Watercolor

Studies from photos. I'm going through different ways of laying the color looking for quicker ways of doing color studies. For now I prefer very spotty and wet-looking watercolors since acrylics are already fine for smoother colors and finer details... I need to diversify a bit what I do with different media.

Beksinski and monumental buildings

What exactly makes the buildings in Beksinski's paintings feel so imposing?

The masterful perspective, the point of view from below and the composition are surely part of the reason, but there's more. He could make buildings look imposing even when seen from above and even when they are tiny in the background.

In the last picture above there is the clever detail of the window light, which is very small, suggesting the tower is very large. But in all the picture I think the illumination plays a major role. His most impressive buildings are stuck by light and better defined in the top part, while the building's base is often blurred, hidden in shadows or smoke. In the real world such an effect is most visible on mountains and huge buildings like skyscrapers when they cast shadows over each other.

To some extent we have an innate perception of natural facts like these, as part of our ability to keep orientation and recognize landmarks. As a consequence, I think that the fuzzyness in the lower part of his buildings suggests they are as imposing as mountains because they are stuck by light in a similar way. But because the shadows are also large and imposing, it also suggest the presence of other structures of similar size in the vicinity, right outside of the visible area. These paintings create the feeling that the viewer is surrounded by immense building and huge masses of clouds, even thought most of them are implied and not part of the scene.

Vertical structures surrounded by clouds, symbols of death, weird lights, desaturated colors etc. also remind of a very specific icon of the XX century... but this connection (of which I think Beksinski was well aware) is mostly symbolic and not as obvious as that with the behavior of light on mountains.

Portrait of Bluefire

A portrait of chakasa Bluefire done as a present for my good friend leonardo. Bluefire works as an Environmental Restorer, a rather difficult job which is basically fixing/cleaning up the mess left by the late industrial age, back when earthlings deluded themselves that the planet's resources could be exploited without limits.

Most of hir job revolves around slowly restroing soil fertility and biodiversity into barren areas, so that in a few centuries they can produce something again. Here however shi is just taking a pause into a recently burned down wood, where new saplings are beginning to grow back.

Acrylics on board. Unluckily no WIPs for this as I was very unsure while painting it and thought I'd have to restart any time, so I didn't make photos of the various stages... I really need to get past this stupid worrying. Also because now I'm able to correct most mistakes along the way.

For the palette I used many colors but the main components for the background are violet and phtalo green, the rest is various shades of gray done with combinations of blacks (Mars and ivory, the latter has the lowest value), titanium white, ultramarine, Van Dyck brown and yellow ochre.

More 30 minute sketches

The next posts will be more about anthros, WIPs and annotated sketches, but in the meanwhile I think sharing these exercises is useful too. They are not very funny to do, so it's better to do them inbetween other stuff rather than diving head first into them, but they teach a lot of things which I wouldn't feel comfortable trying in a proper picture. All of these are acrylics on paper with classical limited palettes of 3-4 colors (for most of them Yellow ochre, burnt sienna/Van Dyck brown, titanium white, ivory black).

For the animals I started from photos which look very static and I tried to add some feeling of movement using the direction of strokes:

For landscapes I'm doing mostly value studies, trying ways to render things like tangled branches and mist:
(This is an ice cliff painted with an odd palette of white, black, ultramarine, and cadmium red for the shadows.)

Also some loose drawings, mostly exercises to keep the species recognizable in spite of stylization or parts of the body being hidden:

Studies from 2009 - Landscapes, with more detail

These were done a few months after the first attempts at this exercise. After getting used to think of values first, details no longer feel so distracting! I'm trying to ignore most visual noise and go for the most visible shapes. At this point it should be safe to put in some details: once you learn to get the big picture you also learn which details are useful and which ones are not, so there can be a few more branches as long as they they don't harm clarity. (Again india ink, from random Flickr photos.)

Studies from 2009 - Landscapes and interiors

Speed painting (mostly from random photos off flickr) done with India ink and a large brush:
The goal in these is forcing myself to ignore details and look just at the apparent values of the landscape - light and dark areas. The principle is the same of the gesture drawings of animals.

If I sketch landscapes with a pen I tend to draw a huge flat mess like this:

I sketched this in a hort full of plants and visual noise (many small leaves and branches etc.). In such situations I get distracted by details and I don't even think about values, but values are the most important thing to achieve a good composition, so they are also the most important when drawing a landscape from the mind. This was the first painting where I designed the landscape thinking just of values and light/dark areas: