in my “REFERENCES” folder. I took the photo in 2010 when I met a beautiful 50ish belly dancer who was willing to pose for a photo shoot. I met her though a mutual friend when we stayed at her home because we had a paint out to attend in the area. She turned out to be a very neat lady who is a physician by day and an accomplished belly dancer in the evenings. Who would have thought?

For this painting I decided to do a few studies. This is an 11” x 14” oil painting that I did to work out the colors for a larger piece. She tried on two costumes for us so I may do another small study to see if that costume works better. Or I may include two dancers! I don’t know—this is the process I go through as I create something. I like to leave my options open.

Now I will critique my painting-- just one more thing a solitary artist working in her own studio needs to become proficient at. The painting has areas of rest and unrest. It has notes of bright color and notes of quiet. There is texture and there is smoothness. The study is a finished painting in its own right but it will (hopefully lead to a larger, even more interesting piece.) There are many things I like about it-- the "S" curve of the dancer's pose, which I intentionally emphasized, the vibrant colors and especially the teal (my favorite color). The palette knife squigglies. :)  Other areas need more work if they are to translate well into a larger piece, but overall the painting does a nice job of creating a mysterious mood for the dancer and we wonder how that tiny little woman can possibly hold that big sword so easily. (She actually did!)

Sword Play

11 x 14" oil on linen