Panic signs

 

I just learned that the looks of oil paint varies a lot more than I expected depending on the kind of surface, the kind thinner used to rinse brushes, and even the size of brushes and brush strokes. In spite of all coloring tests I still tend to panic about some details, especially in the early stages of painting when a color mix looks different from what I expected.


Here I panicked a bit while painting the first layer of green behind the throne because it looked much more opaque and saturated compared to the miniature test, and as a result the brushwork looks dull. Around the lamp the color looked OK and the brushwork is much more natural:

When using acrylics a mistake in the underpainting is a big deal, but luckily with oils it is much easier to blend further layers of paint with the first ones even after a few days. So there is no point in worrying about subtle nuances of color in the early stages.

This is a later stage where the green area is still too flat but the colors are beginning to fall into place. I haven't used any black: all the dark areas are a very dark violet which I'm also using to darken the other colors where needed. When painted thick this violet becomes almost black, but it remains translucent so it sends nice violet reflections when light hits the surface. Being complementary to the green and yellow of the throne's outline it should make for a more interesting color scheme in the end.

Reboot

Time to restart the blogs. Ill luck struck me during 2011 as I had to face several health issues which drove me away from large projects like paintings, and it took a while to find the will to react to them. Now things are going well enough I guess. I revised my life priorities making more room for drawing and painting and I'm working steadily towards a more professional approach now. During most of 2011 I chose to focus on small commissions so I could learn the basics of art business and time management and also do a lot more exercise on coloring. Now I'm actually beginning to feel confident with palette choices, at least for smaller pictures.

I've tried oil painting too and I'm switching to it immediately for paintings, I'll keep acrylics ust for illustrations on paper. I always though oils were the most difficult media to handle but it turns out that most of the effects I failed to achieve with acrylics are easier to achieve with oils. Finally complementary underpainting which WORKS! Painting wet-in-wet with oils is just more fit for my mindset, I like to have time to think between brush strokes. It's also much easier to fix small mistakes.

My first large oil painting will be the Hindu-like avatar picture which has been patiently waiting for over two years. I've already made a small color test in oils. Still a few details to add or correct but this time it's a reasoned and thorough color test, unlike the improvised crap which was the previous test with acrylics.



Full version already started, with underpainting in acrylics to spare some time. This one along with the following 1-2 paintings will be my first exhibited painting in a collective exhibition in May.

Seagulls WIP, brush strokes

I did a silly mistake at the beginning by drawing the whole grid on the canvas. Usually I only draw the dots at the grid's intersections as they are enough to copy the drawings with accuracy and they disappear under the paint. The grid lines instead show through most colors and that's really annoying, but hopefully they won't be too obvious in the end.
I've actually seen paintings around where the lines are still visible, and usually you don't notice them unless paying close attention since they tend to get lost in the overall impression. I leave some of them visible on purpose in my pencil drawings but I don't like this too much in paintings.

So far I've used only the restricted earths palette, which now is up to six colors as I've found the Sepia I was looking for. The final colors will be different in some places (some bags should be almost cyan) but I'll shift the hues and adjust saturation later. For now I just try to match as closely as possible the color I want in each area using only the six available tubes.

Painting a convincing mountain of trash is not going to be easy... it seems there are a few common conventions that illustrators stick to when drawing or painting such places, I'll write a bit about them in the next post.

 

This is the first time I pay real attention to the brushwork too. Before I was too busy trying not to make a mess and lose control of stuff. Among others I'm studying the brushwork of Degas, Frazetta and Leyendecker, and the bags here owe something to the latter. I don't like the way he painted figures but for some objects and plants it makes very cool textures. Degas's handling of colors is probably impossible to imitate in acrylics though...

Tough seabirds

Stared the painting after a ton of studies on seagulls. I wanted a slighly tough-looking girl since gulls are such badasses:

For the flocks of birds storming to the background I used a very abstract approach. First I tried to imagine two or three groups of birds and the overall shape of each group. I want their motion to kinda point to the main figure, so I thought of a few triangles. The lines going across each triangle are to suggest that they have different orientations in the 3D space:

Then I just drew the birds keeping into account these triangles and their inner lines, so that the lines of action of the birds follow them. This should give the flock a believable 3D look and keep the picture readable. I did this after several days of drawing seagulls to get a hold of their shape from various angles...

Some of these are loosely based on photos but most were drawn from imagination after a bit of warming up.

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I created a separate blog for my erotic/disturbing artwork:
http://animalshapes-nsfw.blogspot.com/
Plain nudes like I've shown so far will still be posted here.

Seabirds and trash

 ...are going into the next painting. It's a seagull girl sitting into a dump hugging a friendly RL seagull. I'll decorate her with some terrible pseudo-raver teen fashion jewelry. The idea just popped up like that... amazing how "trash" and "dump" are among the first things which come to mind when thinking of seagulls, along with the beauty of the sea (on instead of it).
The drawing itself not yet ready but I have a good idea of how it should look like more or less. The colored stuff is a heap of trash bags which ironically sport beautiful colors at times. The confused dots at the top are a flock of seagulls storming the dump. The dark thing on the right is an excavator.

I haven't abandoned all the avatar and the feedlot ideas I wrote about, but I sorely needed more color practice before tackling them since they are going to be a lot more difficult than the latest paintings. This one hopefully won't take too long.

Current palette

I've matched as closely as possible the main acrylics palette and main watercolors palette I'm using so it should be easier to use watercolors as quick tests for paintings. The match is not perfect for the Brown Ochre and Venetian Red but close enough. I'll probably add an equivalent of Sepia to the acrylics palette too since it's fantastic for mixing low saturation colors and warm grays.

Master studies in watercolor with the palette above (plus a small amount of a primary cyan) and the original paintings. The studies are very tiny at 2-3 inches across. I'm not trying too hard to match the exact colors or shapes for now, I'm more interested in the way values are distributed across the picture and how I can use the limited palette to approximate a color scheme. But especially the value map, since the one for the feline avatar was screwed up.