Warm/Cool bias - No More Pre-Mixing - and no more Naples

Ok, I keep running into this everywhere now. In my recent oil sketch (gone horribly wrong) I randomly used cools and warms all over - in light and in shadow.

Last night I re-read parts of Alla Prima by Richard Schmid, and he was adamant that if lights are warm then shadows are cool and vice verse - in fact he said this is basically all you need to know about color.

I was dreaming over and over about - something. I understood it clearly as I was waking up and it made me laugh - but now it's buried. I can dimly remember I was doing something - carefully poritoning out - was it heaviness and lightness? Something like that. And as I was beginning to wake, still dreaming but able to think consciously a bit - I laughed silently because I understood it was a metaphor for light and dark values. And maybe warms and cools, since those are what I'm now learning need to be carefully portioned out alongside values.

Also, the Scmidster talked about the method I'm using now for pre-mixing little dabs of color on the palette. In fact he said exactly what I lamented recently - that it just takes for freakin' evar!! And it takes up too much room on your palette. He also said it's wrong. So is adding a little of the dominant color into each color on the palette or into your white. these are formulae and they don't produce good artistic results.

Good! I'm glad to hear it. I was NOT looking forward to spending another 2 hours mixing little dabs of color before each painting. And then only using a few of them before cleaning the palette.

Instead you mix colors as you go. You still keep the same mindset - be very careful to pay attention to value and color temp - just do it only as you need each color.

I like that a lot better.

I suppose doing a color treatment before beginning is also a good strategy - it can help you decide what colors you need.

I did learn a lot from the pre-mixing experience though, and in fact it was an invaluable experience. Without it I wouldn't know much about what colors I can make from what I have on my palette. I suppose someone like Shmid knows what colors he can mix because he's done his charts - I need to do mine soon. He said for years he always had them with him while working and would consult them constantly.

Also, I'm going to take naples yellow off my palette. It can be mixed from yellow ochre and white. Don't need it since I have 2 other yellows now. Hell, 3 if you count burnt umber!

Aquarelles are no better than Conte - they don't make as much dust, so don't screw up the paint as much, but still they smear into the paint. Now I understand why people block in directly in oil paint! The same color as the underpainting will be.

Last night I discovered Control+Paint, the website of the concept artist who's video I posted last night, where he teaches about drawing and painting digitally. Makes it all seem so easy and nice - but I had a super-frustrating day trying it today. I swear, very 30 seconds or so I was growling "NOW WHY THE HELL DID THAT JUST HAPPEN!!??!?!!"

I also realized that I really can't draw the figure starting from boxes or ovals or anything - I just need to draw the damn figure directly, and then I can fiddle around with bloxing off and measuring etc.

When I start by drawing a ribcage I just quite simply can't understand how the shoulders fit in - I don't leave enough room for them between the chest and head. I don't know - I feel like crap - maybe Im just being all down on myself. I know I was starting to work out a system. But what the hell - why wasn't the system already worked out long ago? Why with all the figure drawing and anatomy books doesn't anybody tell you about problems like this? Or is it just a failing on my part to understand what I've read? Ah crap - I just need to keep at it - I'm trying to transform myself as an artist and it aint gonna be easy.

Looking at the ecorche I just realized the shoulders can be visualized as balls sitting right onthe ribcage. Maybe I can work it out in drawings.

Oh, I should mention, each night after I paint I have little snippets of painting stuff turn up in strange ways in my dreams - I remember one two nights ago where I gave Lauren a guitar to be restrung and it had little varicolored dabs of oil paint all over the back of it! Hah! It was a palette! There were others too, but I didn't write them down and, as dreams tend to do, they vanished.

Ok, couldn't just let it go at that. This is my 2nd try - 1st sucked because made shoulderballs too big and too high. Another thing I did here was to stop thinking of the neck as a simple cylinder rising from the top pair of ribs, instead saw it as rising from shape bordered by clavicles and scapulae. I sort of drew that shape in after the shoulderballs and before the neck and head. I think I make necks too short and skinny. It also helped to look at the ecorche - helped to keep shape of robcage in line, I tend to make it bulge to far at the wide point. But this feels good because, for the first time in this whole explosion of drawing/painting, this one really looks like my style. 

Also, I've come to realize that, as I read somewhere recently, the best paint is undoubtedly fresh paint. I don't want to repeat that mucking about with super-sticky crap as it's drying and refuses to act right. So I guess I'll scrap the idea of keeping my tube paints in an airtight pill compact and the palette in something equally airtight. Ya just gotta waste some paint every freaking time - as much as it sucks.

Here's a nice video I found today - it adds something essential to my knowledge that fits in perfectly with the techniques I've been using.

Rather than pay attention specifically to what color to use, apparently the idea is just to use the right value and right temperature (with I suppose some idea of hue involved at some point, thougj maybe not very important really).

Just as no values in the shadows should be as bright as any value in light, the same applies to color tem - if you're doing warm lights/cool shadows (most common outdoor scheme) then your highlights will be the warmest, fading toward cooler warms as it nears the ende og shadows. Then colls in the shadows, fading toward warmer cools as it nears the light.

This makes several times recently that I've run across refernces to the idea of not worrying about specific colors, but simply chosing the right vale and color temperature. What a liberating concept!! It's sort of what I did on the oil sketch gone horribly wrong from last night, thugh for the basic colors I did pay attentin to flesh tones. Aside fron that though, I was dabbing greens, blues, purples, reds etc all over wherever the value was right.

Now add to that color temperature and it might all start go go together coherently.

Oil sketch gone horribly wrong!

I just want to record this before I hit the sack...

1st problem - DON'T DRAW IN CONTE CRAYON!! 

I don't know, I guess you're supposed to seal it or fix it somehow when you do, because the chalk just got into all my paint and immediately turned it into a muddy shitty brown mess. In fact after the first few brushstrokes I just used white because the conte instantly turned it brown. I was feeling like a badass though, and decided to ride it out and see if I could find a way to fix it without missing a beat - figured as long as all the chalk iss turned into sticky gum with oil paint them it;ll be stuck down firmly to the canvas. It kinda sorta worked. I just went ahead and scrubbed in the basic forms letting the chalk fuck everything up, but making sure I could still see the shapes.

2nd problem - MIX THE RIGHT VALUES!! 

My light mids are actually mids, and the mids and mid darks are both just darks. I kinda knew it from the very beginning too, but again, I thought it would be cool to see if I could deal with it on the fly. All gansta and shit, like Frazetta jr or something. 

3rd problem - MIX THE RIGHT COLORS!! 

Once in progress, I realized I didn't have any kind of strong primaries or secondaries, just these tertiaries, which look great, but you really do need strong primaries and secondaries too. Oh, before beginning I mixed up some little test batches of greens to see what I could make from my limited paletter - I could actually get some surprisingly good greens using black and naples, and black and ochre (or those earth tones plus french ultra), but they're very desaturated and neutral. So I've now officially added Cad Lemon to the palette. 

4th problem - DO AN UNDERPAINTING!! 

I now understand - there need to be darks under the darks and mids under the mids or you get white crap showing through.

5th problem - USE MEDIUM IN THE OVERPAINTING!! 

Such a weird experience - the paint was all sticky and mucky the whole time, and it just kept getting worse. I thought I might be able to pull it off for a while, and did some great things (especially the pants I just ad-libbed right over the nude figure), but no. It looked great a couple of times - I worked in some greens and reds and purples, but somehow as I went they mostly got blended down into mud.
Part og the problem was that I was using colors that sat overnight in the fridge - I had cleaned off all the mixes but kept the tube colors on my palette. They were skinned over - had to peel that off (messy!) and they were still sort of partially dried and sticky as hell before I even began. Now I;m thinking when the airtight pill container comes in I need to test it with small dabs of color before committing to it entirely. In the end it might just be best to go ahead and waste a lot of paint in order to make painting better (or even possible). 

IT ALL COMES DOWN TO PLANNING...

Preliminary sketches to work out the design, color comps, drawing it correctly on the canvas (prismacolors I'm thinking, or maybe aquarelles), planning the colors to mix and mixing the right values of them on the palette. And then, if you're lucky, it might just work. 

All this said though, I think it came out pretty cool in a lot of ways, and I love some of the handling - it became very much like a pencil drawing in full color, where I could just kind of make exactly what I wanted happen sometimes without quite knowing how - but I knew it was going to work. I guess that's a good thing.

Oh - and... WASH YOUR BRUSHES WHEN YOU'RE DONE - EVERY TIME!!!

I was just washing them in turps, and after a couple of days they were all getting messed up - the bristles starting to stick together as if they still have oil paint in them, all stiff as hell and need to be broken in before I can use them (which could easily result in broken bristles). After I washed them in warm water and dish soap they're much much softer and suppler and feel much happiuer. Also dry them as well as you can afterwards on a cloth. 

Classical Woman, bistre on cream laid paper

The Conte crayons and pastel paper pad came in - I messed with them a bit today and was surprised to find conte crayons aren't the way I remember them. The ones I used to use years ago were more waxy - these are essentially just small very hard pastel sticks in the same range of colrs (Sanguine, Bistre, black and white). The older ones were like a cross between these and the Specialist square Cray Pas sticks. Did a frnezied bit of googling - apparently Conte was bought out by some massive corporation who was bought out by a bigger fish etc etc, until it's now all owned by BIC, who also owns Elmer's now? Crazy corporate world we live in.

After my initial few lines and the shocking discovery that the beautiful waxy (not messy, dusty or easily breakable) conte crayons of my youth are only a memory now, I decided to go back to work and actually discovered I like these quite a bit. Slightly messy, yes, but nothing like chalk or charcoal! Just a bit of dust when you're really bearing down for solid darks.

It's done from a video cap of a YouTube vid - her face had a quality that instantly reminded me of something drawn by Leonardo or Durer.

It might be apparent now from some of the drawings on this blog that the dry drawing media are my forte. I learned everything I know with a pencil in my hand, and it's the foundation of all my skills in art.

Apparently some people use these hard conte sketch sticks to draw on the canvas for an oil painting - interesting. I don't know about putting solid dense darks down like in the hair above, but everything else should be fine (maybe even the darks if I brush off any excess and maybe fix it - not with skim milk thank you!) This looks a lot like a burnt umber underpainting (bistre is like burnt umber, sanguine like burnt sienna) - but no waiting overnight for it to dry.. I like that!!

Now - about something that handles similarly to the Contes I remember so fondly - the closest thing I can think of would be Prismacolor sticks maybe..

Here's the updated version after a bit more drawing (and a better picture, more well-lit) :

Broken Color

That's the answer - broken color. I was really hetting perturbed because my paintings all have this totally amateurish look with flat areas of undifferenciated color that I try to do something to in glazes, but it still looks flat like a paint-by-numbers set.

Discovered broekn color (did I post about it sometime on the twilight hours last night in my paint-fume induced zombie stupor after endless hours of painting?) It's what Frazzetta does and what gives his paintings vivacity and sparkle and oomph.

Oh god my traps are sore!! Easel painting means holding your arms out in front of you rfor hour after hour after hour as the muscles begin to burn, but you just have to keep doing it. For some reason the left one feels even worse, though I hardly ever used my left arm for anything other than holding the rag.

Before starting I oiled out the underpainting from yesterday with a very thin layer of Liquin fine detail that I wiped most of the way off with a rag - perfect working surface!

Anyway, pics :

Vigorous, beautiful, powerful, almost perfect! Needs a bit more color though. 

Screwed it all up immediately (good thing I knew it was time to snap a pic! I KNEW I was about to screw it up completely... ) Overblended, thought I needed to do this to provide a more complete foundation on which to paint some more. I thought now I could add daubs of color and bring back something like the original fresh vigorousness. Nope... 

Permanent record of my current painting setup

The palette I mixed up for this - pretty good breakdown - light and dark mid tones plus middle midtones,  each with many color variations that all remain within the correct value level. Middles and dark mids should probably be darker though, or the light mids a little lighter. Kept trying to make greens though and wasn't able to - think I need a stronger yellow. For darks and lights I added white or black to the mixes in small dabs directly with the brush - this worked really well because you need very little of the most extreme values, and they should be very desaturated. 

I held a rag in my left hand, and only used 2 brushes - one bristle filbert and one mongoose blender. Worked perfectly! So much easier cleanup etc. Also cleaned the brushes in the small turps cup - so excellent! No need to keep screwing up the big Sillycoil jar. 

Next time I need to put the right colors and right values in immediately and hardly blend at all - get it right from the very start. Every stroke a finishing stroke. 

Final result for today's excursion. Not too bad - much better than yesterday. If you get up really close you can see all kinds of super-subtle color variations, but they're too subtle is the problem.

But considering yesterday I didn't even know how to do this - it's actually a huge leap forward. And now I know to be bolder and braver with it and to mix up all the color patches I'll need.

Oh, when I cleaned the palette I left the pure color lumps and now I've got it languishing in the fridge - not sure if that works or not - need to google it.

Still Life W/ 3 Pots @ Cutting Board - day 2 lessons

Did a lot of glazing tody, and everything went so much better! Spoke wiht Jack out on the lawn about the rent checks I havent cashed yet and about painting - he's done some acrylic painting. Beside the point, but just recording it as journal type stuff.

Working with some medium is much cleaner and easier than without - the paint works much better. It also requires a lot less paint! I'm considering trying an underpainting already using some medium, and then working over it with more and with some turps added.

I oiled out the non-shiny parts of the canvas before starting, which I think helped a lot. Paint goes on so much smoother over freshly-applied paint rather than onto dry canvas. With medium though it dries a lot faster - after about 2 hours it was getting too sticky to work over anymore, so now I'm letting it dry. Ultimately my goal is to learn to do alla-prima, but I think it's a good idea to go ahead and use these lengthier processes during the learning stage - before I can do a/p I need to really learn about mixing colors to hit just the right value and color, and so colors are tied together throughout. In other words, I need to do my color charts.

I see that I'm really not painting the cylindrical and spherical forms properly - there's supposed to be a lot of midtone between the darkest shadow and the highlight, but I'm tending to put a hard edge like a core shadow instead. Work gradually up to the highlight. And really there is no highlight unless it's a shiny material.

Need to get some bigger mongoose or black sable brushes for blenders and for working with the thin paint. They're excellent for it. Also a couple of good W/N Series 7 round liners for detail work. Wait - you know what - I've already got a brand new #1 and #3 here for ink drawing - I think I'll dedicate one of them to oil and mark it somehow as no longer suitable for watermedia.

I'm doing a lot of scrubbing now. I like the way it looks - it leaves paint down in the crevices and shows the texture of the canvas. I suppose this is what they meant in the book I remember seeing once where it said Titian used rags and his fingers more than brushes at times. Not so much to apply the paint (at least for me)  - I put it on with brushes and use them as blenders, but do some scrubbing as well.

I wish I hadn't gone straight to glazes after yesterday's underpainting - glazes have more medium than frotties, and those should come in between. They'll help to refine the underpainting before getting to the glazing stage, which is more about tinting color rather than shaping.

The more I look at this the more I dislike the bright colors, all of which are too high in intensity. I decided to compare with a few Frazettas strictly looking at colors...

Color Comparison :

The John Carter one at the end is about the brightest thing he's done, and still not nearly as intense and saturated as mine. In places it is, but how knows how to balance that out with more neutral and low-key colors. 

It ocurrs to me that I may not use tube colors anymore, but I'm alays mixing 2 colors of the same temperature unless I need to mix complements. I;m sarting to think  need to always muddy up colors by mixung in the complement. Or is there something else to it? How do you make these more neutral desaturated colors? 

My colors when they get darkr retain full color intensity, they don't dull down at all. In fact the darkest blues look like the most intense colors on the canvas, which is totally wrong! Same goes for the dark browns. Bleugh!! 

I'm thinking it's time to start doing lots of quick very focused little oil sketches aimed strictly at achieveing certain color effects and no eye toward finesse or anything else. So rather than take a week of 18 hour days to finish one labored painting that I learn little from I can crank out a dozen in a day and supercharge the learning process.

A quick browse through Charles Reid's Painting By Design and Oil Painting Techniques, which I believe he contributed to, suggests that you generally use complements mixed together or near complements, almost always across the temp divide. And don't mix them thoroughly on the palette - let them only mix partially and finish on the painting.

Time to play!

All this goes hand in hand with the lesson I learned when I had to do an extreme desaturation on the 1st Fafhrd tablet painting. Now I just need to figure out how to desaturate my oil paints - and use broeken color. Frazetta mever uses just one color in any area - there's always 2 that partially blend but are also separate - I think slightly dfferent values, so they also model form.