12-31-2019, 10:52 PM
Joseph -
Just making a little still life. The morning light here is very white/cold and I wanted to make a painting that isn't dark and moody. Feel like I'm wanting to explore more bright things. I think a lot of art has this tendency to get dark because people like the comforts of their dark studios and I feel like I maybe want to get away from that.
Alright,
So I was going to just jump in and get started on the painting but I was convinced to do a little study first. Was probably the right choice. So here's my little color sketch. It's really small, just trying to get the overall impression. Had to balance this board on my knee because my easel was holding my canvas, but it's fine, was a fun experience.
Some advice when doing color studies.
You don't need medium. Medium is generally there to make the paint flow more, to cover things more easily etc. If you're doing a color sketch, you're working on such a small scale that even very stiff paint moves just fine. Paint with more body is also easier to control, at least for me it is, so it's appropriate for color sketches.
Detailed drawing is for the final painting, just get the proportions down and it's fine.
It's easy to start with your dark colors, put them in as the base for the drawing and overall shadows, then build up the light on top. Even if you're working on a dark ground, the shadows and dark values contain a lot of "drawing" related information so establishing it early is a good idea. Most of the time you want to block in the biggest differences between your work and the subject, but you can also pace yourself by working from the darkest value, to the half-tone and then to the light. It's good to always refer back to the dark values as they often need to be adjusted once all the colors are in place, at that point you want to spend time altering all the big values/colors until they are correct.
There doesn't need to be any "rendering" but getting some of the illusion of mass is good. One way I do this is by working from dark-to-light in any kind of "rendering". This way my light brush marks overlay the dark ones and the light feels like it's approaching the viewer and the shadows receding. Some times of course you need to paint dark over light, but as a general rule I try to layer my brush marks this way. This was something Ilya Repin would do in a lot of his work.
When it comes to the thickness of paint, in general try to have the light passages be thicker but also just the things you want to have a feeling of mass should be thicker too. So things in the background can often be thinner than things in the foreground.
In this painting I used a chromatic transparent dark made out of ultramarine and transparent red oxide. I also have some mars black but I used it more for my other mixtures, to keep my shadows a bit deeper. Mars black and ivory work fine for shadows too but they aren't as transparent and if you want them to feel transparent you need to paint them much more thinly.
You don't need small brushes, even when painting small things. These are the brushes I used for the entire painting. To get all the small marks, I either painted into other shapes, picking up some of the paint on the canvas when doing so (something bristle brushes are good at), or I just used the sides and tips, got creative in how I make my marks.
The brushes in the pic are my scrappy old brushes I use for most paintings. I have a lot of very nice brushes but it's often easier to use my more worn down ones because mentally I relax more when using them.
Using big brushes helps keep things feeling natural. So many of the nice effects in painting are lost when you scale down your brushes because most edges have to be manually painted rather than just form from the placing down of paint. I really try to seek a sense of naturalness in my work so I always try to avoid that kind of synthetic feeling you can get when you try to paint something very directly rather than suggestively.
I've got new years stuff to get to so this isn't a super in-depth post. Will do a longer post about color and stuff later.
Just making a little still life. The morning light here is very white/cold and I wanted to make a painting that isn't dark and moody. Feel like I'm wanting to explore more bright things. I think a lot of art has this tendency to get dark because people like the comforts of their dark studios and I feel like I maybe want to get away from that.
Alright,
So I was going to just jump in and get started on the painting but I was convinced to do a little study first. Was probably the right choice. So here's my little color sketch. It's really small, just trying to get the overall impression. Had to balance this board on my knee because my easel was holding my canvas, but it's fine, was a fun experience.
Some advice when doing color studies.
You don't need medium. Medium is generally there to make the paint flow more, to cover things more easily etc. If you're doing a color sketch, you're working on such a small scale that even very stiff paint moves just fine. Paint with more body is also easier to control, at least for me it is, so it's appropriate for color sketches.
Detailed drawing is for the final painting, just get the proportions down and it's fine.
It's easy to start with your dark colors, put them in as the base for the drawing and overall shadows, then build up the light on top. Even if you're working on a dark ground, the shadows and dark values contain a lot of "drawing" related information so establishing it early is a good idea. Most of the time you want to block in the biggest differences between your work and the subject, but you can also pace yourself by working from the darkest value, to the half-tone and then to the light. It's good to always refer back to the dark values as they often need to be adjusted once all the colors are in place, at that point you want to spend time altering all the big values/colors until they are correct.
There doesn't need to be any "rendering" but getting some of the illusion of mass is good. One way I do this is by working from dark-to-light in any kind of "rendering". This way my light brush marks overlay the dark ones and the light feels like it's approaching the viewer and the shadows receding. Some times of course you need to paint dark over light, but as a general rule I try to layer my brush marks this way. This was something Ilya Repin would do in a lot of his work.
When it comes to the thickness of paint, in general try to have the light passages be thicker but also just the things you want to have a feeling of mass should be thicker too. So things in the background can often be thinner than things in the foreground.
In this painting I used a chromatic transparent dark made out of ultramarine and transparent red oxide. I also have some mars black but I used it more for my other mixtures, to keep my shadows a bit deeper. Mars black and ivory work fine for shadows too but they aren't as transparent and if you want them to feel transparent you need to paint them much more thinly.
You don't need small brushes, even when painting small things. These are the brushes I used for the entire painting. To get all the small marks, I either painted into other shapes, picking up some of the paint on the canvas when doing so (something bristle brushes are good at), or I just used the sides and tips, got creative in how I make my marks.
The brushes in the pic are my scrappy old brushes I use for most paintings. I have a lot of very nice brushes but it's often easier to use my more worn down ones because mentally I relax more when using them.
Using big brushes helps keep things feeling natural. So many of the nice effects in painting are lost when you scale down your brushes because most edges have to be manually painted rather than just form from the placing down of paint. I really try to seek a sense of naturalness in my work so I always try to avoid that kind of synthetic feeling you can get when you try to paint something very directly rather than suggestively.
I've got new years stuff to get to so this isn't a super in-depth post. Will do a longer post about color and stuff later.
Discord - JetJaguar#8954