CGmythology: Many thanks my friend I appreciate the kind words!
Marco: Thank Marco
darktiste: Oh wise and infinitely knowledgeable darktiste thank you for blessing me with your very relevant observation. if you ever feel like giving me another insightful paint over please don't be shy
so for the past few days i've been working on charcoal daddy and I am now doing an oil painting which I cannot get a good photograph of today but I will attempt to tomorrow when there is more Daylight
Okay for the past few days I have been failing at this oil painting; I figured I'd give some insight on the things I fucked up on so any of you who ever try oil painting almost blind we'll have some idea what to do.
Firstly you need to plan out where are your lighter values are because once you have your colors in place it becomes increasingly difficult to layer white on top of those colors without white dragging the color down and just making an off-white color
Secondly you need to understand that a lot of pigments have different transparency which can make it difficult to layer them late in the process. Lemon yellow on top of the colors late in the game and if you put it in a mix it will just kind of disintegrate
Thirdly try to blend your colors on your palette before you put them on the canvas.When you do apply a harsh white highlight you will need the brush to be exceptionally clean. You want your brushstrokes to look scratchy and small. Some good planning in the early phases.
fourthly, you can move things around a little bit early on and get away with it but don't plan on doing it too much. My heavy-handed approach will eventually be charming but right now it looks ugly as shit
These are simply some notes from ya boi diving down the mountain of Art i'm hitting every Rock on the way down, getting every red light, but still trying his best to make it on time
I'm going to try again tomorrow and start fresh since I screwed up this canvas. Another stinker to add 2 fedos pile o shame
And God forbid I get a good photograph of this always some kind of stupid glare or specular even in in the shadows
(12-01-2019, 12:45 PM)Fedodika Wrote: you need to plan out where are your lighter values are because once you have your colors in place it becomes increasingly difficult to layer white on top of those colors without white dragging the color down and just making an off-white color
Ugh this is so true.
You could retouch it when it's dry, though, or scrape it off where you want the brighter color to be! Good luck on your next go at it.
C0W: I confirmed a lot of the ideas I had simply trying them out! Using a bigger brush that was also quite soft proved to be the better choice for blending the tones and small hard brushes something I honestly should have known.
Here's another figure study and of course I don't see how off it is until I take a photo of it; head is too small the arm is wrong in a way that it is too thin. Ends up making the whole leg look too big, maybe after a year or so I'll have much less of these issues. I'll probably even redraw most of these the second time because they're just so fun to draw.
Laugh it up, you don't live like I do at the mercy of any sista with wrist scars and black eye goo
Generally speaking, the more medium is in your paint, the harder the paint is to control. Modern paint manufacturers include am excess of oil in their tubes so it comes pre-loaded with medium, making it already fluid enough for most thinly painted styles and can be a difficulty for direct painting. You can of course work around this but you either need to have a process suited for it or you need to get good at paint handling with soft paints. I recommend just removing as much oil as you can from the paint so you can first learn to work with paint in a state where it's easier to control, excluding mediums or solvents from the process.
When first learning how to paint in oils, an option to consider is to just finish most of the painting without white, then adding white at the end. You do this by painting in scumbles and just build up the whole impression, wiping off paint to get the light back. Then once you're done, you really only need to address a few small areas if you want the light to feel more solid. It's a very simple way to transition from drawing into painting because it doesn't rely on much paint-handling in order to get good results and it slowly introduces how to handle paint. http://www.art-catalog.ru/data_picture_2.../11612.jpg https://www.russianphotographs.net/artic...van_08.jpg
Another option is to work similarly but matching the colors and values on the palette and placing them thinly in their right spot. If you use stiffer paint with no medium, this will be very easy to control and there won't be any slipping and sliding going on outside of your control. https://i1.wp.com/emilcarlsen.org/wp-con...091%2C4587
If you find yourself going thicker constantly, try switching over to a shorter bristle brush and pressing into the painting with every mark. It will cut through the surface and instead of just slathering on paint on top of paint, you can replace the paint on the surface. The bristle brush will deposit some of the paint in the brush and it will also pick up paint from the surface, replacing it rather than constantly adding more. Oil painting isn't suited for a free for all approach where you throw around paint and hope for the best. Every mark you make will effect future marks so it's best to work thinly with less fluid paint to minimise this effect until you have the basics under control.
Generally you want to avoid layering wet pigments as much as possible. Pigments have different drying rates and something like a lead white over ivory black will cause the surface to dry and isolate the lower pigments, causing them to dry much more slowly, causing an internal tension in the pain layer, making it more susceptible to cracking as it ages. It's one reason bristle brushes are so good, they penetrate the surface of the wet paint causing a more homogenous paint layer.
In this last painting, if you find your modelling of the light feels slippery, it's usually because of the paint consistency. You'll find consistently that older oil paintings always preserve a very stiff white for the lights, even if the overall painting is very thin. It helps in modelling the subtle light half-tones as well as helping the effect of showing solid lights and transparent shadows. https://arthive.com/res/media/img/oy1200...478342.jpg
Mr. Berndt: Thank you alot for this suggestion! i got a lot of mileage out of it in the past couple of days whilst painting some loomis heads. Im starting to get the feel for how one would work with layering, and just how important it is to have confidence in the strokes one is putting down (and accuracy.) My plan is to do a couple small leyendecker studies on these small canvases in the coming days to practice tiling and try to do less blending and scrubbing and try to just mix the right colors on the pallete since i dont want to be scrubbing off paint when i much prefer the look of thicker strokes. Its just something i gotta adapt to, though the examples you provided are marvelous. also, if you get the time, your advice youve given to a lot of artists here could benefit a wide audience, maybe consider putting your work into some sort of permenant archive, as it could be a masterclass in itself, even if the person cant see whose work youre critiquing.
Heres more bails and fails from old fedo, the 2 (skewed and bad female) portraits are loomis copies. The paint is very thin on them and i was getting the feel for how to lay tones down and scrub them off to get a white value; this proved to be just what i was missing on; control over the white value mainly. The portrait with the scrubbed out mouth is a leyendecker study, i kept screwing up the mouth so i just wiped it off, disappointed in myself i went back home to go to bed. However, my parents reacted more positively to this painting that any traditional work i'd ever done. They thought it was brilliant for some reason, the fact it has no mouth. So that was a pleasant surprise, they actually encouraged me not to add the mouth, so i guess I wont!
The figure study has a few issues with it, mainly the tilt is kinda stiff in the torso, the leg shapes and proportions are a tad short or too long here and there. a couple other things... i'll probably end up doing these again next year theyve been so fun. the other drawings are crap from life drawing, looks way better before i take a photo of it, as usual. All the problems just immediately appear once i take a photo, or even hold my camera up to it. It's like it makes me think of the image as an actual JPEG which is funnily enough the way ive viewed most images in my adult life. That's basically the mirror trick for me is just the photo lens; if only i had a robot eye that made everything a jpeg as i drew it, that'd be helpful, i guess thats a nother crutch of digital is it trained me to see everything with that instant mirror flip to check that over and over.
In other news, I'll be getting a brand new computer soon, its custom made, i had a technician help me pick things out. also shoutout to Toxicpanda for showing her specs and giving me some ideas. It has a 32GB RAM a I9 processor, 16 TB Hard drive, and a bunch of other stuff, but altogether its about a 2k$ computer and its a freakin beast. Also got a nice Dell 32" Monitor on the black friday sale and grabbed marmoset toolbag on discount too. So when i get all this stuff, im going hard on some 3d. I really want to get familiar with 3d coat as i think this is what will make me employable. It'll force me to make my assets and characters look good, plus ill have all the cheats of digital and many more. being able to light and place these objects accurately will be invaluable to me, since i can paint things together, it may just be what i need to break through in a meaningful way.
I'll still be doing lots of oil painting since theres a show i want to have that chloe painting done for in january, and may have a commission from a friend soon, which will help. Next year will be interesting with these new tools and ideas, so i hope i can at least make some money to pay off this investment. And if ya cant tell, i got a new keyboard, its mechanical, and really loud, I LOVE IT! clackety clkaclkekltlkclkalkelktlkalkcalkclakslkalskeylmkarsynl
Some really nice looking updates here. Glad to hear you're going to be studying 3D soon and getting a new computer, should be a lot of fun for you to tackle a new medium! I really enjoy the Loomis head paintings, those skin tones are brilliant, very rich in colors! Nice work with the pencils too, always a fan of your shading and use of light for your figure studies :)
more tiling practice, i quite enjoyed these little heads; focusing on mixing on the palette and not relying on blending on the canvas, just putting down the right mark first
more work on this tomorrow, constantly tweaking proportions that get outta line and tryina keep the paint from gettting too thick which helps alot
im seeing a lot of patterns like how one would get a certain look in oil... right now heads too big gotta chisel it back down i had it right early on, so i know i can fix it, also that hand is tricky and weird enough that leg is too
spent about 4 hours today tweaking and wiping out the proportions; barely any rendering got accomplished. I get kinda excited now to make a global proportional change, its like, hey i get an opportunity to make it look right despite it being a lot of work, which can get irritating, its a mixed experience.
Also creepin on gligers sketchbook, if you ever need somethin to do, get a notepad and go in there and steal his ideas ;)
Just came here to spread good vibes and pump you up yo! Ha. I wish I could do more, but I don't know much about traditional workflow. I would say I like quite a bit how you get the shading done in pencils, if you can match some of that control to paint that would be a step up! You probably have many more hours with them. So just keep it up!
A notepad wouldn't be enough, the last 10 post on Gliger would take me weeks to study, I dunno if he even sleeps... probably does searches while dreaming, wakes up, starts writing it all down. Anyone else wants to do that astral projection like Doctor Strange to practice more? Ha.
Lookin kinda weird right now but im laying on more opaque paints on top of the thin values i had laid in. im gonna try to diffuse some of these edges more right now everything feels really hard; getting smooth gradients is very challenging but im trying
still smushing around trying to find edges and add in opaque colors; i feel i have a much better idea how the process works for when i go to start a new painting. right now the tones in the stomach are looking nice to me and the legs are interesting as im finding the little tricks to make the form turn, its just really diifficult. its so hard to get the subtle gradient on the chest area that comes off the highlight but the more i try things the closer it ends up getting, so ill just keep plugging at it
If you don't mind me asking, what are your materials? Like what brushes do you have, what pigments are you working with, what's the ground you're working on, you seem to be adding something to the paint like a solvent, what is it? Things are looking a bit messy and you mention things being very difficult, knowing your materials will help diagnose what's going on and maybe there's something that can be done to make it easier. My speculative guess just from the look of things is just that your paint is way too soft and your brushes seem small, maybe they're even synthetics? It looks like there's an overuse of solvents so that could be part of why your paint is so soft, but lots of tubed paint is overly soft anyway.
When it comes to getting nice smooth transitions, you often need to paint into another color. So you over-paint one shape and then paint it back with the surrounding colors, so they mix together at the edge. If all your paint has been thinned down a lot with solvent, there's not much to paint into. If you were to have the same pigment there but it hadn't been diluted so much, you actually could paint into it and get a nice edge. When oil paint is thinned down with solvent, it looses its paste-like qualities and becomes more like watercolors.
You can also paint hatched lines across the form and then using a brush without much paint in it, you can drag it along the form to smooth it out. You can also leave a lot of the hatching, it was common for a lot of ecole de beaux-arts students and you can see a similar thing in this Kramskoy painting https://astrofella.files.wordpress.com/2...-j_279.jpg
Personally, I'm not really into mixing stuff around on the canvas. It's cool and all and I sometimes do it of course, but I prefer another approach as my "go to". So to get transitions, I mix and paint in the color between two other colors. This mostly means I spend more time making sure each mixture is correct and less time brushing stuff around.
You can see this being done well in this Repin painting http://operawire.com/wp-content/uploads/..._Repin.jpg
If you look carefully, you can see how all the rendering is done in patches of colors, no real brushing around or mixing apart from what happens naturally from placing the patches of paint or in non focused areas like the hair.
Stiff paint laid thinly is often the easiest way to control the paint and it also happens to be one of the safest ways to paint in terms of making a healthy and stable painting. When the paint has some resistance it won't slip and slide so much and you can very carefully brush along an edge to slightly modify it. When the paint is so soft, it can't resist the brush and that brushing will radically change the appearance of the edge. It's a good place to start before getting too far into crazy materials and techniques.
About archiving my stuff, it's not really something I want to do. If I am going to save some text somewhere, I'd prefer to have a lot of time to work on it and have it be better than just random forum posts. Like, I'm working on a doc about Ilya Repin's painting techniques, teachings and materials and I feel like it's the kind of thing worth archiving somewhere because I'm using sources that haven't been translated into english and it isn't easily accessible. But other stuff, they're just forum posts.
thanks, so the paints are the winsor n mewton artist line and some mineral solvents, i sometimes was using linseed oil because it makes the brush run smoother, but idk how to layer this stuff, im totally guessing on a lot of this stuff. This old lady gave me her brush set, so the photo with the less brushes are the ones i mainly use, idk what theyre made of, and the photo with all of them are the ones i dont use, so if you think one of those would be more helpful id like to know of course. I included the palette as well, as we all know im pretty reckless with stuff so that could be an issue as well, im more than 1000% open to any guidance because i feel lost most the time like i dont know a process... well i sort of do, but im not sure when it would and wouldnt be appropriate and stuff like that
The paints seem fine. Winson newton isn't super top quality stuff but it's decent and consistent. They're on the softer side and some of their colors are super oily. I've used them for less serious paintings but I always prep the colors first. You can do this by just spreading them out on some absorbent cardboard or paper first. It will suck out some of the oil and the paint will be less soft and slippery. You may need to mix it up again and then re-apply it on a fresh area to get rid of more oil if it isn't enough after 15-20 minutes. It can be hard to paint when your materials are the consistency of toothpaste.
When it comes to a palette, you generally want to clean it well. If the surface isn't flat, you won't be able to use a palette knife on it so you're stuck brush mixing. What you can do to get a good palette is to go to a second hand store and buy a framed picture with a glass cover for likea dollar. Then remove the picture and outside frame and stick in a grey/brown paper. This works as a great palette if you prefer to have it sit on a chair or something. It's really easy to clean, just get off as much paint as possible with the palette knife, then pour just little bit of solvent on it and wipe it all off with a paper towel.
If you don't have a palette knife, it's a good idea to get one. Brush mixing can work, but it does contribute to muddiness and you need to frequently clean the brush as you work. Some artists that do it a lot like Richard Schmid have a can full of fresh mineral spirits to get rid of most of the paint in the brush every time he wants to use a new color. If you have a palette knife what you can do is mix up a tone you want, then leave a bit on the tip of the palette knife and you can hold it up to your painting to see if it's correct, then modify it if needed. So you can be much more careful with your colors and the process of painting correct colors can be made much more direct.
When it comes to mediums, generally you need much less to change the consistency than you think. Paint is mostly pigments and small additions can change its viscosity drastically. Most painting effects can be gotten without any medium, it's best to only use it when you have a good reason to. On small paintings, there's no big reason to use mediums unless you have a technique that depends on some kind of resin based medium or something.
The brushes look rough. It's hard to tell what hairs those are but they seem like they're not all for oil painting.
Some of them look like they can be bristle brushes, you can usually tell because the hairs are white and somewhat stiff and springy. I think the ones with the beige handles are bristle brushes and would be what I'd use out of that mix. Bristle brushes are the standard used by oil painters historically. They work well with stiffer paint because the paint can resist the brush's stiffness.
You should maybe consider getting your own brushes. I'd recommend filbert brushes (flat in profile with a rounded tip) with bleached hog bristles (just commonly called bristles). Good brushes are very nice and if you take care of them and clean them well, they last a very long time.
As for a process, it can be good to just simplify it as much as possible and remove fancy stuff. So when you have a general impression there, you can for example start by choosing one part of the reference and mixing up that color with a palette knife. When it's correct, you pick up the color with the brush and place it where it's supposed to be with nothing fancy going on. Then choosing the color next to it you repeat the process, mixing up the color by hand and simply placing it. No brush mixing, no blending around of the colors. Example of this https://www.russianartsalon.com/images/s...012x15.jpg You can see in the example how even though the paint is thick, it's not a mess. This is because stiffer paint resists being moved and you can work into it much more easily without mixing when you don't want to. Painting doesn't have to be more than putting the right color in the right spot.
Berndt: Thanks so much! i watched the new proko vid on cornelia hermes and tried to lay out my stuff how she did, and i think its a lot cleaner now. I tried your reccomendations and yea i had a lot more control over the paint, despite how rough this little drawing might look. I only spent about 30 minutes on it, and the values are much clearer and read much better from afar than the previous painting. anyways, many thanks for your advice and very soon ill be attempting another oil painting most likely bigger scale and trying to paint it clean. I also scraped off the excess paint and look forward to just doing it efficiently
what you said
"Painting doesn't have to be more than putting the right color in the right spot."
Is something ill keep in mind for a long time, i got carried away with all these extra things you can do with oil, so its a learning curb for sure.
In other news, i got my new computer today! custom built I9 processor 32GB ram 16TB harddrive and 32 inch monitor. Since i got the new monitor i can now see the full layout of daggers, lemme tell ya. I had no idea the motorcycle handles and mirrors were on the side! Its gonna be so cool using this monster for digital painting and 3d work. I will be doing ALOT of that soon, though i wanna get this oil painting stuff under my thumb first. Still got hillbilly internet despite the high tech computer. There is a slogan in the south called High Tech Redneck, which perfectly suits me i suppose.
screwin with some 3dcoat today, following anton tenetskys tutorial; ive seen it all the way through before but im going through again and trying to go step by step in building it; gonna try to do some more chloe studies and more stuff on this tomorrow; Alot of the shapes are still crude and unrefined, Im developing a grasp over the medium its mainly getting flat edges on things im trying to get right; i think this learning curb wont take long to get over thanks to the tutorial being so in depth
