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.

2016 Year of Academy on a Local Budget

After the Holidays

watercolor on Arches

6"x12"

Last year was the weekly studies and this year will be the year I finally get to learn traditional technique in both watercolor and oil. Since I cannot just abandon my family for 12 months and go to the Philadelphia Academy, I am calling it my "Academy on a  Local Budget" year. So with that in mind, I began looking for two teachers here in RVA who teach traditional rendering techniques.

I quickly found two great teachers in Christopher Winn for watercolor and Colin Ferguson at John Tyler Community College in oils.  Here are two quick studies I just did in the past few days...one above and one below

Enamel Pot Study

oil on gessoed paper

14"x16" (approx)

This is the first oil painting I have done with the traditional method of underpainting and grisaille. How did I get two art degrees without it?  I blame on the love affair with abstraction going on at the time.

I also am discovering that studying two different painting mediums at the same time makes me a bit of a rebel.  But I am enjoying it.  It is kind of like speaking two languages, you aim to get to the same understanding but just as you have different vocabulary and sentence structure with words there are different mediums/vehicles, along with order of value development with painting.

And one medium is much more forgiving of mistakes than the other...

you might be surprised which one is.  Another post another day perhaps?

Also another plus in this adventure for 2016, taking and paying for classes will make me produce more (fingers crossed).

Color Me Nerdy

So I finally did it....

After TWO university degrees in art and painting, you’d think I would have been assigned this....I know I will atleast heavily suggest this to my students. (Yes I am that kind of art professor).

I finally made my first color chart!!

Wow and did I ever learn a lot!!  It got my watercolor process grooving (yes I know it is not really a painting, art or process word but it does seem the best one to use).  This color chart made me think much more in-depth about my mixing proportions, viscosity of the paint, tinting the best way possible.  Finally, the repetition (120 of those little suckers) forced me fine tune my mixing and application to make things more accurate than I normally strive for.

It is all about the proportion of pigments

75/25----50/50------25/75

Not only that, I now have a handy dandy reference guide to refer to later.  

This is so cool because it is useful in so many ways. I can now have better control over my palette, not spend a ton of $ on all sorts of funky color tubes... I can just mix my own funky colors!

Buh-Bye Guys!

(Well, maybe we can still be friends...)

Special thanks to Christopher Winn for the palette selections and Watercolour Journey for the set-up and mixing process.

Perpetual Student

Wow this design foundation class is coming to an end and I think I have learned just as much as I have taught.

First, it forced me to take a photoshop class...something I have wanted to do for years...

Secondly it got me to set up a (somewhat) decent photo shoot setup to record student work to use future students when I (hopefully) teach this again...

 one of the last photo shoots I will be doing of student work this year.  

But now (thirdly?)  it has made me want to become a student again so I just jumped the rubicon to enroll at the same school as a student to take a refresher oil painting class after seeing some amazing work on display there..

Finally it got me to find some (finally) really great resources on color...the Nita Leland series.  Cannot wait for the books to arrive and spend some time with my own easel!!!

Design Examples

Wow I have really enjoyed teaching design foundations but as any teacher will tell you, the first time keeps you very busy!!  It is like trying to move into a house as you are still building it!

Any of you art majors out there will remember these...color saturation squares and logo designs...

But I also got the chance to go to my first ever traveling workshop to Monterey California with Christopher Wynn last month...details to follow