Shifting Gears Again

I took my bell tower painting off the easel and sat it on some shelves in my office/studio (a.k.a. living room). I was dismayed…stuck, if you will. I wasn’t satisfied with what I was doing but I didn’t know what to do about it. So, I contemplated it as I went about my day-to-day business. What to do. What to do.

I had been painting it using several photographs from different angles as my resource material. I wanted to capture the variety of color and variety of stones used in this beautiful structure. But the way I was going about it I was going to have to paint each and every stone and then detail it. That’s not the look I wanted nor was it the technique I wanted as it sounded tedious and boring.

In my blog of 05/20/08, you can see where I was going with my plan. I had painted quite a bit more than shown in those pics but I didn’t photograph it at that stage. After I made my color chart (see second blog entry of this date below), I was more confident that I could accomplish the various colors in the rocks I saw in the photographs. So, I had no choice but to rework all I had done on the stonework.

I painted the inside of the belfries and the end of the structure on the left. After painting the end of the structure with the underpainting, I went back and dry brushed in the suggestion of the rocks. As you can see here, it gave a much more realistic look. I was pleased with that effect. I may have to tone down the blue although there are some rocks that look particularly blue in the photographs I have.

Next, I painted in the areas where the stucco was still on the walls and then painted over all my stones with an underpainting. Here’s what it looks like now.

I think this new technique of dry brushing the rocks in will work much better. I'll go back and add highlights to some of the rocks. But this way, I can use the underpainting to give the texture to the rocks as I let it show through the dry brush strokes. I’m going to paint a little looser and trust my artist’s instinct a little more. I’m going to exercise my artistic license a little more and lighten up. This is supposed to be fun!

Color

Well, I’ve been feeling kind of stuck with my painting this month. That’s why I haven’t been painting. If I’m not painting, I’m not blogging either. So, there…

However, a few things happened to kind of jump start me again. This process continues to amaze me. I’m glad I’ve decided to journal this experience so I can have documentation of the various steps and how they unfolded.

I didn’t realize it but one area in which I was still feeling sorely inadequate had to do with color, specifically mixing and using color.

As has happened so many times on this journey, if I keep my eyes open, someone comes along to take me through and impart wisdom. So it happened with my education about color. PBS started airing a new instructional video, or new to me. A married couple, Gary and Kathwren Jenkins, teach how to paint beautiful, large-scale floral paintings. In their instructions they talk particularly about utilizing color to paint vivid, full-of-life paintings.

Gary emphasized using pigment-rich paints. This is something I’ve discovered and I believe I talked a little bit about it in another post on this blog. Using the more expensive paint really gives a richer look to the painting. He also talked about the fact that a white object in a painting really has many different colors. He painted a magnolia blossom which we all know is white. However, to paint it richly many different colors were used in the shading of the pedals and the shadows. He talked about looking at a white wall carefully and seeing the different colors that are really there, that we kind of take for granted. Those are my words, not his.

As he described how he used color in his painting, I saw that he would plan his paintings so that a huge yellow blossom would ultimately go over a part of the background that had been painted purple. Since those are complimentary colors, the yellow looked like a richer yellow because of the purple in the background. Other instructors have talked about complimentary colors but Gary talked about the subject in such a way that I saw it differently.

If you haven’t already done so, I urge you to do some research and learn about the color wheel.

Another recent development that has restarted my painting is the creation of what I call a color chart. I took a 16x20 canvas and marked a 1-inch grid in pencil across the face of the canvas. Skipping the first square in the top left corner, I labeled each square across the top with the name of a paint in my pallet. Again, skipping that first square in the top left corner, I labeled each square going down the left side of the canvas, one color in each square, and in the same order as the paints across the top.

In any given block on the grid, I took the two colors at the top and side of the canvas and mixed equal parts of those paints. I mixed right on the canvas and left a sample of the mixture in the grid.

In this method, each color intersected each other color twice on the graph. So, in the lower left half of the grid, I also mixed a touch of white with the two colors in the original mixture. I did this because many of the colors were rather dark and mixing them with white would allow me to see exactly what color I had.

Here’s a photograph of the chart. I’ve already found it very helpful because I can find the shade of green or blue that I want for a particular item and then adjust from there. Before making this chart, I wasn’t sure how to get a sage green, for example.