Tag: learning to paint

I made a vase! Reinventing my composition in Photoshop

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Three weeks ago, my dog died. I’d lost other pets before, but Buddy was my shadow – my “heart” animal – and I wasn’t there to comfort him at the end. I’d written a long post about my grief and anguish, but I didn’t post it, and now I don’t want to.

Instead, let’s talk about painting.

One of the struggles I’ve had – even when I took my first painting classes in my first go-round with this blog – is that I cannot seem to get my lighting right. I recently made strides with the lamp that lights my canvas and palette – investing in a fabulous dual-head “Duo Pro” to reduce the glare I was getting – but my still-life set-up is still pretty grim. I keep hearing that virtually anything will do – just buy a cheap clamp light! – but the shadows that I’m getting are way too…shadowy… and every scene I set up appears as a nighttime scene.

Which it is. Because the university where I work brought us back to the office four days a week (blech), and in Minnesota, that means that most days I’m never in my home during daylight (again, blech). It also meant that this particular still life was set up from what I could find in my studio (aka “the living room”) at 5 a.m. while trying not to wake my family.

In other words, me no likey.

The original set-up

But hey, I’ve got Photoshop! As much as I would love to be someone who consistently paints from life and not photos, it’s just not logistically workable for me – I don’t have room to keep a still life set up, I’ve got a lighting problem, I’m not always going to be able to paint something in a single sitting. So in this case, I thought I’d take my lousy photo of my lousy still life, and see if I could make something less lousy to paint.

One thing I’ve found helpful when choosing a composition is to zoom way, way out on a photo and see if it still makes sense at a tiny size: Does my eye go to the right place? Does it still look harmonious? Can I even tell what I’m looking at? Looking at my photos of this set-up, I realized there were simply too many competing values, and it was the leaf (as the most detailed and high-contrast item) rather than the butterfly (my intended focal point) that caught my eye.

I started by working in Photoshop to crop out the leaf, mute the pot, lighten the butterfly shadow and bump up the saturation of his wing… everything I could do to ensure that the butterfly was the uncontested focal point.

But that didn’t seem like enough — everything was still too mid-value and blah. So I continued to pick, until I’d basically recreated the whole thing in digital paint, completely reinventing the pot in the process:

A much cleaner composition!

This is why I’m moving away from digital — as much as I enjoyed “painting” this, it still looks pretty darn digital. But it does give me something to paint that simply wasn’t available to me in real life. (I wish I did own this pot, though — it’s pretty cool!)

The finished product

This still isn’t great — it’s a bit…lifeless (even disregarding the dead insect that it’s built around). And unfortunately, I didn’t pay enough attention to my eye line, and the perspective is off. But I think I managed to take a sow’s ear and make it… a slightly prettier sow’s ear.

Onward!

Paintings 7 & 8: Getting my ducks in a row

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Fresh off the success of my “pigeon with a hat” painting, I thought I’d try something completely different: a duck in a hat! Maybe this will be my niche?

I’d originally anticipated painting a standard “barnyard” duck, but while looking for photos to study I came across this blue-billed marvel called a “ruddy duck.”

Copyright Sinclair Miller, Maryland Zoo in Baltimore

Here’s my original digital:

Good-lookin’ fella!

Apparently, my dapper gentleman is also a randy duck – the blue coloration only comes out when he’s hoping to mate (as does, of course, the stylin’ hat).

Since my pigeon was way off in her background-to-head ratio, I learned from my mistakes and blew up this feller larger in his frame than I’d originally drawn him. Then, rather than grid or freehand draw him like I did last time, I just printed out a black-and-white version of my digital drawing and used my graphite transfer paper to trace the lines of the black-and-white picture. But once again, I was foiled by my cheapness! Not wanting to waste too much printer ink, I used the “draft” setting, which created an image so washed-out and pixelated that I couldn’t follow the value changes, leading to mass confusion and a first painting that was yes, another “wiper.” 

But we Irish-Lithuanians are made of strong stuff, and I set back in to try again. This time, I produced this:

Eek — need to up my photography game!

While it’s not terrible, and the beak turned out better than I’d expected in this second version, I made a giant mess of the hat — that little rim was tough! My background color, too, was not ideal: The orange—while a lovely color unto itself—is too saturated and draws attention away from the bill. Furthermore, Gemini had just told me that I should be painting with a 60/30 ratio of Gamsol to Walnut Alkyd, and my 50/50 mixture was too “fat.” So altogether, it seemed worth it to do one more pass, and begin to develop better processes and habits.

So, I went in for try 3, and produced this guy:

Mistakes, for sure — but altogether a very dapper gentleman!

“Well, I never!”

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In my years of aspiring to be a children’s book illustrator, my “specialty” was emotive animals, like this terrified ant about to get scooped up by a hungry anteater:

So with my new dream of being an Etsy artist (no fine art aspirations for me!) I thought I’d see if I could create some original drawings that I would then attempt to recreate in actual paint.

What a pleasure to go back to digital after struggling with this new medium! And rather than worry about my finished product looking too “computer-y,” I could use my tools to figure out composition, expression, and color, and then give it the human touch in oils. This would also have the benefit of being reproducible, because I could grid it to create a template. I can almost smell the money!

So, my first step was creating a picture of a pigeon in a hat. It’s rough, but I like her haughty expression and the rich purples and greens. I’m calling it “Well, I never!”:

Well, I never!

One thing I’d learned way back at the start of this blog was how to transfer an image onto canvas using a grid. In fact, I wrote a whole post about it. So I used Photoshop’s ruler with some guides, and marked the image on my screen into 6 1-inch squares, and then did the same on my canvas.

This method did indeed allow me to get (most of) the positioning correct, but it was time-consuming, and—frankly—pretty frickin boring, even for a tiny image. Moreover, I was once again tripped up by the actual painting, because in attempting to add detail in paint, everything got muddled again:

Clearly, I need professional advice! So I hopped over to one of my favorite cheap resources, Domestika, and watched the section on Portrait Painting with Oil that was part of this specialization series.

And I realized something — probably something obvious to anyone who’s been painting more than a week. I’d always heard that  with alla prima, you were blending paint right on the canvas. But in the video, the artist mixed her paints for each section ahead of time. Sure, there was some blending on the canvas, and some in-between tones that she mixed up on the fly. But she wasn’t just getting close enough and then attempting to correct it on the canvas like I was. Instead, she was being planful — putting down all of her darkest tones (one stroke at a time), and then moving down the line until she’d finished every stroke of the subject’s skin. 

Worth a try! So, I started again — this time following the advice of my bestie Gemini and using Saral graphite transfer paper to first draw my pigeon on paper before transferring it to canvas:

Unfortunately, I did two things very wrong here. One — I attempted to avoid drudgery by free-drawing rather than gridding, which led to her having way too small a head and too big a background, and just being a bit “off” in her expression and physicality. Then, I thought it made sense for me to understand where all of my value changes were, so I added those lines right into my drawing, just like a paint-by-numbers. Yikes! Line overload! I ended up losing my way in them and having to once again edit on the canvas — though thankfully not as much as before.


But, but! I still think this represents a big leap forward for me. I’m sure I’ll cringe when I look back at this in a few months, but right now I’m feeling pretty proud!

Painting 4: Revenge of the pomegranates

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Why painting 4 you ask? What became of 2 and 3? While I’ve sworn to document even my dismalest of efforts, I’m also not going to finish a painting that’s completely irredeemable (I’m lazy, remember. I’m also cheap — I’d rather save the paint and reuse the canvas). 

Since my bottle painting was such a raging success, I jumped right into another still life, this one even harder (cause that’s how I roll). Although I was painting from life and not a photo, this was the subject:

Pretty, right? Also very, very difficult. Now, over the years—since learning to draw from imagination at the tender age of 48—I’ve gotten pretty good at being able to picture something in my mind and draw it from any angle. But I need to really understand the form first, and I could not, for the life of me, understand the form of that purple candleholder at the left front. It has these sort of wedge shaped pieces radiating out like spokes, but the wedges are slightly rounded, and the top of the wedges are more triangular than the bottoms, which follow a gentle curve. Looking at it from a distance in my still life box, the random dark glaze plays all sorts of tricks of the eye so the whole thing just wasn’t making sense any more, and my paint kept getting gloppier and more muddled as I edited and edited.

After two “wipers,” I finished a pass of this one:

Now, I say “a pass,” because even though I’m attempting to finish each painting in one sitting (à la alla prima), I was at a point where I could not add any more paint without it simply converging into the mud. So I thought I’d go back to the traditional method and wait for my paint to dry to the touch before adding more detail, finishing the insides of the cups, and perhaps editing. 

A few days later, however, I was not keen to pick this one back up again, nor was I ready to start over with it before first learning more about what I’m doing wrong. I’ll save this one for the future. 

Next!

More like “alla primate”?

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In 1964, a Swedish tabloid unveiled the work of an “unknown French artist” by the name of Pierre Brassau. Critics rushed to praise him, with one prominent reviewer stating that “Pierre is an artist who performs with the delicacy of a ballet dancer.” The rub? “Pierre” was actually “Peter,” a seventeen-year-old, paint-eating, tantrum-throwing chimpanzee, gifted a set of paintbrushes to test whether critics could tell the difference between modern art and monkey art (yes, yes, I know chimps aren’t monkeys).

While Pierre’s work is more abstract than mine (…is attempting to be), our process is similar: alla prima, or wet-on-wet, a method by which a painting is completed in a single session rather than constructed from thin layers over a period time. Back in the early days of this blog, I was taking classes to learn to paint with this second (slooooowwww) method – as the Old Masters did – while also having a messy, dirty, passionate affair with the first. And when I decided to go back to painting, the first thing I did was dig up my old copy of Daily Painting, by the queen of effortless (-seeming) alla prima, Carol Marine.

Carol Marine

Oh, Carol. She’s like one of those fabulous French women who throw on mom jeans and a t-shirt and look like an it-girl, while me in the same clothes is more like Cousin-It-girl. Somehow the unstructured messiness of it all looks dynamic, passionate, effortlessly cool in her pieces, while in mine it looks like, well, monkey art:

Looking at it now, I’m going to take back some of my charming self-deprecation to admit that there are actually aspects of this piece that I like. (Since writing this post, I’ve created a second painting that’s much worse than this one. You’ll see that one soon.) My bottle does indeed look like transparent glass. After wiping off my first attempt (and cursing myself for once again starting off with something too hard), I sketched out only those lines and value changes that were necessary to understand the form of the bottle, instead of once again getting lost in all those persnickety little details that the alla prima method struggles with. And taking Carol’s advice, I started my painting with the most saturated, pure patch of color – in this case, the chartreuse-y light on the right of the bottle – and once applied, left it the hell alone. So by that measure, I done good.

But what the heck is up with those proportions? Well, here rears the ugly head of my most prominent vice: laziness. In preparation for this still life, I’d made a still life box to control my light source – just a cardboard box with holes punched in the top and side for lights as seen on many a YouTube video.

Lazy moment #1 occurred when I realized my light-holes were too small and – rather than recut them – thought I’d use two rechargeable mini book lights instead of something more professional and permanent. And somewhere in the middle of painting, one of those lights died, and (lazy moment #2), I didn’t bother to replace the battery, thinking I could still see well enough.

But I couldn’t. That piece of driftwood in the back became a fuzzy hunk of grey, and (lazy moment #3), I thought I’d just paint it from imagination (instead of grabbing a new battery from the friggin next room) — which led me to envision it from the side rather than from the same top-down perspective I’d used for the bottle. Which led me to attempt to alter the top of the bottle to make it more side-on. And etc., etc. You give a mouse a cookie and all that.

And that’s the issue with alla prima, and why I fear it may not be for me. I’m much more of a “pantser” than a “planner,” and I love my control-Z. My process for artwork has always been to figure things out as I go along, and that just doesn’t work for a style that demands I get things right the first time.

But at least I’ve learned not to eat my paint. Onward!

I’m back!

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Five years ago (yikes!) I wrote my final post for this blog, having succeeded in my goal of painting like the Old Masters.

Haha. No.

In fact, as you can see from the cringeworthy pancake image displayed at the top of that post, my trajectory had gone in a very different direction — digital. Since my goal over the past five-plus years had been to write and illustrate a children’s book, keeping things on the computer seemed to make sense: I could compose, edit, resize and reposition, experiment, all without the drudgery of thumbnailing or the need to start over to make changes. How easy, convenient, wonderfully freeing!

But even though I loved the process, I never quite loved the results. While I became better at capturing the emotion and positioning of my characters, I couldn’t help feeling that there was an “uncanny valley” quality to my brushstrokes. I was attempting to simulate oil painting…

…but no one would confuse the two, no matter how many pressure-sensitive brushes and canvas-simulating overlays I used. Meanwhile, my dream of being in bookstores felt further away than ever. I’d taken class after class in both writing and illustrating – even diving into an intensive semester at Hamline’s MFA in Writing for Children – but, frankly, no one wants to buy what I’m selling. 

So. I’m taking a step back. Rather than continuing to create work that lives only in my computer, reliant on outside gatekeepers to see the light of day, I’ve decided to go back to my original passion: oil painting. I’ll be once again delving into still lives (lifes?), but more than that, I want to see if I can transfer the skills I built from five years of creating narrative art into original paintings… that I can then sell on Etsy for oodles of money. And once again, I’ll be documenting everything: the bad, the ugly, and hopefully eventually the good(ish).

Join me!

How I learned to paint from imagination at age 48 (part 2)

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In my last post, I wrote about programs that have helped me begin to overcome the main challenge in learning to draw: understanding form in 3-d space. In this post, I want to give a shout out to my absolute favorite resources in a bunch of different categories. And hey, if anyone’s reading this and wants to share theirs as well, please do!!

Anatomy

Proko’s anatomy classes are da bomb, no doubt. But for me, the benefits of them were the model poses (and subsequent draw-alongs) and the e-books. Sure, I’d watch the videos, and they were cute and sometimes laugh-aloud funny — but I don’t really learn that way. I’d watch them once, but any information I absorbed was really through the e-books — videos are simply too fast for my middle-aged brain. Sometimes, unfortunately, the e-books didn’t show enough different poses to make me understand (especially with the forearms — don’t know what God was thinking with those things) and in those cases I needed other references. I have lots of anatomy books, but the ones I find myself referring to most often, are:

Artistic Anatomy by Paul Richer and Robert Beverly Hale. Honestly, this is less of a shout-out than a half-hearted mumble. I don’t particularly like this book: Most of it is text (I wonder if anyone, anywhere has ever read it?), and the limited number of drawings at the end are really grainy and, again, limited in number. BUT every muscle is labeled, and we do see at least a few different angles of each body part, making it the best book I have for looking up a particular muscle by name. If anyone knows of a better one, though, do tell.

Morpho, Simplified Forms by Michel Lauricella. This is a teeny tiny book of unlabeled sketches of different body parts, with muscles broken down by group rather than individually. When I have trouble getting my mind around the shape of something (such as those dang twisty forearms), it’s been helpful to refer to this to see it broken down into its, well, simplified form.

However, my most favorite of all anatomy books is:

Anatomy for Sculptors by Uldis Zarins and Sandis Kondrats. This is the most money I’ve ever spent on a book. Ever. I think my fingernails were sweating as I pressed the order button. But I don’t regret buying it — what I regret is all the other ones I bought when I should’ve just pulled the trigger on this one to begin with. What I like about this book is that each area of the body is photographed in several different poses, and then each of these photo sets is repeated with the muscle groups overlayed in a particular color. This same color is used every time you see those muscles in other poses, so it really clarifies what’s happening when a particular muscle seems to be in the neck in one pose and the butt in another (perhaps a SLIGHT exaggeration). Like this:

There’s very little text or labeling here, but they do have helpful little asides throughout that help you understand some of the trickier areas. Like this:

Nope, still not getting it. But most people probably will. (As an aside: One odd thing about this book is that many of the women models seem taken from Pornhub [ahem — so I’m told] while the men have pixelated, um, parts. Personally, this latter fact doesn’t bother me — most likely I wouldn’t be drawing those parts anyway in my eventual goal of illustrating children’s books. But, FYI.)

Facial Expression and Portraiture

As much as I like Proko for anatomy, he really phoned it in with his portrait class. Honestly, it offered so little value above the free content that I actually wrote and complained. (And if they’d offered me anything other than excuses you wouldn’t be hearing about it now. KARMA.)

This category has one VERY clear winner:

The Artist’s Complete Guide to Facial Expression by Gary Faigin. If you’re interested in narrative art, you MUST buy this book. If you’re interested in portraiture, you MUST buy this book. The beginning chapters break down each feature in great detail, with finished drawings that indicate how each is affected by age and sex. Later chapters break down how each feature is affected by the six basic emotions — sadness, anger, joy, fear, disgust, and surprise — and the nuances in between (the differences between horror and terror; between the [surprisingly similar] grief and laughter). In addition to the very finished portraiture examples, the author also includes an encyclopedia of emotions represented in more of a cartoon style, to really synthesize what each feature is doing in each expression. Ever been completely mystified by how the Pixar folks achieve those micro-expressions? It’s all in the facial muscles. This book will give you the key.

I’m currently leaning on this book heavily as I attempt to draw a picture of a girl jumping up after being frightened by a bear while camping:

Coming for your job, Mr. Lasseter!

Lighting

Color and Light by James Gurney. Once again, I feel like I’m choosing all of the books that everyone seems to know already, but there’s a reason a classic is a classic. Whether or not you appreciate Mr. Gurney’s style, he knows his stuff when it comes to lighting a scene. This book is geared toward painters, but the principles are applicable for anyone. It’s not a read-through book — more of an encyclopedia — but mine is already well-worn and I’ve barely begun in my “art journey.”

Clearly, Mr. Gurney could’ve lighted this better.

Each principle is allotted one page, with a smallish amount of text, and a few examples from the author’s own work. The writing is very accessible, and it’s brief and clear enough for you to completely absorb it when you’re in the middle of a project and looking for the solution to an art puzzle. While much of it is beyond what I’ll probably ever need, it’s answered all the questions I’ve had so far, and the rest is there when or if I’m ready. Drawing an underwater scene and want to understand how the light should be distorted? Don’t know where to begin with a limited palette? Gurney’s your man.

Alright, I’m going to be lame and stop here — breaking out my other suggestions to a Part Three. Apparently, I’m a prattler, and I’m also tired — after all, I’m now fift— now a little older than I was last week.

Stay tuned!

…And one step back.

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It’s funny how I can mention the same thing week after week — “I did a good job with my values,” “We’re waiting on color so we can work on our values,”– and still manage to miss the mark. I’d been admiring the work on Etsy of this amazing Ukrainian pet portrait artist, and wanted to see if I could create a background like his — loose, unstudied, the perfect complement to the (also perfect) subject. Turns out…I couldn’t.

My original thought was that the green bug would be the focal point and the butterfly and blue beetle would be a similar color to the background and therefore less prominent (I’d read that the area with the most contrast draws the eye the most and should therefore be your focal point). And it is true that parts of the butterfly and blue beetle are fairly subdued next to the dark background — their values are fairly similar. But instead of doing what I should’ve done — simplifying and darkening the background beneath the green beetle so that the contrast is greater, perhaps increasing its size — I plopped a very small beetle on top of a busy area of varying values. Perhaps, if you squint, you still notice it first because of the contrast between the bright yellow and the very dark green beside it, but it’s a close toss-up with the butterfly wing (which has the advantage, of course, of being much larger), and that, in my opinion, makes for a pretty unfocused painting.

While I’m glad that I don’t have even more detail in the background, I’m no Ukrainian Etsy artist. It would’ve been helpful to have a horizon, or some depth of field, and certainly the line of the driftwood should’ve been softened to integrate better with the background. As it is, it looks more like a collage than a painted-from-life still life.

In general, though, the entire thing is just way too complex for such a small (6×6) painting.

What?! Way too complex? Who are you, Jennifer Caritas!

(As an aside, if anyone’s curious about my subject matter, I used to make these fancy insect displays, and still have tons of insect inventory. Look for more bugs in future paintings!)

What I did well:
Individual elements are okay — I actually quite like the blue beetle.
I attempted some brushwork of varying directions and colors — a first for me. A for effort!

What I could’ve done better:
Too much going on!
Too much similarity in values — need a more obvious focal point
Better integration with background

Still life with veggies: I’m a complicated gal!

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One thing I always tend to do when taking up a new endeavor is to rush in and take on the most complicated challenge I think I might possibly be able to handle, skipping over those baby steps that really build a solid foundation. With painting, it’s not just the challenge though: I worry that if I were to, say, paint apples, my painting would be one of five billion other apple paintings with nothing to really separate it. Logically I know, of course, that focusing on more simple subject matter is a way to develop a style (as a hack — I mean, a novice — I haven’t yet found my style), and that I’ve seen apple paintings that have taken my breath away. This tussle between my logical self and my…self-self (for lack of a better word) is on display in my latest still life: Veggies.

My logical self led the way: I was going to skip the shells and driftwood this time and find something from my fridge to paint. But me being me, I once again got over-complicated (in my defense, though, I’d eaten the other half of my still life the night before).

My proportions seem pretty far off here — the purple cabbage looks more like a purple Brussels sprout (though would a Brussels sprout leave a big purple mark on my husband’s pink shirt?) — and both veggies look a bit cut-and-pasted. Part of that, I think, is because the cabbage is actually half-eaten as well (it’s missing its entire back half), so it’s not casting the shadows one would expect of a spherical object. The pepper, though, also has that effect and I have no excuse for that (I…suck?). I suppose I’m at the stage with this whole painting thing where I can see my flaws but can’t quite identify why they’re happening or how to put a stop to them. It’s a frustrating place to be, but I know, logically, that it’s one step further than not being able to see my flaws at all (I’ve evolved from the Trumpian stage, happily).

Things I did well:
Decent composition — objects aren’t simply plopped in the center any longer — and decent values/contrast
I like the brushwork on the top part of my cabbage — it says a lot with just a few brushstrokes

Things I could do better:
Proportions
Better integration into background

Moving forward? My first still life with controlled light

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Once I’d finally gotten my light situation under control, I was ready to see if it actually made a difference in my painting ability. Maybe I actually had a hidden genius inside of me, ready to pop out when the conditions were right!

Jim had sent me a link for building a shadow box, and although that particular one seemed like a bit more effort and money than I wanted to spend, I did find an easy tutorial online that involved simply cutting panels out of the top and side of a cardboard box and covering them with tissue paper. Easy, cheap, works. I’d never quite understood the reason for an actual shadowbox — couldn’t I just put things on the table if I was painting with a tabletop easel? — but I’ve read in several places that it was helpful for controlling ambient light and generating interesting shadows, so I decided to give it a go.

This is, admittedly, an odd composition. It looked much better to me before I put it into the shadowbox — after that, with the shadows that were generated from the harsher light, it started to look a bit…random. The backdrop beneath and behind the objects was a piece of patterned paper — I ignored the pattern when it curved behind because I worried about the amount of noise in such a small painting (it’s 6×6), but it still looks unnatural to have the driftwood stick poking into the back of the box.

Aside from this, though, I actually like this painting. My values look good, and my brushwork doesn’t look fussy like it did in my last painting (stones). I’m not sure I got the light quite right — I was having trouble making sense of this complexity of this crinkled old leaf and winged it — but I’m not sure it’s noticeable to the untrained eye (at least it’s not to my untrained eye). Overall, I think, a step forward!

Things I did well:
Brushstrokes are fairly loose and unfussy
Good contrast and values

Things I could’ve done better:
Weird composition without a meaningful focal point
Intersection of driftwood stick and driftwood chunk is odd — is it floating? Is it resting?
Bug could be brighter — in real life it’s almost metallic-looking (I wasn’t quite sure how to make that happen. Glazing?)