“Matchmaker, Matchmaker...” Color the Traditional Way

One thing I am learning over and over again this year of Academy-On-A-Budget, it is just a sequence of the obvious that makes for masterful technique.

                                           It’s all in the sequencing boys


In other words, "Duh...why didn’t I think of that ?" or more accurately, "Duh...why didn’t I put those together in that order?"

Well better late then never, right?










So with the help of my two AOAB master teachers, Colin Ferguson and Christopher Wynn, I am learning not only how to mix, the possible combinations but WHEN to mix them.

This is where these lovely cards come in as my Duhoooh moment...

Color swatches and Recipes

Of course you paint a swatch to the edge so you can compare it to the real thing by holding it close to the actual object!

Guess

Mix  

(tiny portions first so as not to waste any paint)

Confirm

holding up the swatch to match...I needed to go a smidge lighter....

then write down the recipe and keep all the sheets.  With the longer view of all this stuff in the still life, I have about 10 pages of paint swatches and their recipes

So it seems to be working but man does it take a WHOLE lotta time!  Especially when it comes to remixing it all, the mixing lights and darks.  Wow those old masters have patience and persistence!

Adding and Subtracting Value

First a quickie walk through of my latest still life...

...sketching from observation...

with oils I like to work with the figures first

...putting down the underlayer with a lot of liquin...

...grisaille in the objects...

Now a quicker walk through with my palette. This shows how I work with tone...

First it is light to dark with adjustment for dabs of paint in-between...

...mixing them and comparing with the nearby value scale to make each step in equal to the others...

...sometimes mixing in between values if I feel the composition needs it (and drapery ALWAYS needs it!)....

...adding more paint as I use up the first batch (and comparing with the existing splotches to make sure I make an accurate match)...

Finally time for clean-up. 

In Class Study and the G word

Grisaille today Color tomorrow

For those of you who were like me until about two weeks ago, and had no idea what that G work meant...a greta explanation and history from wikipedia...

"Grisaille (/ɡrᵻˈzaɪ/ or /ɡrᵻˈzeɪl/; French: gris [ɡʁizaj] 'grey') is a term for a paintingexecuted entirely in shades of grey or of another neutral greyish colour.^[1]”

A grisaille may be executed for its own sake, as underpainting for an oil painting(in preparation for glazing layers of colour over it), or as a model for an engraverto work from. "Rubens and his school sometimes use monochrome techniques in sketching compositions for engravers."^[3] Full colouring of a subject makes many more demands of an artist, and working in grisaille was often chosen as being quicker and cheaper, although the effect was sometimes deliberately chosen for aesthetic reasons. Grisaille paintings resemble the drawings, normally in monochrome, that artists from the Renaissance on were trained to produce;”

LOVE this part...

" like drawings they (grisaille) can also betray the hand of a less talented assistant more easily than a fully coloured painting. “

So is a grisaille the renaissance’s way of saying, put up or shut up?

UPDATE  Instead of grisaille today and color tomorrow,  it is more like color in a month.   Apparently this grisaille layer needs to be completely dry before color can be added.  In fact it has been two weeks and the professor says no we still have to wait...sigh...

Studies and Scale

My first oil painting in the style of the old masters...about 3/4 way done with the underpainting and grisaille layer...

Study with dark ceramic cup, drapery and egg

 Traditional underpaintings only have one color, usually only burnt umber is used.  

I love the way that Colin has us using Payne’s Grey for the cools and Burnt Umber for the warms of the composition.

Another thing he has done is to push the class to work BIG right off the bat...so here is another photo with my hand in it to show scale...

So now that egg looks like it belongs to a ostrich instead of a chicken!

This scale does remind me of going to Europe the first time and seeing the proportions in original works in the Lourve and Uffizi that I had been studying for years, feeling that they were just life size, even after reading the dimensions. It is still a bit of a delightful shock to see their real size and see how their proportions still worked out! 

Guess it is just experience vs. knowledge once again.